Sunday, Aug. 28, 2011 — I’ve been in stealth mode this weekend on eBay … just watching the auctions go by. There’s been some sweet deals; the things I wanted I couldn’t afford – go figure!
I was almost overcome by auction fever earlier today when I saw a Yaesu FT-757GX for auction for less than $150. The catch? Seller said the transmit was out (more often than not, some CB’er bought it, got inside and cranked the power up so AM went well beyond 40 watts. They’ll run that way a while until they let the smoke out of the finals.
At any rate, I thought it might make a good shortwave receiver … fortunately, there was time for my memory (and common sense) to intervene; the FT-757GX is not the receiver you would want for SWL’ing and DX’ing! It’s not a horrible receiver, just one that overloads easily. I moved on to other things, and later saw the rig sold for more than $200! Had it been fully functional, I would have considered buying it (though I can’t exactly say I why I need it).
TV HISTORY. I still have that assortment of Radio & Television News magazines from the 1950s that I pick up and read from time to time; there’s always something interesting in them. They offer fascinating looks at the state of television at the time.
The debate in Washington in the month of August 1955 was pay broadcast TV vs. free broadcast TV. There were three different companies lobbying the FCC (and Congress) to allow it. There were a variety of schemes presented. In one, they would only offer pay TV in certain hours of the day, that way, viewers could tune in at the right time. Another suggestion was to sell TV programming in groups, and its interesting how closely that system parallels the current cable TV subscription setup!
The commission was open to hearing more on pay broadcast TV, though one or more of the commissioners agreed with the broadcast stations that it was “incompatible with our tradition of free broadcast.”
Some 56 years later, I’m thinking that point-to-point broadcast TV will soon be a thing of the past. I only know of one person who still attempts to watch broadcast TV; everyone else is either on cable or satellite.
COLOR TV & THE COL-R-TEL. In the “New Products” section of the magazine, one of the products being introduced was the Col-R-Tel color TV converter. Believe it or not, it turned b&w images into color images.
It only worked on programs broadcast in color. It utilitized a spinning disk with the three basic colors, red green blue. This was a rather complicated system, but as evidenced on YouTube and in written reports, it actually produced color images.
The wheel sat on top of the TV; one of the parts of the device was to alter your picture tube’s size so it would display in the 14″ window, where you would see your colorized images.
The color wheel’s speed was kept in sync with the picture tube by an interface that kept it in “time” with the horizontal oscillator. The disk were divided into six sections (2 sets of the 3 colors), and another interface demodulated the color information on the received broadcast signal, using the three colors to control the single monochrome gun. When the red part of the wheel was in front of the screen, the converter would control the TV picture tube to show only the red color on the screen at that time. It worked the same way that images are separated for color printing on 4-color presses.
With the wheel in sync with the picture tube, it would repeat that process faster than you could see. A video of the Col-R-Tel in operating has come flicker, but users who used it said the image was higher quality than the video indicates.
The color wasn’t real saturated, though those who used the system said the color was better than found on color TVs at the time. Col-R-Tel was sold from 1955 into the early 1960s.
CBS SEQUENTIAL COLOR. The interesting thing is that the Col-R-Tel system borrowed significantly from the CBS Field Sequential Color System that the company proposed to the FCC in 1949-50. It too used a spinning sequential color disk.
The FCC was evaluating color TV systems, and it boiled down to three — CBS’s sequential system, the RCA system and a line sequential system proposed by Color Television Inc. After all the hearings, the FCC decided to make the CBS the U.S. standard for color TV. The problem was the CBS system and standard b/w TV were not at all compatible; programming broadcast with the CBS system could not be received on a regular b/w receiver. The FCC believed that TV makers would build sets that would receive both the “regular” b/w broadcasts as well as the CBS system. In the end, manufacturers turned their backs on the CBS system and did not produce sets to support it.
RCA filed a lawsuit in federal court to block the start of the CBS color broadcasts. The suit ended up going to the Supreme Court, which affirmed lower court rulings that sided with CBS. While RCA lost the individual battles, they still won the war — the prolonged court battle had continue to sour the reputation of the CBS system. In the end, CBS had to purchase a couple of supplier companies in order to build sets capable of receiving its own broadcasts. Only 200 sets were produced; 100 were sold.
Broadcasting using the CBS system began in June 1951 and ended in October of that year. CBS recalled all the unsold TVs and destroyed them. The nation’s entry into the Korean War prompted the government to prohibit the production of color TVs; its an interesting footnote in history that b/w set production was not affected. The ban on color TV production helped stop development of the CBS sequential system, given industry players more time to examine the problem of making a color system compatible with b/w.
The 1949-50 color TV debacle prompted manufacturers to band together to form the NTSC (National Television System Committee), prompting cooperation and collaboration among industry players. By Feb. 1952, a standard devised by the NTSC was being field tested; the standard was proposed to the FCC by petition in 1953, which adopted the standard.
That’s enough TV history for one night ;-0
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