TV sets in operation - 1950
 

The founder of the first TV station in South America, mister Assis Chateaubriand ( in white suit ) watching the transmissions of his station on some roundie TV sets with some of his employees:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_2MJYUubm8

That one TV looks like a DuMont...

Cool history.

Do you think the underscan was intentional?

John

Apologies for my ignorance but... what is underscan ?

The first TV shown is a GE and the scan doesn't fill the mask for some reason. Underscan.


The second one is a big'n for sure, my first thought was 24"er like the Stromberg Carlson twins at the ETF auction.

I don't know if it was intentional or not... most likely 99% of the people involved on that filming are already dead.

So... we will never know.

Another video from that same period:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgBnYU6uJjI

Nice to see those TV trucks with the PRF3 callsign.

That station still holds the all-time distance record for any channel 3 station seen in North America - 5126 miles to Hot Springs, Arkansas (no date given, I presume 1950's).

Hmmm.... I believe we are not talking about the same TV station here, because the TV station of both videos I posted in this topic operated between 1950 and 1980 in São Paulo, Brazil.

Well, that distance is 8250 km, that is more than 20% of a great circle of the
Earth, so I would not rule this out as a correct figure for a Brazil-U.S.A. distance.

P.S.: this link should confirm that this is indeed the case.

http://www.wtfda.org/dxstats/TVRECDIS.htm

Amazing!!!
 

I already knew of a climatic phenomenon known as "thermic inversion" which makes such things possible, but I could NEVER imagine that it would make possible for a television signal to travel THAT far!!!

And the first TV on that list - PRG3, from Rio de Janeiro - was the sister station of PRF3 of São Paulo. According to that list, PRG3 was received in California in 1954.

As for PRF3 TV, it's reception in the USA must have occurred during the 1950's also, because in 1960 it went from channel 3 to channel 4, and most likely changed it's call sign.

Well, this new information ( new here, in Brazil ) may re-write the History books on Brazilian television: they say that Brazilian TV signals reached other countries for the first time only in 1959, when channel 5 of Porto Alegre, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul was innaugurated and people in Uruguai and Argentina reported receiving signals from that station.

It also my understanding that WDIV, channel 4 (Southfield, MI USA) was seen in Joinville, SC (this would also be about 8000 km).
This would have to be 1978 or later, since before then it was WWJ-TV.

Note that this is not in the WTFDA stats, since the -receive- location was not in North America.

These receptions (BR->US or US->BR) would involve abnormal ionospheric propagation (multiple "hop" sporadic-E or transequatorial scatter) rather than "thermic inversion", which is also called "tropospheric refraction" or "trop"

Incredible.

There were also numerous reports of people here in Southern Brazil receiving TV signals from countries that are very far from here, such as Colombia and Venezuela, but from the USA... is the first time, ever, that I read it occured.