Anybody Remember VIR

[ChrisW6ATV]

Originally Posted by wa2ise

It got displaced by other things that wanted room in the vertical interval. Teletext, closed caption, and ghost cancellation reference signals and such came later.

I am not sure if what I saw in the mid-80s was VIR, but I remember noticing color stripes and some dots and things in the vertical interval on most channels. One time, I hooked up a scope I borrowed from work that has a delayed-sweep feature (Tektronix 2215). With some careful knob-twiddling on the scope I realized the vertical signal included one line of NTSC color bars, one line of multiburst (the vertical stripes of finer and finer B&W lines often seen in test-pattern sets), and maybe some others like a grayscale ramp. It was pretty cool.