Low band TV in Britain.
 

Low band (band 1) in Britain was 5 channels numbered 1 to 5 & carried BBC1 using the 405 lines system. (6 was in high band) There were 5 high power transmitters, one on each channel. Channel 1 was used by Alexandra Palace then Crystal Palace (from 1957) for the London area, channel 2 from Holme Moss for northern England, channel 3 from Kirk-O-Shotts for central Scotland, channel 4 from Sutton Coldfield for English midlands & channel 5 from Wevoe for South Wales & West of England, all with vertical polarisation, (Rods vertical) these covered most of the population by the early 50's. They then started to reuse channels for medium power stations: channel 1 was used by Divis for Norther Ireland, channel 2 from North Hessery Tor for South Devon & east Cornwall, channel 3 from Isle of Wight for Southern England, Channel 4 from Meldrum for North east Scotland & channel 5 from Pontop pike for North east England. The medium power stations used a mix of both horizontal & vertical polarisation to try & reduce co-channel interference. Then from the mid 50's the low band exploded with dozens of medium & low power stations up till the mid/late 60's, all carrying BBC1. High band was used by ITV starting in 1956 & in the mid 60's for a few BBC1 transmitters...

Fascinating. I lived in Scotland just outside Glasgow in the early Seventies and there were only three channels, BBC1, BBC2, and STV. I don't remember what dial positions they were on though. I do remeber when our 13 inch colour tv broke down the repairman said he had to take it to the shop because it was "one of those new transistorised sets" and he could not fix it in the house.

Thanks for the lesson on how BBC covered the UK, Colly. Those transmitter locations sound so challenging to receive , considering the terrain is so similar to the northeastern US. A British website "antennahacks" is very interesting and details their adventures. They discuss trees and foliage, especially evergreens, and how they affect UHF reception.

Having visited there a few times since the mid-70s, I saw mostly UHF yagi antennas.
I recall a hotel room in London with a Philips monochrome set having a loop antenna and pushbuttons set like a car radio. They were variable and numbered and I seem to recall channel 21 and 27 as BBC 1&2.
I saw the occasional VHF antenna, vertical polarised and just figured that was for FM broadcast. The X antennas I was told were omni-directional FM, probably a radio 4 listener who wanted their classical music crystal clear.

Low band VHF DTV is alive and expanding in the Philadelphia-South Jersey area. Channels 2 and 4 have been built. A channel 5 now in Middletown Delaware.

WPVI 6 (85 mhz center band) has upped their power a few times since 2009 because most people buy a set-top UHF antenna which pulls in all the other transmitters and usually the one and only hi-band channel 12. I mean, who wants a 64 inch dipole hanging off their set:sigh:

About 12 years ago, some analog stations were simulcasting in ATSC on a different channel, UHF mostly. I began experimenting with DT reception and collecting classic UHF designs to test. A long-time TV repair acquaintance predicted the channel assignments would change but the lo/hi VHF and UHF bands would remain. He was telling everyone to keep or upgrade their broadband antennas even suggesting the big combination antenna monsters like the Channel Master CM3671 and Winegard 8200, both about 4 meteres from front to back.

Until analogue shutdown in 2012 the main London TX used these channels:

ITV: 23 (from 1969)
BBC1: 26 (from 1969)
Channel 4: 30 (from 1982)
BBC2: (from 1964) 33
Channel 5 (from 1997) 37

All horizontal polarisation.

BBC1 405 line was on channel 1 (45MHz vision, 41.5MHz sound) until 405 shutdown in 1985
ITV 405 line was on channel 9 until 405 shutdown in 1985
Both vertical polarisation.

There's a surprisingly large number of Band 1 and Band 3 aerials still surviving on people's chimneys. A lot of the Band 1 aerials were X shaped.

VHF FM radio was trasnmitted from 1954 in Band II. Originally with horizontal polariastion, now with mixed polarisation which is better for portable and mobile reception. You don't see many Band II outdoor aerials as most people don't bother. The horrible little "halo" aerials have less gain than a dipole but work well in many areas. I have one on my chimney.

DAB digital radio is broadcast in Band III, vertical polarisation. An old ITV Band III aerial often works quite well even though the frequency is a a little low. Again most people just use the set's own telescopic aerial.

Say, after 625 color came on line in Brittan did anyone make/sell monochrome sets that could tune and display 625 in monochrome?

There were plenty of 625 only monochrome sets after the introduction of colour. A colour set in 1967 cost about GBP300, about GBP5000 or $14000 in today's values allowing for inflation and the exchange rate of the time. This would have been an expensive luxury. A monochrome set would have been about 5 times cheaper.

In the UK the BBC is funded via a licence fee levied on all TV users. You may or may not agree with this system but that's what we do here. There was an additional licence fee for colour. Incredibly there is is still a different licence fee for monochrome only with a few thousand still around: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/news...white-TVs.html
While I strongly suspect that most (not all) of these people are breaking the law by using a colour set I also suspect it's a political decision not to pursue them. At some point the numbers will drop to almost zero and the monochrome licence will be abolished.

For comparing prices over time I use this excellent website:
https://www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare/

Common monochrome 625 only sets in the UK included many designs based on the Thorn 1500 chassis and on the Rank Bush-Murphy A774 chassis. Example of a 1500 set on this page: http://www.golden-agetv.co.uk/equipm...?ProducerID=12

Unfortunately nearly all the VHF TV antennas (aerials) have gone from the British rooftops. (Well in the Nottingham area they have) When my Canadian cousin came to stay with us in Nottingham in the mid 1960's he was fascinated with all the vertical H & X shaped antennas on just about every rooftop. I asked how they went on in Ottawa? He said "everyone had a rabbit ears antenna on top of the TV." Some people had a cable system called Rediffusion but it only got the same 2 TV channels that you got off the Antenna TV. Only posh people with plenty of money had UHF TV's on 625 lines. Until Nov 1969 the only program on UHF was BBC2, when BBC1 & ITV fired up on UHF in colour then UHF antennas appeared on the the rooftops. Sometimes the VHF antenna was taken down, but often they were just left there to fall to bits over the years. In my own case I used the VHF antenna for FM radio, it was still there when I joined the army in 1977 & went to Germany, when I came back in 1981 it had gone, "blown down in a gale" my parents said. Hardly anyone used VHF TV after the early 70's, they'd all gone over to UHF 625 lines in black & white or colour...

For some reason unknown to me all the high power & some medium & low power VHF TV transmitters in Britain used vertical polarisation, (rods vertical) I don't think any other country except New Zealand did this. When I've been to USA, Mainland Europe & Russia all the VHF antennas were horizontal polarisation. At UHF all the Brit high power transmitters use horizontal polarisation & most low power are vertical, this is to try & cut down on co-channel interference...

But in the right locations in continental Europe you can still see (now as useless remains of course) vertical VHF antennas, because certain transmitters used this polarization to ease channel reuse. In Germany this was the case in band 1 with the Ochsenkopf transmitter (ch. 4) and on a number of cases in band 3, such as Visselhövede on ch. 7, Wiederau on ch. 9, Dresden and Heide on ch. 10. Also some UHF high power transmitters used vertical polarization, at least Marlow (ch. 24 plus later added ch. 43).

In other countries this was less common, but still it happened. One example, at least if literature can be trusted, was the old band 2 (OIRT ch. 4) transmitter in Vilnius.

Up until 1955/56 TV's were only fitted with a low band tuner, they were called "BBC only" sets. When ITV started on high band in 1956 all new TV's could receive both low & high band. You could get ITV converters to change a high band channel to a low band one, sometimes you got BBC breakthrough though..

It would be funny if that ever happened in time to hear John Cleese say "...and now for something completely different." in a Monty Python episode. :D

England has a history of older TV's not being able to receive new stations, you had the BBC only sets not able to receive ITV in the late 50''s/early 60's, (no high band tuner) then 405 lines VHF only sets not being able to receive BBC2 on 625 lines UHF in the late 60's/early 70's. Then more recently the digital changeover, but you could & still can buy cheap digital converters, I've got 4 of them, 2 with RF outputs for my really old TV's (1971 Elizabethan & 1985 NEI) that don't have SCART or HDMI inputs...

Somewhere in the back of my feeble little mind, I THINK I remember reading that a lot of the early color experimentation in Blighty was done on 405...

Yes I believe that is true, I've read that NTSC looked very good on 405 lines. On 625 lines the BBC tested NTSC, PAL & SECAM, they eventually chose PAL for hue stability. Read that some ITV companies wanted SECAM, & most set makers wanted NTSC...

SECAM was a nightmare in the studio. You can't fade or mix it without severe compromises. I once worked for Michael Cox Electronics who made genuine SECAM vision mixers. Hideous things, with no possibility for them to be any better. It's no surprise that France was in the vanguard of component (YCbCr) colour studio techniques. In some SECAM countries they took a pragmatic approach and ran the studios in PAL, transcoding to SECAM for transmission.

They wouldn't be the first studios to hate the chosen broadcast format and transcode the studio's chosen format to it....Here in the states when CBS's field sequential system lost the format war officially (writing was on the wall long before), CBS took their existing field sequential broadcast studio ran it through a transcoder, and were the first post NTSC approval station broadcasting NTSC!...They continued with that kludge for years until the field sequential gear broke or they had got over their loss enough to stomach buying proper NTSC color cameras.

Heard that the advantage of SECAM was that the viewer couldn't mess it up - on NTSC they could get the hue & saturation wrong, on PAL in the UK the saturation was often to high, but on SECAM the broadcaster was in charge & the viewer got what they got & that was that. That's on TV's without a colour/saturation control that IIRC original SECAM sets didn't have, the later PAL/SECAM sets did have a colour/saturation control so the viewer could mess it up. I had a PAL/SECAM/NTSC TV & that had a hue & saturation control...

You're thinking of the Chromacoder, a Rube Goldberg use of sequential color field cameras to broadcast NTSC. I am quite sure network use of the Chromacorder didn't last much beyond 1954. In fact, CBS in Hollywood was equipped with TK-41s by the fall of that year. I'm not sure if any definitive evidence exists as to exactly how long that technique was used, but probably not outside the very early, still experimental period following the approval of NTSC color. It required a ton more light and (surprise, surprise), gave an inferior result compared to an all-electronic color camera.

BBC1 on low band reached over 99% of the UK population by the 60's, it also reached large parts of the Irish Republic, Northern France, Western Belgium & Western Netherlands. They made TV's that'd work on 405, 625 & 819 lines for use in Northern France & Belgium, they must have been very expensive...

The Chromacoder cameras used the field sequential method, but that was about it. Chromacoder =/= CBS field sequential. They scanned 525 lines at 180 fields per second, 60 of them red, 60 of them blue, 60 of them green. The raster was rotated 90 degrees so the scan lines would run vertically so as to reduce the moire patters when converting the result to NTSC. The output from the camera was then fed in a round robin fashion to one of three special CRTs operating at 27ish kV with a specially formulated P1 phosphor, one tube for red, one for green, and one for blue. Each CRT had a camera tube aimed at it, and the output of the three camera tubes was used, along with a storage tube, to develop an NTSC signal.

Britain had no plans to broadcast any VHF TV after the 405 lines VHF system closed down. Most British 625 lines TV's didn't have a VHF tuner, although a few did as they were meant for the Irish market where they used VHF & UHF for 625 until around 2012 AFAIK. Later on from the late 90's there were multi standard sets that'd work on all 625 systems in PAL & SECAM, VHF/UHF, I had one of these but it only ever worked on PAL I system at UHF. High band is now used to broadcast digital radio, don't think low band is used for anything anymore..

There where dual 405-625 line sets too. Includig color ones!
But when in the U.K. color tvs becamed cheaper? (let's say 4.000-6.000 British Pounds in today's money).

1960's British colour TV's had to be dual standard 405/625 sets if you wanted to receive BBC1 & ITV as they only transmitted on 405 VHF till November 1969 when they fired up on 625 UHF as well. Both colour & black/white dual standard TV's were clunking great monsters. My parents rented a dual standard TV till 71/72 when they bought a Sony colour set & a free Elizabethan T12 B/W portable TV that I still have, so we became a 625 only family overnight. BTW you could tell who had a 625 lines TV by the UHF TV antenna on the the roof, most folks had an H or X shaped antenna for VHF TV reception. Most of the H & X shaped antenna's have corroded away or fell down by now...

For many years, many Britons also hired (rented) their TV sets and even some of their appliances. From companies like Thorn, Rediffusion, and others.

The BBC did try color on 405 but mostly experimental. Sets were produced for demonstration but not sold to the public.

A great collector, David Boynes in England, restored what I think from the notes is a Pye 405 color set (mostly RCA tube imports and Pye designs from there) and from that modified a B&K generator to produce 405 color. I can only find his notes on the ETF site and they mostly document the B&K mods...not the set.

http://www.earlytelevision.org/pye_c...storation.html

More from David (FERNSEH)

https://www.vintage-radio.net/forum/...t=68780&page=2

And a BBC doc that shows color at the very end. Not a kine but a film shot on set.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K37...ature=youtu.be

The notes have an interesting entry of finding a Mullard (Holland) version of the 21CYP22. Perhaps there were other 21's made under license by Mullard or others and can be searched in Europe. Jerome H...any help on this thought?

Mods...if this is drifting too far afield please restart as you wish with a new topic.

In the 1950s the BBC produced experimental colour transmissions on both 405 and 625 lines. All using NTSC adapted to suit the different systems. Several manufacturers made experimental colour sets using American CRTs and largely American technology. Marconi built cameras, nicknamed coffin cameras on account of their size and shape, using 3x image orthicon tubes.

Apparently it all worked pretty well and a lot of experience was gained. I think the decision not to start a colour service was largely financial and political rather than technical.

By 1967 when the UK colour service started there were plumbicon cameras and a well developed set of European valves and components, largely due to work by Philips.

Early sets were expensive, several thousand pounds in todays values. Roughly equivalent to the cost of 42" plasma flat screens when they first were sold.

Many who rented had a coin meter on the back of the TV, you'd put 10 or 50 pence coins in it, think you got 2 hours for 10 pence & 10 hours 50 pence. (or something like that)Iif there was more money in the meter than the rental cost they got the surplus back as a rebate. When I went to Canary Islands 11 years ago you had to put a 1 euro coin in a meter for 1 hour of TV, when I went last month it was free...

Yes a lot of people used to rent washing machines, fridges, stoves etc & often paid via the TV coin meter. Heard of washing machines with slot meters but never actually seen one so not sure if true or I was being had...

As long as you didn't have to watch Molly Meldrum on station at Meldrum

Heard an urban legend that said that the BBC had to continue broadcasting 405 lines because there was a grandmother that still had a working 405 line set and no 625 line set. I would have thought that the BBC would give her a 625 line set so that they could shut down the 405 line transmitter...

When France shut their 441 lines system down anyone who had a 441 lines only TV were given an 819 lines TV as it was cheaper than keeping the 441 system running. Why the BBC & ITV didn't do this I don't know... There were very few people using 405 lines only TV's when it was shut down completely in Jan 1985, vast majority of folks had gone over to 625 lines colour by then. Someone gave me a 405 only TV in 1981, it worked for a bit then started smoking so turned off quick, took it outside & plugged it into an extension lead, it then smoked a lot & went "PHUT" & it died & that was that. Never saw another 405 lines picture again..

BBC and ITV continued with 405 past any reasonable date for switching them off. Switched off at start of 1985, duplication of services on 625 started in 1969, It would have been cheaper to switch them off some years earlier (perhaps 1980 or so) and give anyone legitimately still watching on 405 a new set.

I don't know the politics of the timing of the 405 switch off. "Granny watching on 405" was surely urban myth. By comparison the digital switchover was done from 2008 to 2013 though DTV had been transmitted as early as 1998. Set top boxes were given free to certain vulnerable and elderly people.

A single low band transmitter covered almost all of northern England, it was Holme Moss channel 2 TX'ing at 100 KW's high up in the Penines, it's signal reached both the north & Irish sea coasts, North Wales & the Eastern coast of Ireland. It's now an FM only TX now but still travels, I can receive BBC radio 2 on 89.3 here in my home near Nottingham & received it in Blackpool last week so it still travels far...

A big problem with low band here was co-channel interference: In summer reception would often be ruined by patterning &/or distorted sound. It'd usually be 625 line TV stations from the European mainland coming in via sporadic E, most of these used negative video modulation & FM sound, the 405 British system used positive modulation & AM sound (Belgium used positive modulation & AM sound for their 625 lines system) & a 405 set couldn't resolve a 625 transmission properly. Received French 819 lines TV a few times with a split picture on UK channel 3, there was no sound though...

This is interesting:
1) That anyone outside of RCA had the resources at the time to build the CY.

And:

2) That there was enough demand to actually bother, given color was barely selling in the US, and PAL was still over the horizon.

In the US, wasn't Zenith the second one to build color tubes?

(Ok, this starting to become serious drift, I guess...)

When you say maker of color CRTs you fail to differentiate whether the CRT was prototype or production...RCA, Zenith, Dumont, CBS, and Philco (I'm probably forgetting others) all had prototypes that were revolutionary in some way or another but when color was standardized LATE in 1953 only 2 OEMs actually made CRTs for production TV as far as I know. They were RCA and CBS.
CBS developed and sold the 15HP22 (basically a 15GP22 with phosphor directly deposited onto the inside of the envelope instead of using a separate phosphor dot plate (RCA later bought the patent from CBS). They also made a 19" version of the 15HP22 for a few months before the 21AXP22 from RCA obsoleted it.
In 1958 when nearly every maker except Motorola had given up on making color sets and simply rebadged RCAs Westinghouse briefly made and recalled a 23" rectangular color with a CBS CRT. That CRT had both purity and convergence design flaws that led to the recall (2 examples are known to survive).

Zenith did not make a consumer market color TV until 1961 and though they had color CRT prototypes in 1954 they didn't gear up to make consumer CRTs until after they entered the consumer market....I have owned early Zenith branded 21FJP22s with an EIA code that indicated that they had been manufactured by RCA.

It would be interesting to know which OEMs produced color CRTs besides RCA in the years 1954-1964... If that data exists and is compiled it would tell you who started when and if any of the original OEMs took a break in the leanest years of color sales.

It is known that Japan had adopted NTSC color by 1960 and made roundy color TV for both their domestic market and export. I wonder if RCA exported enough to supply them or if they made their own plant.

Long before PAL Brittan and parts of europe were experimenting with color after NTSC came into existence. I could see a large tube and set OEM like philips making their own color CRTs on an experimental basis. Philips actually produced a roundy color for both Canada NTSC and european PAL markets, but I believe it used a 21FJP22....It would be interesting to know if they made their own CRT or bought American.

Long before PAL Brittan and parts of europe were experimenting with color after NTSC came into existence. I could see a large tube and set OEM like philips making their own color CRTs on an experimental basis. Philips actually produced a roundy color for both Canada NTSC and european PAL markets, but I believe it used a 21FJP22....It would be interesting to know if they made their own CRT or bought American


I have two Philips TVs with a round color picture tube.
The Philips 21KX100A has a RCA 21FBP22.
The Philips EL-5793 has no numbers on the picture tube. This has a brown connection to the picture tube. According to Philips an AX53-14. I don't know if Philips made this picture tube itself, but someone might recognize this picture tube.


Also two photos of a new RCA 21FBP22, bought in the Netherlands.

The Philips EL5793 http://www.marcelstvmuseum.com/photoalbum85.html
The Philips 21KX100A http://www.marcelstvmuseum.com/photoalbum30.html

That "Philips" 21KX100A is something that I wish me.

Same here. I understand they made an NTSC version for the Canadian market... I've never been to Canada before but I would make the trip for one.

The 21KX100A's in the Netherlands are original NTSC, later converted to PAL, PAL modules were made for it. These TVs are also very rare here in the Netherlands. I've never seen a picture from Canada with this 21KX100A. Maybe a member in Canada knows if these TVs were sold there, maybe under a different model number.

On the photo my 21KX100A in my living room together with an EL3400 video recorder from 1964, is black en white. Picture on tv from DVD player.

I've seen pictures with that V.T.R., but didn't imagine it was that huge!