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Blastfrog

I swear my dad's full of shit

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So, my dad was telling me this story about how when he was a kid, he was over at a friend's house and that they were watching TV (his friend only had a black and white TV), while it was interrupted by some people experimenting with pirate TV signals. Sounds reasonable so far, but then he claims that the signal was using some trick to get red and green color (but not blue) out of a monochrome CRT. He swears up and down that this is what he saw even though it was DECADES ago.

I mean, how is this even possible? A monochrome display CANNOT show color, I have no idea why he says that he saw this for an objective fact.

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glenzinho said:

You know what they say, the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree...


...Aaaand we're done here.

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esselfortium said:

I liked this better when you posted it in WADs and Mods.

Really? That's a noob-level fuck-up, boy.

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I try to start a discussion on the technical capabilities of CRTs and you all have to turn this into calling me stupid. Meh, oh well.

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It could have been a color set and he just didn't know it because there was so little color broadcasting at the time. The most unlikely thing that I can think of is that they had a pirate station broadcasting in color so long ago. Perhaps some well of amateur radio enthusiasts performing color broadcast experiments, but not pirates per-say, tv equipment was very expensive in those days and often required intense light and cooling.

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Csonicgo said:

if you're good, you can tell a color set from a B&W just by examining the screen.

Definitely. Hell, you don't even have to be "good", per say, just look at it up close to see if there's RGB on the grille.

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I'm no scientist, but I'd think that pushing the right wavelengths through the tubes could possibly make a B&W TV produce a colored hue, but not at the same time and not in any discernible image. But again, I'm no scientist.

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Without a suitable phosphor mask, you're not going to see colour regardless of the received signal.

freder said:

Perhaps some well of amateur radio enthusiasts performing color broadcast experiments, but not pirates per-say, tv equipment was very expensive in those days and often required intense light and cooling.

If we're talking decades ago, radio amateurs didn't have access to the sort of bandwidth required for broadcast television below about 2.4GHz without sacrificing most or all of an allocated segment, so most amateur TV broadcasts were of the slow-scan variety, which works with a much smaller bandwidth but looks like a slideshow and usually requires extensively modified receivers.

Watching colour on a monochrome TV is pure bullshit, apart from the CRT being unable to display colours (having only one electron gun and no colour mask) the receiver lacks the circuitry required to extract and decode the colour sub-carrier.

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You should probably kill him and cut him open to see if he is, in fact, filled with shit.

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GreyGhost said:

If we're talking decades ago, radio amateurs didn't have access to the sort of bandwidth required for broadcast television below about 2.4GHz without sacrificing most or all of an allocated segment, so most amateur TV broadcasts were of the slow-scan variety, which works with a much smaller bandwidth but looks like a slideshow and usually requires extensively modified receivers.


Exactly, the first color broadcasts were around 1958 and were generally major events like the '58 Rose bowl. Any color equipment at the time would have been relegated to laboratories at places like RCA. Even SStv was in it's infancy. If pirates had wanted to get into tv at the time their best bet was probably the narrow bandwidth mechanical systems that could be broadcast over short wave signals, albeit with very low quality and frame rates.

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note that "color" in the first few years was VERY low frame rate (either you had three cameras, or a spinning disc, RCA made the latter).

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I always thought it was interesting that they tacked color (chrominance ) on to the exiting grayscale image (luminance) to keep compatibility. Too bad composite sucks shit, and sucks even more shit on NTSC, and particularly sucks major shit when being broadcast over the airwaves with a damaged RF signal.

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Shouldn't this thread title be changed, so it reflects more on the dry old tech topic of how CRTs work, than on your father lying to you?

Please don't, actually, it's more hilarious as it is now...

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Sodaholic said:

I always thought it was interesting that they tacked color (chrominance ) on to the exiting grayscale image (luminance) to keep compatibility. Too bad composite sucks shit, and sucks even more shit on NTSC, and particularly sucks major shit when being broadcast over the airwaves with a damaged RF signal.


I think we can all conclude you don't know what you're talking about and probably misunderstood your dad.

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I remember some dishonest TV dealers in Greece added a sort of colored filter in front of the screen of big-ass old B&W TVs, trying to pass them as "color" once it became popular. The filter looked like anti-glare glass with a purplish tint and the effects on the image were, well, minimal, other than being ripped off ;-)

Perhaps what your dad means was that the TV was in color in the first place, but that pirate transmissions (except that one) generally weren't, and some friend of his hacked a transmitter in ordoer to add half-assed color?

Csonicgo said:

I think we can all conclude you don't know what you're talking about and probably misunderstood your dad.


At least he got the statement you quoted technically correct, although it does nothing to save the rest of his posts.

freder said:

Even SStv was in it's infancy. If pirates had wanted to get into tv at the time their best bet was probably the narrow bandwidth mechanical systems that could be broadcast over short wave signals, albeit with very low quality and frame rates.


Fully electronic (non-mechanical) TV was far from being at its infancy by the end of WW2: the electronic raster acquisition and projection tubes had both been invented before the war and perfected quite rapidly after Baird's mechanical TV. Germany (during Hitler's rule) had presented functional, fully electronic sets and even broadcasts (often cited in the movie "Contact" where the first TV broadcast created by humans was a speech by Hitler).

As for the Baird "narrow bandwidth" sustems, those were considered pretty much a dead transitional technology as soon as fully electronic ones became practical in the 30s, which was really VERY soon. The "resurgence" of narrow band TV is more of a contemporary geek & tinkerer hobby, there never were accepted standards or even limited production runs back in the 20s or 30s that could justify a "return" to the system or lead to its adoption by TV pirates as an "alternative" in the 50s/60s. For one, nobody would have been able to watch them but other tinkerers, and with all the electronics widely available to build a real electronic TV, why bother?

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I was actually referring to slow scan tv, which began to be used by amateurs in the 1950's. The old mechanical systems started becoming popular again in the 70's, I just meant that if pirates wanted to get into tv back in the 50s that would have been their only option :P

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Slow-scan back then relied on CRT's with long persistence phosphors in order to retain a viewable image between frame updates, they're nothing like the tubes you find in regular TV sets.

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Nah, your dad ain't full of shit. It's just that dads sometimes like to bullshit their own kids, just because they can.

Sticking to the topic of B&W TVs, a cousin of mine, when first taken to a real circus, saw a tiger and didn't believe it was real, because "the colors were wrong": he though that a tiger was supposed to be black and white, as seen on TV, not orange and black.

Also, as kids, me and my sister grew up with a B&W TV set until we got our first color TV in 1991. Until then, I knew full well that color TVs existed (we saw them in other people's houses) and that certain things weren't as we saw them (e.g. the Smurfs weren't really black!), but we couldn't do anything but filling-in the color of what we saw with our imagination.

As a result, I came to the point of dreaming that a special, magical cartoon was aired, which, only for that one time, since it was special & magical, would appear in color even on our B&W TV :-)

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Aliotroph? said:

Perhaps the TV pirates displayed some of those optical illusions that cause you to see colours in a b/w image. Here's an example. Results with these vary widely among different viewers though.

Wow, awesome.

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Sodaholic said:
I always thought it was interesting that they tacked color (chrominance ) on to the exiting grayscale image (luminance) to keep compatibility.

I always thought this was sorta neat...

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Yeah, that's pretty cool. I first heard about it as a method of restoring the colour in some Doctor Who episodes from the early 70s that only existed in b/w.

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Bucket said:

You should probably kill him and cut him open to see if he is, in fact, filled with shit.


Sometimes I wish i could filter these threads out so only you are able to post in them.

Also why are you bringing your argument here, do we look like your dad to you?

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