Hello Lynne and all,
"Mrs. Lynnette Annabel Smith" writes:
>But here in the UK there will be no more analogue
> TV after the third quarter of this year. All of the frequencies are then
> going to be auctioned off for public mobile radio and mobile telephone
> use. The shops are offering recycling and disposal services for old TV's
> and VCR machines. In fact with the exception of so-called combo machines
> which usually play video cassettes but won't record them, no manufacturer
> is now producing video cassette recorders for sale here in the UK.
That is more or less true here. The only analog TV still
on the air here is a handful of "low-powered" community
television stations which were granted exemptions from the hard
and fast rule that all analog systems had to go off the air by
June 12 of 2009.
We had a low-power station here in Stillwater which is
still alive on cable but whose analog output appears to have
gone away and now there is not one analog signal on air here at
all.
On a different topic, you say,
> I don't really recall those valve TV's myself. But there again I wouldn't
> have known one if I'd seen one.!
You couldn't have told from the outside, but until flat
screen televisions began to show up maybe 10 years ago, they all
had at least one valve, the CRT or Cathode Ray Tube or picture
tube. Televisions up to the sixties were jungles of valves of
every shape and size. They threw off lots of heat and broke down
constantly and were full of lethal voltages.
If you turned on the TV and it was 20 or 30 seconds
before the sound slowly faded up, it was probably an all-valve
design. Sets made from the late sixties on usually had sound a
second or two after being switched on with the picture fading in
a few seconds later.
On the transoceanic signal reception, you said:
> And yet we never got any of the American signals as far as I know.
Most likely not. The signals would have been there but you
actually had two systems that coexisted there for decades. The
system we could here over here was your 405-line Band-I system
that dated back to the 1930's. It is my understanding that
British television viewers did complain in the late fifties
about all the sound and picture disruption from America or
actually all the Americas that hopped the pond during the Solar
maximum around 1958 The frequencies that you used for that
405-line system were heavily used over here for two-way radio
such as police cars, taxi services, tow trucks and you name it.
In addition, the frequencies around some of your 405-line
channels were part of our 6-meter amateur band. British viewers
did report hearing American voices along with the programs they
wanted to watch. I am sure they weren't any happier with that
than those police agencies and businesses here who would
sometimes get hours a day of 50-HZ buzz saw sounds from the
video carriers and steady jamming of their radios by the audio
signals that would fade in, here.
I once actually listened on a Winter morning around 1980
to the Oklahoma Highway Patrol which is charged with law
enforcement on rural highways and toll roads that are not in any
town. They were being hammered by the British and French video
carriers for hours a day and there was nothing they could do but
keep trying to get through.
The system that you and others in our general age group
probably grew up with was your PAL color or is that colour?:-)
system. I am not sure when England began using the new 625-line
system, but it was probably around 1955 or 1960. It not only
allowed for color but your channel frequencies were higher. The
sound was FM or frequency modulated instead of AM so there
wasn't as much potential for long-distance skip signals to
interfere.
So, when you were watching John Craven's "News Round" or
"Blue Peter," the odds are good you were probably seeing it on
the newer system. Also, had you been near to the old system
transmitters, their signal would have overwhelmed the weaker
signals from over here.
This all may sound like stupidity on somebody's part.
Someone should have known this or done that to prevent all that
interference but it's not that simple.
Engineers knew back in the old days that we could
sometimes get radio skip that causes signals to go much further
than they should but it was hard to go higher in frequency and
still produce radios and televisions that worked well, so it was
a compromise on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK, you got a
TV system that worked reasonably well and only occasionally
bothered anybody in North America and we set up radio
communications systems here that usually worked just fine and
only bothered all of you some of the time.
Fortunately, technology is so much better now and we can
all build broadcast and communication infrastructure that works
better for all and much more predictably, also.
Finally, I absolutely agree on the miserable quality of
program content these days. It's trashy here and, as far as I
can tell, no better over there. But at least the garbage is now
arriving in high-tech packages.
Martin
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