Broadcast Equipment Failure in Early Television
 

The reading about 1936-50 television I have done so far has been concerned with learning how the hardware worked, but next I want to learn how the hardware failed to work, which I think will be more fun. Essentially, it's everything that could go wrong that would lead to interruption of service. I am not counting things like lightning striking the station or ice storms causing the antenna to collapse, which are beyond the control of the broadcaster. I would like to know at least in general terms what the most common component failures were and how long they would take to rectify, and how many minutes per month on average would a station expect to lose because of them. I would be surprised if many station logs were still around, but does anyone know if people compiled figures at the time, and whether these reports are extant?

Common in the heyday of quad machines [two inch tape] were head clogs on-air. Techs or tape ops were quickly delegated to poor Freon into the canoe [head guide], keeping this up until the next commercial break where they'd get two minutes to clean the heads properly. Or for Australia's ABC [ad-free] that could go on until the end of the programme!

In later years drop out compensators became available and hid all manner of sins.

Would the clogs completely kill the picture? Also wouldn't the freon be bad for the tape and transport?

The quad head had four heads spinning on a drum mated with a vaccum guide (canoe). The horizontally travelling tape was sucked in to the canoe by machine vaccum to be read by the vertically spinning head assembly. Transverse recording I think they called it.

As there were four heads at any given time there were four bands of video repeated four times in a frame. It did spin fast.

It would take just a small bit of oxide fluff to sluff off and usually clog one head. It was too fast for the fluff to continue on to the next head.

Usually you got just one head clog repeated four times every fourth line. If the head was clogged, there was no RF for the machine to process and the missing RF went to full snow if bad or snowy if a partial clog.

Freon was usually sitting by in a restaurant plastic mustard squeeze bottle ready to shoot directly in to the head assembly. Most of the time it worked. If not, the next trick was to take your fingernail and lightly press it to the exposed part of the spinning drum. Either one of these would cause the tape speed/drum speed to momentarily change and break up the pic. If it worked, the tape would re-lock in a few seconds and the show would go on.

The Freon evaporated so quickly that it was not a factor as it was about 20" of tape travel until the tape hit the takeup reel. I have to wonder how much Freon was gassed out and burned a hole in the atomosphere later on. We went through gallons of the stuff in a year.

So there is something to be said for television advertising after all. But to be nit-picky here, videotape belongs to a later era than the one that I'm researching. The fault need not be something that would lead to a complete signal loss, but the kind of problem that would lead to the "Do Not Adjust Your Set" slide being sent out. How reliable, for example, were the microwave transmitters on remote broadcast vans; how often would a camera malfunction; how often would film in a telecine jam or tear? (I seem to remember this happening a lot with Star Trek reruns, because the episodes had been aired 700 or so times.)

Rinehart, where were you located? And in what years of Star Trek reruns are you referring to? I would think that after not too long all the reruns would have been transferred from film to tape and usually played from tape, not film.

I was, and still am, living in Ottawa, Canada, and the period would be roughly 1973-75. This happened more than once, but I recall most clearly one occasion when, after having difficulties with the sound track, all of a sudden the picture froze on the TV screen, tilted diagonally, and with the sprocket holes clearly visible. It remained like that for a few seconds, and then the station ident was put on the screen. I can't remember how long the program was interrupted; as an impatient eight-year-old it seemed like forever, but it was probably just a couple of minutes.

Back in 1981 I was working at the RCA Sarnoff Lab, and had a business related trip to NYC, to the CBS network head end. Back then they had two videotape machines, synchronized to the frame, playing the same programming feeding all the CBS TV stations in the eastern and central time zones of the USA. Two machines, so if the one actually on the air suddenly has a problem, the tech on duty would hit a switch to place the other machine on the air, taking the problem machine off the air so it could be fixed. So viewers would not miss a second of a soap opera.

I had often wondered if they had such redundancy at the network level. I do recall seeing some extended dead air on primetime network TV; at least a couple times on ABC back in the mid/late 80s. It seemed pretty obvious that it wasn't a local issue.

I sure remember all the technical difficulties that WTTG-5 in DC had running the old cartoons I loved to watch every day as a kid. Of course, I kinda enjoyed those myself. I always pictured that announcer standing by the mic all day, ready to jump on the air at a moments notice to state, "we are experiencing technical difficulties...please stand by." I wonder what kind of equipment that former DuMont-owned station was using in the 70s?

During station breaks the network would show (still do, I guess) their logo and the locals would insert their i.d. at the bottom. On several occasions I saw the WCBS-2 logo show up on the whole network. Another neat thing was to see the WBAL-11 logo show up on local WBOC-16. I know that they used to get network feeds over-the-air from other stations. I suppose in that case they either had to quickly throw up their own slide instead of the network version, or otherwise cover up that other stations logo somehow.

My eldest brother is an electrical engineer, and he has told me that it is standard practice nowadays to have redundancy for every minute of the broadcast day and that is why we never see the "We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties" slide any more.
As for the Star Trek reruns, I do remember that at some point a few years after the incident I described, they all of a sudden improved in quality, and this is likely the time they transferred them to videotape.
However, as interesting as all this is, it's a little removed from my original query, which was about TV during the experimental era and the first few years of the commercial era.
So to reiterate, what I am looking for is comprehensive information about failure of equipment which resulted in loss of program service. It looks to me like a good portion of the people who post here work, or have worked, in television, and it is from them that I would especially like to hear. To the best of your knowledge, were records of the kind I have described ever compiled? And if you are unsure, does it seem plausible that they might have been?

The Bad Old Days
 

DCRTV.com has had a lot of stuff over the years on its "free" side about WTTG and the other D.C. stations over the years. If course, if you join the "pay" side, you can see it at your leisure.

IIRC, WTTG moved from the old Raleigh Hotel into 5151 Wisconsin back in 1967. They had Norelco PC70 cameras. I saw a couple of them (with some from KTTV and WBBM-TV) at the Gaithersburg Hamfest back in the late 1970's. Most of the stuff at 5151 was brand new. Including a 770' tower out back... The oldest of the Raleigh Hotel stuff (especially DuMont) went to WOOK-TV/WFAN-TV and probably got sold off by Eaton when he took the station off the air. Some of the later WTTG studio stuff went to the WNVT-53 at a college in Northern Virginia.

The OAI (Off-Air Interconnect) days were crazy. WSVA-3 in Harrisonburg, VA used to get "Galloping Gourmet" off WRC-4 in Washington. Well, one morning, there was a TD with the tape and WRC went to a slide. WSVA ran the slide, too for about 10 mins. or so until they put their own slide up until the next program was sked to air.

And, don't think ID screw-ups were limited to micro-market stations, either! Once, while watching "Hellfighters" with my parents on local KOGO-10, a KNBC-4 ID slipped through. Those screw-ups were profitable for the FCC, as well. In the BS days (Before Satellites), the Anchorage affiliates would usually get the "lower 48" programs on VTR after the Honolulu stations had finished with them, although some stuff would come in from Seattle. Well, the FCC would usually monitor the sports programming to look for an ID other than KENI/KTUU, KTVA, KIMO, etc.!

Speaking of WTTG, there was a time when it almost became Washington's ABC-TV affiliate when the then WMAL-TV wasn't clearing a lot of the prime time lineup. That was when Metromedia's KMBC-TV in Kansas City was already and ABC-TV affiliate. The negotiations got to the point in the early 1970's the the network engineering guys came down from "the Lodi Forest" to inspect the place. It got a clean bill of health. Then again, one should consider the state of Washington TV engineering in that era. There were ham stations with better equipment!

I'm curious, can you advise which film chains WTTG would've used back then (i.e. post-1967 move to 5151 Wisconsin)? I'm guessing RCA TK-27 . . . their equipment, it sounds to me, would've been the same as Metromedia's New York station, WNEW-TV, which likewise had live studio PC-70's (up to the mid-to-late 1970's) and film chain TK-27's. (And WNEW itself, in the Metromedia days, likewise had countless "please stand by" moments - with the voice of Tom Gregory making such announcements.)

Metromedia-era WTTG, I noticed from some DX sites and YouTube clips, had color test pattern designs (courtesy Tele-Measurements) with custom layout and whatever "5" logo they were using at any given moment . . . unlike WNEW which had electronic color bars.

WNBC station ID on Cleveland's WKYC
 

I'll never forget one afternoon in the early '70s, when I was watching a program on Cleveland's NBC station, WKYC-TV. Someone in the master control room must have flipped the wrong switch or pushed the wrong button on a control panel because, to my amazement, during a commercial break I saw the ID for New York's WNBC! First time I ever saw a slip-up like that in the Cleveland area (I lived in an eastern suburb of the city at the time). Did this sort of thing happen anywhere else in this country besides Washington, D.C. (as a previous poster, W. B. I think, noted) or other major TV markets? :scratch2:

I wish I'd had a VTR at the time (VCRs had not yet gone mainstream in this country in the '70s because they were so new and so expensive) to capture this gaffe for posterity. I have not seen another one like it since, although with so many TV stations and networks, such as MeTV, being automated these days, I wouldn't be surprised if it would happen again -- entirely by accident. I have seen snippets of commercials on MeTV during commercial breaks, but I have yet to see slipups like this on the major network affiliates, since the one I just mentioned.

BTW, I also remember one hilarious slipup on WKYC-TV one morning in the early 1970s. The station was minutes away from signing on, but instead of a test pattern, I saw, to my surprise, a station ID that started spinning, a "BOING!" sound in the audio, and I don't remember what else, but it was a hoot to watch. An engineer must have spotted this long about now and switched to a test pattern.

WTTG was almost a WNEW clone with the move to 5151 Wisconsin. However, I usually only saw electronic bars.

One thing WTTG rarely ran was the Metromedia "corporate" ID with the animated "M" and a jingle of "Metro-media Tele-vision" over a music bed, and a repeat of the channel number. They would run the animation and music bed, but on voice at all.