Re: Turn Your Radio On ...

On 2/1/25 2:47 PM, Lars Poulsen wrote:

On Fri, 31 Jan 2025 20:08:17 -0500, WokieSux282@ud0s4.net wrote:

    It was common for US stations to start/end/both with the national
    anthem or something similar. A test pic of an eagle or something
    'patriotic' on the screen. The practice kinda faded in the latter 60s
    once we had been told to be self-loathing.

 rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

The test patterns were dropped as color TV became more popular. Color TV
drove my uncle crazy. You had to be a little artistic to adjust the RGB
balance so everyone didn't look like a corpse and he was a techie, not an
artist.

>

On 2025-02-01, Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote:

I remember a "color" (which was really 'saturation') knob, and a "tint"
knob, but don't remember any sets with external knobs to adjust R, G
and B colors (other than maybe in the "no user servicable parts inside"
area...).
>
But yes, getting color and tint just right so things looked half normal
instead of corpse or nauseated was a real challenge.

 The old National Television Standards Committee (NTSC) was sometimes
referred to by the alternative expansion "Never Twice the Same Color".
The "tint" part of the encoding was a phase adjustment on the color
subcarrier. The transmitters tended to have some phase drift.

   Hey, it was all analog ... slightest change in
   temperature, or a beer can next to the works ...

The French version of color TV encoding was called SECAM, often
translated as "Supreme Effort Contre les AMericains". The Germans came
up with a simpler solution: They reversed the phase every other line,
whereby it became self-correcting. PAL - Phase Alternating Line.

   Clever !

Everyone else picked up the German system, except for the Soviet allies,
who adopted the French system, so that the West German broadcasts would
be displayed in Black and White only.

   Doubt there were TOO many color TVs in the
   old eastern bloc. In any case, making the
   opponent's stuff look worse is good propaganda.