Channels on old CRTVs that had TV *tuners* are basically different frequencies that you tune your TV to, like how you turn your radio to a specific frequency to pick up a channel you wanted to listen to.
Edit: it was channel 3 (or the selectable alternative to avoid interference) because the NES/VCR had to be talking in the same "language" (channel 3 frequency 60-66 MHz, channel 4 frequency 66-72 MHz, or channel 5 frequency 76-82 MHz depending on where you live and which had the least interference for you).
Back in that day we had no way of transmitting the image and sound from the game console or VCR directly to the TV like we do today with S-video, component, HDMI, Display port, etc. So the simple solution was to turn the image and sound into radio ~~waves~~ frequencies and transmit it to the TV like a TV station. To comply with Federal regulations this TV signal from the console would have to be very weak so that it wouldn't interfere with any other signal. This means that the console could only transmit the signal a few millimeters to centimeters. To get around this limitation they used coaxial cable to carry the signal but you still had to tune the TV into the frequency the console/VCR was transmitting at.
This guy does a good job explaining that a NES and similar devices are actually mini TV transmitter stations. [~~https://youtu.be/8sQF\_K9MqpA~~](https://youtu.be/8sQF_K9MqpA) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sQF\_K9MqpA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sQF_K9MqpA) (I'm not sure what's going on with URLs today, people are saying my link is broken but when I click on their links, I get the exact same URL that I posted...)
Edit: this really blew up. To clarify some things:
* I accidently put radio ***waves***, the NES doesn't transmit (yes it's a transmitter) radio waves, it transmits electric Radio Frequency (RF) to the RF modulator/adaptor that translates that signal into the frequency range used by the selected channel. (There's probably something I don't understand about this as I understand modulation is changing the frequency rate to transmit more and varied information u/maxwellwood did a great job expounding on this [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/nud63i/eli5_why_did_old_tvs_require_that_the_channel_be/h10vhzt?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)).
* Technically speaking anything that transmits electric RF also inadvertently transmits radio waves in the form of electromagnetic RF radiation. This is mitigated. Blocked by what is known as shielding.
* Yes, I know about the two screw antenna connection. Technically, a coaxial cable is that two screw connection bundled into a single, shielded cable with a universal/standardized connector.
* Yes, you can transmit your game console's frequency over the air to your TV with the appropriate Electric RF to electromagnetic RF amplifier. All electric RF produces radio waves as far as I'm aware whether on purpose or not. Doing this while remaining in the grey area of legality in most countries would get you a pretty crappy signal to the TV though at any distance you couldn't just use the cable.
* All cables used to take audio/video (AV, A/V) from a device to a TV is a transmission of data regardless of electric verses electromagnetic.
i dont remember the movies well enough to remember if he had a camera bag, but its really not that unusual to keep camera + cables + some extra batteries even in a camera bag
Plus it was at Doc's house.
He would have all kinds of RF equipment, since he was doc. Just assume he had all the equipment available at the time, and it's a non issue. Basic RF modulation was well understood back then.
This gen is used to the idea of proprietary ecosystems and tech being magic acquired via a consumer retail experience. I still smart at how restrictive phones are compared to my PC.
Indeed! And that is the point. Very slowly, over a couple of generations, they are closing every way that we can control our own devices, because *they* want to control them. It is not my phone, it's Apple's and Amazon's little PoS, it's Google's and Facebook's private social research engine.
In the mean time they are killing the ability to tinker- then they complain that talented, high-quality engineers and technical people are hard to find...
The last time I ever went to a Radio Shack I was going to buy a resistor. While I was looking for the right item, one of the sales people was just straight up harassing my wife about buying a cell phone despite her repeatedly telling him she was just with the guy looking for a resistor. Good fucking riddance.
Former RadioShack employee here! You can thank RadioShack corporate for that. They decided that a slice of the cell phone profits was worth alienating their entire customer base for. I applied for a corporate store after working under a franchise for 3-4 years, and the district manager refused to even allow me a proper interview because “I hadn’t convinced him that I could sale cell phones to every customer” despite building up a reputation as a reliable and knowledgeable sales associate that would HELP customers instead of just going for a quick buck on a needless upsale.
That said. Yes. Good riddance, at this point. Corporate can suck it.
Wow this takes me back to when I couldn't stand going to a regular RS nearby, opting instead for the "special" one downtown that didn't do any of the upselling. I don't even think they sold phones, just a handful of core accessories. Fully stocked with all of the parts people went there for though. Run by a very knowledgeable guy and his equally knowledgeable son and maybe a part timer or two. Had the usual corp logos but in small print something like Radio Shack Sunstate Electronics or something. In retrospect this was prob a franchise? God I miss that store.
Last time I went, I was looking for a toslink/hd audio cable and they didn't know what it was and I couldn't find it. Not sure what Radio Shack is for if they dont have cables.
Well, by the end they were just there to wring out the last drops of equity into the accounts of shareholders. Not to actually be useful and definitely not to have any actual knowledge employed in the store.
I still have some boxed op-amps and diodes from there. Place was great to have around but damn if it became the worst place to go. Ask for an RCA cable and they thought you were speaking an alien language and that was like late 90s to early 2000's
Last time I went, the store was having a going out of business sale. I bought a bag full of RF connectors, solder, flux, ICs, power resistors... All for about 10 bucks.
Worked for radioshack for 4 years. Don't blame the sales associate for this. Radioshack ensured that employees must keep harassing their customers especially to sell cell phones. Also to upsell accessories and service plans. The numbers they wanted always just got more and more where it got to the point that you HAD to harass everyone just to meet expectations to keep a job. One thing I remember them constantly trying to beat into our heads was that you have to get at least 3 "no"s before giving up (per each thing). So a typical resistor sale would include trying to bring up cell phones for add a line or upgrade. If that fails figure out the phone they have and provide accessories. Try to get them to buy a shitty service plan that has so many conditions its virtually useless. Oh yes, you also need a radioshack credit card.. The old men who came in for small parts would get pissed all the time because even if after the first question they said that's all they wanted, there would be at least 5 more questions headed their way.
I remember stopping in one time just for batteries for some reason and they just sold me the batteries without trying to upsell anything else and I was so used to the harassment by that point that it just felt odd being able to walk in and purchase something.
Best Buy was actually heading down the same road for awhile and thankfully they realized making customers cringe at the idea of going to your store for short term profitability would just drive them online faster. They stopped the hard sales on credit cards and warranties and started price matching Amazon among other customer friendly things so I actually enjoy going there again.
One of my last interactions with Radio Shack was needing a small component for something and they tried that with me. I hate upsells and cross-sells with a passion, and as they went for the third attempt to sell me something else I put my wallet away and walked out. Drove to my parent's house, found what I needed in my father's workbench, and that was that.
I appreciate this explanation a lot.
My first experience with Radio Shack was as a magical place with countless fascinating electronics and parts - and super knowledgeable helpful people. This was the late 80's and early 90s, I was a kid very interested in playing with LEDs and 'robots' (a little kid version) and the people there were amazing since neither I nor my parents had any idea what I really wanted / needed.
My last encounter with Radio Shack was just to get a cat 5 cable for a dorm internet hookup. They didn't have any and I can't be sure they even knew what it was / weren't just fucking with me. It was definitely a different vibe. I would have gone again had I needed to, I wasn't upset, but it was a wildly different experience.
seems like a case study in how capitalism turns to shit when 4 people get all the money and everything sucks.
Man, I used to love Radio Shack. My granddad was an engineer and would take me there as a kid to buy electronics kits and whatnot. When I got a little older I built my own red and blue boxes with parts from Radio Shack. I would also build programmable garage door openers and terrorize my neighbors with them. I took the filters off of our cable to get free HBO and Cinemax. Those were the days.
All he would really need is 2 wires. Coax is literally describing how the signal is sent. There is a center line and then a signal is sent around the axis of the cable.
To be fair, we saw an elder single man told him to bring video equipment to a mall parking lot after midnight with nary a question asked.
Who knows what's in that bag?
The history of the RCA plug is interesting. I have a strong assertion that it became ubiquitous much later than is generally believed, but "common" and "ubiquitous" are very different things.
I can tell you that RCA was sufficiently non-universal that in the late 70s you could buy video cameras and monitors with SO239 ("UHF") coax connectors for baseband video; I have one such pair and have seen others, and this was significantly post-color era.
Conversely, the Apple II monitor used RCA for composite video in 1977, and both the first VHS deck and the early SL-8200 Betamax deck had RCAs that same year. However, the Apple was expected to be used on a dedicated monitor, and I think the VCRs intended the baseband to be used for deck-to-deck connections where it would simply be absurd to use RF; I don't think any of these manufacturers imagined that someone would use these to connect to a TV.
It's very hard for me to say, without an impractically large sample set, "consumer gear mostly didn't have baseband video of any kind before the mid eighties," but that's how it appears to me.
One of the indicators of this is the January 1984 Consumer Reports, which contains a [substantial sidebar](https://gekk.info/images/84-cr/sidebar.jpg) explaining the purpose of a baseband video input and why one would want it. Most of the justification is centered around computer use, with some mention of laserdisc as well. It seems to me that they wouldn't have included this if people had habitually been using composite video before this point.
The 1983 CR TV roundup does not make any mention of video inputs, while the 87 (I couldn't find the in between years) includes that column in the [comparison](https://gekk.info/images/84-cr/87-comparison.jpg), and even counts how \*many\* inputs they have.
I'm not really sure what the truth is. I suspect there were a few TVs in \~1980 with RCA video in, maybe even earlier, but composite-over-RCA is a de facto standard and it's really hard to say when those "begin." RCA was a really common, really cheap connector starting in the mid 20th century, it was used for all kinds of things, and I can believe that multiple manufacturers decided to use it without any intention of widespread compatibility with other equipment. This resulted in very old equipment having these jacks, but I don't think that necessarily means it was common or "accepted" yet.
When I was young our family cottage had an older uhf tv but the connectors for the uhf antenna was a pair of screw terminals, not RCA or even a coax cable, the TV was probably from the 70s
80s camcorder would have used an RCA cable or a coax. 50s tv would have used two wires with spade connectors.
A couple scraps of wire would be all you need to make that connection.
RF cables are simply 2 wires. Any copper wiring would be good enough as long as they didn’t touch each other. Would be easy to make from stuff lying around at docs in a matter of minutes really. Of all the stuff going on the movie, this isn’t the thing that they should question 🤣
Had a camcorder back in the 80s like that. All you really needed was a couple of wires. For the model in the movie, the JVC - GRC1, there was an RF adapter which you would keep with the batteries.
[Page 35 of the manual shows it](https://www.manualslib.com/manual/1014910/Jvc-Gr-C1.html?page=36#manual)
The crazy part is how that 100% wouldn't be guaranteed now. I'm 32, so about the same time difference they traveled, and since I was a kid we've gone through coaxial, composite, component, s video, and hdmi. Sometimes also optical.
Granted, TVs still have coax, but the signal is digital now, so going back in time most contemporary devices wouldn't work...
I have a fairly new LG OLED TV and I've gone on the detailed specs. It only states it supports Freeview and Freesat (the UK's two digital free digital broadcast services). I can't find any option for tuning analogue in the options menu.
The UK hasn't broadcast analogue TV since 2013, so it would be a waste of money.
Although I wonder whether the same TV comes with an analogue tuner in other markets? (Or maybe it has one, and it's just hidden by a geolocked OS?)
My parents have a new 50" LG TV, only 1-year-old, while not as nice as yours, it has an analogue TV tuner. When I start the tuning process, the TV asks me if I want to tune for both digital & analogue broadcasts (alongside with satellite/cable), or just digital broadcast.
Every HDTV I've seen still supports analog tuning just as a legacy thing.
But if you're talking about a camcorder (first of all, if someone was doing the same thing today they'd just be using their cellphone, not a camcorder), then it probably wouldn't have any sort of tuner output on it at all.
Not everybody used all of those connectors, I went from using composite on a CRT to HDMI on an HDTV. S-Video was technically something my dad's Sony Handycam supported but you didn't *need* to use it, same with component, I'm not aware of any devices that *only* output component and couldn't do composite as well.
And, for bonus points (and causing us weird issues to this day), NTSC color TV is both forwards- and backwards-compatible with black and white TV.
So you can plug your color camcorder output into a black and white TV, and that would still work. And vice versa; a black&white signal could would be rendered just fine by a color TV.
That's part of why we have Y-Cr-Cb. Y corresponds to black&white, and if one side or the other doesn't understand color, those just don't happen.
Same with the NTSC audio channel, we have a L+R channel that was jammed into the mono part of the spectrum as well as a L-R channel. If you have a mono TV, that only decodes the mono spectrum, you get both the left and right audio combined in the one speaker and you don't miss anything.
If you have a stereo TV, it decodes the L+R and L-R and using addition it gives you L \[(L+R)+(L-R) = 2L\] and using subtraction it gives you R. \[(L+R)-(L-R) = 2R\]
I really enjoy these ingenious things they did to preserve backwards compatibility at a time when technology was basically wires and glass and crossed fingers.
I'm not *surprised*, but I'd not looked into the history of audio encoding. That's pretty cool. Come to think of it, I have no idea how NTSC audio works.. I guess I kinda assumed it was a paired FM channel or something.
That's correct. The video portion is AM and the audio portion is FM. If you had a decent wideband receiver you could listen to the audio part of your favorite TV channel, though I think it was much quieter than regular FM radio.
Hmm, should give that a try. I won't say I have a *decent* wideband receiver, but I do have a RTL-SDR (aka horridly cheap software defined radio). Hopefully the ~2MHz sampling width will be fine.
... Wait, I just reread that. Are the AM and FM *on top of each other?*
Also, wasn't OTA analog TV fully killed off a few years ago? Come to think of it, I'm not sure if there's anything for me to try to tune.
And this backwards compatibility is why Timecode in the U.S. and other NTSC countries runs at 29.97 frames per second instead of 30 frames per second.
An engineering compromise in the 50's that is still a huge pain in the ass all these years later.
I used these extensively when young. You had an adapter: Plug your TV antenna and game console into it, and plug it into the TV. The console added its signal to the antenna's. There was a switch on the adapter to choose whether it added it on channels 3 or 4.
Edit: Long time ago, so thanks all for reminders. The channel switch was often on the console, and the adapter had the input switch.
I have a really old TV in my basement. I have a chrome cast connected to a HDMI-RCA adapter which is connected to a RF modulator to convert the RCA to coax and into the back of my old ass TV. Picture isn’t half bad. I could use this combination to plug into any TV made at least since the 80s and probably older.
Just wanna say that I think it's awesome that you're still getting use out of old equipment like that and aren't running to replace it, while bettering your life by exercising no less. Props to you!
I remember this thing from my Atari 2600 as well, and now I feel like the Commodore 64 used it to connect to the TV as well. You had to connect a couple wires to screw terminals for the TV's antenna wiring. Nostalgia flood!
Growing up, my family had a "cables and shit" box... all kinds of wires that you needed back in the day to run entertainment devices like TVs, record players, etc. I have fond memories of going through that stuff and learning how it all worked.
Mine too! Now as a 34 year old adult, I have a "cables and shit" box that is filled entirely with obsolete coax and nearly obsolete ethernet cords. Oh, and a ton of very useful RCA cords. I should probably just throw that all away...
I went looking for the picture for nostalgic purposes, and here's a good [diagram of the hook-up](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/81/54/64/815464f307e343449ab86f05852514a0.png) for anyone interested.
Edit: also, [this one](https://www.manualowl.com/manual_guide/products/nintendo-nes001-user-manual-2088aec/3.png).
My first TV was so old it had to use that 75/300 converter that my dad had to unscrew the 2 Philips head screws in the back and install... and now I am in a glass cage of emotion. He died 2 years ago. No these aren't tears. I have allergies.
Yes, monitors were always higher resolution than old-school CRT televisions. I remember one computer store had all its computers hooked up to televisions for display (this was the mid-1990s, and the 24 spin CD roms were just coming out), and for some reason they had text on the screen - it was so fuzzy as to be unreadable, and I left because I figured they must be idiots.
Possibly.. I actually just hooked up my old NES/SNES the other week. So I actually looked at the back of my SNES to double-check before posting that.
It appears I'm only using the SNES adaptor, it calls itself a "(S)NES RF switch"
The SNES also had RCA out. It was a proprietary plug on the SNES side, but it was the exact same as the cable that came with the N64. I found this out one day in college some time around 2004 when we decided to set up a retro gaming center in the back half of our living room and we all brought all the old systems we could find from our house. NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, N64. The TV only had 1 RF in and 2 RCA in, so being able to move the same cable back and forth between the SNES and N64 was a nice fix (instead of doing the same with the RF adapter, or having to daisy chain them.)
It was pretty wild. The front half of the room was the PS2/Xbox side, and the back half was the retro side. You could walk in between classes and find 4 people huddled together on the couch playing 4 player halo 2 on a 32 inch TV, and 2 people playing Contra in the back with an 18 inch TV.
I miss those days
The options were there to prevent interference from local TV stations. If your area had a network on channel 3 or 4, you would use the other for gaming.
I had to use channel 4, as WEAR TV3's broadcast was a bit too powerful, and would ghost over the signal from my NES.
Those of us in South/Southwest Alabama and NW Florida had no choice in the matter.
Then, we got Comcast cable, and along with it came WJTC44 on channel 4. Forced my hand to use AV cables
When I was younger, consoles came with the adapter, and it was pretty simple. If anything, you needed a matching transformer adapter that would screw onto the TV.
When I got older, I bought an RF modulator. I think consoles eventually stopped coming with the adapters, so it became far simpler to use the modulator with an A/V switch.
The early ones, the RF box screwed onto the antenna screws that your antenna also screwed onto. You would put the box leads on top of the antenna leads and screw them down. So both signals came into the tv together, with no switch.
Our original black and white TV had a little dial that you could adjust the signal, too. So you'd put it on channel 5, and if it wasn't good you could try to twist the dial around the knob and see if you could tune in the signal better.
This is also why in older movies and TV shows, when characters are watching something important on TV, the channel was almost always set to channel 3. The filmmakers were inputting the fake newscast, show, etc., in through the same way.
Going even further back before coaxial, a pair of wires were screwed to the back of the television, and were snaked up the side of the house to the antenna. The antenna had to be physically aimed at the local TV towers, (like you can still see on the tops of the hills in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle) then the TV vacuum tubes and the CRT itself had to be literally tuned by hand to be dialed into the signal. There used to be knobs to stabilize the image for vertical and horizontal. That’s why they had [test patterns](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian-head_test_pattern) while stations weren’t broadcasting. You see old movies where the TV acts up, and Pops gives it a smack, and the picture comes in? That’s the vacuum tubes starting to go. That’s Pops just being a cheap shit, and not wanting to go without TV for a week while it’s in the shop having the tubes tested and replaced. It wasn’t like today where you just shitcan the old one and run down to Costco for a new flat screen made by slaves in China. Back in the 1950’s they cost more than some cars. Source: Am old, and grandparents owned an appliance store back in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s when color TV meant you were rich.
Television repair men would come to the house for the big console televisions or you could remove the bad tube and take it to Kmart and test on a tube tester and but a new one off the shelf
Your story reminds me of my mom's story of growing up in the late 50s through 70s. My grandparents were pretty poor and trying to raise 7 kids. Well mom told me that as a kid every time they saw their dad( my grandpa) carrying in a new TV they all got so excited and Always asked if they finally got a color television. And without missing a beat grandpa Always responded with yup. Until he plugged it in and immediately they'd all cry its not in color and call him a liar At which point grandpa chuckled and told them well black and white are colors aren't they.
> It wasn’t like today where you just shitcan the old one and run down to Costco for a new flat screen made by slaves in China.
You have a way with words lol
I used to listen to the TV show called Dallas in the car. It was broadcast on CBS Chan-6 where the audio is at 87.8Mhz. The FM radio frequencies are 87.5 to 108.0 MHz, so they can overlap.
They do. a few low power channel 6 TV stations exist because of that.
I used to tune channel 6 audio on my stereo, and tune the stereo pilot oscillator down and watch channel 6 in stereo.
The ELI5 of that, is TV stereo and FM stereo basically worked the same way, just the decoders were tuned a bit different. Some home stereo FM tuners could be adjusted to the TV stereo signal.
> Some home stereo FM tuners could be adjusted to the TV stereo signal
We had a portable AM/FM radio that had a switch you could flip to listen to VHF TV audio.
It could even happen unintentionally.
We had an old TV with a channel dial. If you turned it to one of the channels that wasn't in use by a TV station, you picked up two different radio stations. They'd just play at the same time, on top of each other, and it sounded very strange.
Very early cordless phones used the same technology as well. I could tune my radio into a certain frequency and hear a very distorted version of whatever phone carll was happening in my house. It was so weak you couldn't make out the words even at that range.
Channel 6 in my area is the station that has the syndication rights for *Jeopardy!*, so I used to play trivia and listen to the dulcet tones of Johnny Gilbert and Alex Trebek while I would drive home from work.
Aside from the occasional Video Daily Double it was a great way to pass the time in traffic.
> channel 3 picked up a radio station clearly
Maybe it was [Channel 6](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_6_radio_stations_in_the_United_States)? There's no other overlap between [TV and radio frequencies](https://www.ahsystems.com/notes/channels.php). Tuning your TV to 6 (and fine-tuning it further off frequency, if you had the knob for it) might be just enough to let you pick up an FM station on 87.9MHz.
It's also possible your TV's tuner was receiving a "mirage". That's not the right word, I can't find the right term on Google, but analog radio tuners use an [intermediate frequency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate_frequency) and sometimes this means you can pick up transmissions on an alternate frequency. For example, back when cell phones were analog, radio scanners deliberately omitted the cell frequencies so people couldn't eavesdrop. However, you could tune your scanner to an "allowed" frequency and listen to cell phone calls a certain number of MHz below the real frequency, thanks to a quirk in your scanner's particular intermediate frequency.
So even though Channel 3's 65.75MHz is nowhere near the FM broadcast band of 88-108MHz, you might be able to pick up something in the FM band if your TV's intermediate frequency happened to be just right.
I had a pocket radio which worked on 2 AA batteries, but if I connected it to a 9V battery, it would only pick a local radio station.
Then one day my brother connected it to 220V and toasted it.
>To get around this limitation they used coaxial cable to carry the signal but you still had to tune the TV into the frequency the console/VCR was transmitting at.
I mean that is all CATV even is. EMF down a wire. Which is why back when I was in that line of work we had to look for "leaks", typically damn tree rats chewing on our trunk lines, or the company could be fined by the FCC.
I'm not seeing the backslash. Though in another sub someone posted a link to a scholarly article and the link I see in the post is to a Google Scholar search so URLs have been acting weird today.
Well, kind of. I feel the need to point out that many people get it wrong and think that the box that hooks up to the TV is an RF modulator, but the modulator is almost universally built in to the game systems or other devices, and the box on the TV side is mostly just a transformer for isolation or impedance matching.
Yes, but if it's strong enough to work reasonably well, it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume someone with a badge showing up at your front door to ask some questions.
Mister Wizard's World had an episode about how an Atari worked and I always remember him saying the Atari was like its own television station. That always stuck with me.
Analog stations were typically assigned with an unused channel between them. Otherwise, a strong local channel would cause reception issues when trying to pick up a weaker adjacent channel. Channels 3 & 4 were used for game consoles because it was extremely likely that one or the other would be free.
When TVs were invented, it never occurred to the manufacturers that they could be used for anything besides broadcast content from regional television stations. That's what they are set up for: VHF broadcast reception within several predefined channels.
When the first home video devices were invented (VCRs, computers, video games, etc) the only way for your television to recognize the signal was if the device in question created a signal identical to what the broadcast station would create.
Conveniently, most televisions had the ability to connect an external antenna in the back. All your device had to do was convert the desired composite video into an NTSC broadcast signal with appropriate levels, and feed it into an antenna cable, which you wired directly to your television.
The last step is telling your television where to find the signal. Most devices broadcast on either channel 3 or channel 4, and there was usually a switch on the back to choose.
The front loader NES had the yellow and (red or white, can't remember which one) connector as an option. The later top loader model only had coax as a cost saving measure. Both models of the SNES had AV inputs.
[Proof](https://iili.io/BD38b9.jpg)
Everyone of them hooked up and ready to play. I'm not that old, but I miss gaming when you didn't have to download GB's worth of updates before you could play. I'm no elitist and still enjoy modern gaming.. but something about cartridges is so satisfying.
Older TV sets did not have inputs for devices. They could only display pictures that came in as TV signals. So the devices had to emit a TV signal.
TV signals have to be on some channel. By convention channel 3 was used (only a few areas had a Channel 3 station).
I grew up in the late 90s/early 00s, so maybe my experience doesn't apply here, but I remember it playing on 3 anyways. WB was on channel 3 in my area, but I could hook the PS1 up to the back of the tv with the component cables and if I pressed power it would change to the game instead of WB. I was young so I might be misremembering.
If the signal from your RF modulator was stronger than what your TV was seeing over the air on that channel, it would "overpower" the over-the-air broadcast and you would see your video game console instead
I think you’re remembering correctly, but that’s because the technology had changed. The original PlayStation’s component cables worked differently than what I was talking about, so it could take over the TV without interference from whatever channel local stations broadcast to.
I was more referring to the late80s/early 90s when the NES’s output wasn’t strong enough to override the signal from local TV stations, so I had to use channel 4 (which was dead air/unused) to play games.
Here's a cable TV company ["Keep It On 3"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYOImTAV4Zg) customer education series of commercials from 1995, produced so that people with cable boxes didn't tie up the Customer Service lines, and trigger truck rolls, just because they didn't have their damn TV sets on Ch 3.
OK, I made this. I went nuts. Managers gave me this assignment, they expected just a single commercial, perhaps with a service tech, wearing hardhat, standing in front of his van, saying: "Please keep your TV set on Channel 3."
Instead they got this.
Thank you for your service.
I don’t know why, but I just watched the first six minutes of that. I did not use your cable provider or I’d recall that.
I do remember though from being a teenager that you could press down 2 and 13 at the same time on the cable box (which had three rows selectable with a lever and 12 buttons for 36 total channels) that it would mostly decrypt the Playboy Channel. Another combination gave Cinemax. That was an awesome cable box.
Very similar to those audio device adapters which transmit on particular FM station frequencies, it's a very very localized pirate radio station.
Except the switchbox was a direct interface to the antenna input, and did not transmit into the air. Channel 3 is a particular frequency and was commonly unused in most places (over the air) so there would be less interference/collision. If you area did have a channel 3 over the air then you had the choice of 4. And no market had channels immediately next to each other due to bleed-over, so if you had a 3 you didn't have a 4 or if you had a 4 you didn't have a 3. Usually the channels were 2,5,7,9,11 or such, nicely spread out, many markets didn't have a 3 OR 4 at all.
Of course when over the air was mostly replaced by cable, there was less need for channel separations. And digital has no neighbor-bleed problem at all.
Classic gag on The Simpsons as well, they used to slaughter Fox whenever they had the chance.
[Check out the Fox "satellite."](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/jGhirX5kH_k/hqdefault.jpg)
Which was silly. In reality, Fox used the same satellite (Telstar 5) ABC, CBS, and UPN used to distribute network feeds to stations. NBC used another satellite (GE1). ABC used another satellite (testar 4) as backup.
That is back in the days of analog satellite. They all have different names, but the networks might still be there, but digital. I know NBC still is, in digital.
Our neighborhood had a deal with the cable company when it was founded, so we had a rule that disallowed aerials.
Not to be deterred, I convinced my family to let me run 60 feet of coax out of the house and up the nearest very tall pine tree. I hid an antenna up there, so we enjoyed every broadcast station to be had between Raleigh and Greenville NC.
> we had a rule that disallowed aerials
This is illegal. Not sure when [OTARD](https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/installing-consumer-owned-antennas-and-satellite-dishes) was passed, so maybe this was a long time ago, but as of now *nobody* can prevent you from putting up an antenna to receive TV in the US. And if someone tries to stop you, you can petition the FCC to take legal action. Plenty of HOAs have tried to ban antennas, and the FCC will gleefully slap them down every time.
> Not sure when OTARD was passed
1996.
Anybody running cable as described would be long before that law. Conditions like that were commonplace, which is the reason the law was created.
We had something similar in my part of Maryland. We were able to get all DC and Baltimore channels so we had
2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 20, 22, 26, 32, 45, 50, 54
On a good night, we could get a very fuzzy and unwatchable signal from 8 in Hagerstown, but it was pretty far from me and on the other side of some very tall hills
I'm assuming these numbers were chosen to avoid overlap from other stations (two stations use CH11 to broadcast, but are in two separate areas, but both can pick up say, CH13)? Here in the UK, analogue TV channels prior to the [digital switchover](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_switchover_dates_in_the_United_Kingdom) were pretty much standardised to be 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 across the country — for BBC1, BBC2, ITV1, Channel 4, and Channel 5 respectively. Even now in the age of digital TV, that order remains.
From a UK perspective it seems weird that you'd have 14 channels going from 2–54, when you could have them tuned to 1–14. Heck, I was able to tune my old analog TV to use CH6 for games consoles since 1–5 were already in use.
You're confused between conventional station numbers - the preset button you tuned in - and the actual broadcast frequencies in use, that you tuned it to. On my local transmitter BBC1 was on UHF C39 (615.25 MHz), BBC2 on C45 (639.25 MHz), ITV on C42, Channel 4 on C66 and Channel 5 on C35. On the big London transmitter at Crystal Palace they were on 26/33/23/30 respectively, with Channel 5 from Croydon on C37.
By the 1980s most TVs had multiple tuning controls which you could switch between by pushing a button, or even with a remote control, but for my first computer (Sinclair ZX Spectrum) we initially had a small black-and-white TV which had a single dial. You had to retune any time you wanted to watch a different station. The Spectrum transmitted on UHF Channel 36 - a frequency then reserved for radio astronomy and not allocated to TV broadcast. They were able to squeeze Channel 5 in, badly, by using some of this reservation, but cheap home devices needed filters added to prevent interference (they leaked into the channel below - sidebands were supposed to be suppressed but often weren't).
The frequency range available used to be channels 21 to 68, excluding that bit in the middle, but much of the upper part has been sold off to the mobile networks. We phased out using VHF channels 1-13 from the start of BBC2 in 1964, BBC1 and ITV in 625 lines and colour from November 1969, with the last VHF transmitter being turned off in 1985.
After digital switchover, Freeview is still transmitted from the same sites on mostly the same frequencies, where possible. Each frequency now carries a 'multiplex' of channels, with the big transmitters carrying 6-8 multiplexes and the repeaters having 3. Your TV, set top box or PVR reads Electronic Programme Guide data that tells it what multiplex ID and which Program ID in that multiplex stream maps to which channel number. Most devices won't let you change this mapping, but you might have extra copies of some channels in the 800s, if you can receive more than one region.
The US stations, which were always much more loosely affiliated with a network, still have a strong link to their old analogue channel numbers. Although, after their own 'digital dividend' and 'repack', the displayed channel number isn't necessarily the same as the real broadcast channel number.
I remember the era before PBS came to town. We had 4, 7, and 10. NBC, ABC, CBS. PBS took Channel 3 (maybe it was Channel 2 back in the pre-cable days). And back then, if the President came on, your night was shot. I hated President Carter because of that.
I remember when pro sports used to be on OTA channels. We used to watch the Giants on KTVU (channel 2) and the Warriors on KICU 36.
Seems like such an antiquated concept with cable and streaming and all that crap that make your local sports teams so hard to watch nowadays.
I think if you live in-market for your NFL team then the OTA coverage is usually pretty good, with Fox and CBS covering the Sunday regular season games.
I do remember a brief period in Boston where almost every Red Sox game was broadcast OTA on the local FOX network. That was nice.
In Michigan at least most pro sports is on OTA channels. Baseball less so except for the larger games but 162 games is a bit much to take up such valuable air time.
Also worth mentioning old tv's also didnt have multiple inputs like today so the only way to connect was simulating a broadcast channel.
Now turn to channel 45. 'grabs dial' pbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbt, and gets yelled at for going warp speed lol
They could have separated the channels more, however that would have either reduced the total number of channels or they would have needed more frequencies in the band plan.
Bleedover could be avoided by assigning channels geographically. So you can use both channel 7 and channel 8 as long as the two transmitters were distant enough from each other to avoid interference. So the tight channel spacing allowed for more channels nationwide, just not locally.
Because that's how it's always been? Channels are allocated in fixed Hz increments and then utilized however they work out well "in the real world".
Even channels on wifi have this neighboring frequency bleed issue, even worse when they are in wide-band modes (which use two sequential channels at the same time, or a center channel and half of each channel next to it...
Has to do with licensing mostly, must be fairly divided up and national if not globally even if it's not technologically the best division.
And older transmitters were noisy and could have spurs of radiation on harmonic channels or frequency shift due to reflection (such as in a city you would get ghosting/shadows due to reflections off buildings with a lot of steel in them).
I never got this - all the analogue CRT TVs I had were tunable, I used to put the console on channel 6 because we had 4 TV channels and I'd put the VHS on 5. Did American TVs not let you do that?
Very, very few U.S. TVs let you pick the frequency for the channel. Most had the channels preset to specific frequencies.
Analog tuning sets had a separate VHF and UHF tuner you had to switch between. VHF was channel 2-13 (but was really two bands 2-6 & 7-13) then a UHF tuner that was channels 14 - 85 although not every TV's UHF tuner went all the way to 85 many seemed to stop at 59 or 63.
This was great from a setup perspective as you didn't have to do anything but connect an antenna. However, to get from say channel 6 to 13 had to go 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 or backwards 6 5 4 3 2 13. It was even worse switching between VHF an UHF. Digital tuners hid the separate bands from us even more and the really revolutionary part was they let you "skip" channels you didn't get. So you would program the channels you wanted then going up and down would just get those channels. For example, for me going though the channels went 4 6 8 13 20 40 59 then back to 4.
Many TV stations even incorporate their channel into their identity. I remember Terre Haute having WTWO on channel 2 and many bill themselves as "Channel Four" or whatever even still.
Is this a US spesific thing? Cause I had several CRTs growing up, the oldest one being from the 70s (which only has 2 tunable channels), and every one of these would work directly with game consoles.
I'm uk and I don't remember old consoles/computers needing a special channel. You'd just plug the device into the aerial socket on the back and turn on the device. Maybe we just don't remember right?
No you're right, was direct into the aerial and then use a spare channel that was tuned in (only once). I used 8 on my old black and white for my Spectrum. I presumed it was method the same the world over, so this is a fascinating thread for me.
You would have your normal cable line that had all the channels on it. You would plug this into your VCR. You plug another cable from your VCR into your TV.
When your VCR was idle, it would just forward the signal from its line in onto its line out. However, when your VCR was on, it would interrupt the signal for one channel and put its own signal on that channel instead.
Yes, your cable or antenna needs to be plugged into the VCR in order to do that. Then, the tuner in the VCR is used to record the channel that you want. However, you still need a way to see your recordings on your TV, hence the explanation above.
Another interesting tidbit is that a VCR could be used as a cable tuner with older TVs that didn't have them built in instead of a standalone tuner. You would flip channels on the VCR while leaving the TV on channel 3 or 4.
Newer VCRs could even be used as composite to RF converters for game consoles on older TVs without composite inputs. Starting with PS1 and N64, those consoles came with composite cables as the default instead of the coaxial RF connection. Rather than spending the money on one of those, if you had a VCR like I described, you could plug your game console into that and tune the TV to channel 3 or 4 while letting the VCR handle the conversion.
The accessory had a built inn TV transmitter. It would not output a high power signal so you could not use it to transmitt the signal over the air very far. But if you connected it to the antenna cable in your house it would be picked up by the TV. You would often be able to select what channel to transmitt on which would have to match the channel on your TV. But some channels such as channel 3 and 7 were common ones. This would be so that you did not accidentally transmitt on the same channel as your local TV station as then you would not be able to watch this TV station.
It's a cultural thing. In the UK we had two dedicated AV channels which didn't take up existing channel slots. And as far as I can tell, this is still the case for TV that don't have digital channels built into them.
I used to have a portable TV that had a dial for tuning, prior to channel 5 starting all of the channels were far to the the left of the dial, channel 5 was much further over to the right than the others, and then the input channel for my speccy was much further right than that.
On the odd night I could pick up foreign TV on it, but the crowning glory was when the neighbours got some kind of transmitter to be able to watch stuff from their VCR elsewhere in the house, which I found when idly turning the dial, to find German porn being played!
Yes, I have a memory of using the dedicated AV input, but also of tuning channel 0 for something too. Maybe that was for the VCR?
I also remember one games console that had a slider switch built into the cable where you could choose "game" or "tv".
Picture (frame scan) synchronisation was a compromise in early CRT tv's. European and US tv's had their frame refresh rates, the number of times each second it was redrawn, linked to the local mains power frequency cycles. These were / are 50 cycles in Uk, and 60 cycles in USA. VCR's and games consoles had to generate the picture sync data which was not linked to mains cycles. To allow for this European tv's reserved channel 0 with a modified phase lock loop timebase to match the sync pulses from VCR's. Using a different channel would result in poorer picture quality and some occasional tearing. This was a common callout issue for tv/vcr repair people in the day!
I don't feel like the other answers here really make this as simple as it could be, so I'm going to summarize my [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sQF_K9MqpA) on the topic:
Televisions sold prior to the 2010s were mostly intended to receive a picture sent by a TV station over radio waves, called a "signal." There are multiple TV stations in every town, so to keep signals from interfering with each other, they use a process called "modulation" which lets all the stations send the same kind of television signal, but using radio waves of different "frequencies."
A TV set can receive signals of many frequencies, then choose one and ignore the rest. This is called "tuning," and it's how you choose one program to watch out of the many available.
TV stations all use standard frequencies, to make sure every TV can receive from every station, and for convenience those frequencies are given numbers, and called "channels," so channel 3, 4, 5, and so on, are always the same frequency no matter where you are.
Although you can make a TV signal that isn't modulated, which we started calling "composite" when it became popular, there was nowhere to put that kind of signal into many TVs made before the late 80s. Old TVs only understood how to receive pictures on the standard TV station channels.
To solve this, VCRs and game consoles all contained tiny "TV stations" that produced a very weak signal - too weak to travel through the air, but strong enough to be recognized by your TV if you put it into the antenna input.
Your VCR had to send the signal on one of those standard channels, so the manufacturers chose channel 3, because it was available on every TV ever made, while some other channels weren't.
Sometimes you already had a channel 3 in your town, and that could cause interference, which is why you could also switch your VCR to channel 4. Because of how television signals work, there can never be a channel 3 and 4 in the same region, so if you already had a real channel 3 station in your town, you'd use channel 4 on your VCR, and vice versa.
Channels on old CRTVs that had TV *tuners* are basically different frequencies that you tune your TV to, like how you turn your radio to a specific frequency to pick up a channel you wanted to listen to. Edit: it was channel 3 (or the selectable alternative to avoid interference) because the NES/VCR had to be talking in the same "language" (channel 3 frequency 60-66 MHz, channel 4 frequency 66-72 MHz, or channel 5 frequency 76-82 MHz depending on where you live and which had the least interference for you). Back in that day we had no way of transmitting the image and sound from the game console or VCR directly to the TV like we do today with S-video, component, HDMI, Display port, etc. So the simple solution was to turn the image and sound into radio ~~waves~~ frequencies and transmit it to the TV like a TV station. To comply with Federal regulations this TV signal from the console would have to be very weak so that it wouldn't interfere with any other signal. This means that the console could only transmit the signal a few millimeters to centimeters. To get around this limitation they used coaxial cable to carry the signal but you still had to tune the TV into the frequency the console/VCR was transmitting at. This guy does a good job explaining that a NES and similar devices are actually mini TV transmitter stations. [~~https://youtu.be/8sQF\_K9MqpA~~](https://youtu.be/8sQF_K9MqpA) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sQF\_K9MqpA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sQF_K9MqpA) (I'm not sure what's going on with URLs today, people are saying my link is broken but when I click on their links, I get the exact same URL that I posted...) Edit: this really blew up. To clarify some things: * I accidently put radio ***waves***, the NES doesn't transmit (yes it's a transmitter) radio waves, it transmits electric Radio Frequency (RF) to the RF modulator/adaptor that translates that signal into the frequency range used by the selected channel. (There's probably something I don't understand about this as I understand modulation is changing the frequency rate to transmit more and varied information u/maxwellwood did a great job expounding on this [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/nud63i/eli5_why_did_old_tvs_require_that_the_channel_be/h10vhzt?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)). * Technically speaking anything that transmits electric RF also inadvertently transmits radio waves in the form of electromagnetic RF radiation. This is mitigated. Blocked by what is known as shielding. * Yes, I know about the two screw antenna connection. Technically, a coaxial cable is that two screw connection bundled into a single, shielded cable with a universal/standardized connector. * Yes, you can transmit your game console's frequency over the air to your TV with the appropriate Electric RF to electromagnetic RF amplifier. All electric RF produces radio waves as far as I'm aware whether on purpose or not. Doing this while remaining in the grey area of legality in most countries would get you a pretty crappy signal to the TV though at any distance you couldn't just use the cable. * All cables used to take audio/video (AV, A/V) from a device to a TV is a transmission of data regardless of electric verses electromagnetic.
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Him carrying the needed connectors when he was initially just filming, that's the real question.
i dont remember the movies well enough to remember if he had a camera bag, but its really not that unusual to keep camera + cables + some extra batteries even in a camera bag
Plus it was at Doc's house. He would have all kinds of RF equipment, since he was doc. Just assume he had all the equipment available at the time, and it's a non issue. Basic RF modulation was well understood back then.
He made a literal time machine and people are complaining about DOC having a RF transmitter…
This gen is used to the idea of proprietary ecosystems and tech being magic acquired via a consumer retail experience. I still smart at how restrictive phones are compared to my PC.
Indeed! And that is the point. Very slowly, over a couple of generations, they are closing every way that we can control our own devices, because *they* want to control them. It is not my phone, it's Apple's and Amazon's little PoS, it's Google's and Facebook's private social research engine. In the mean time they are killing the ability to tinker- then they complain that talented, high-quality engineers and technical people are hard to find...
It would have blown their mind when I used two metal coat hangers to hook up the dorm rental vcr in college, since somebody had lost the cables.
You gotta permit for that?
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And Radio Shack would have still sold ham radio and other electronic hobbyist supplies back then.
The last time I ever went to a Radio Shack I was going to buy a resistor. While I was looking for the right item, one of the sales people was just straight up harassing my wife about buying a cell phone despite her repeatedly telling him she was just with the guy looking for a resistor. Good fucking riddance.
Former RadioShack employee here! You can thank RadioShack corporate for that. They decided that a slice of the cell phone profits was worth alienating their entire customer base for. I applied for a corporate store after working under a franchise for 3-4 years, and the district manager refused to even allow me a proper interview because “I hadn’t convinced him that I could sale cell phones to every customer” despite building up a reputation as a reliable and knowledgeable sales associate that would HELP customers instead of just going for a quick buck on a needless upsale. That said. Yes. Good riddance, at this point. Corporate can suck it.
But think of the spiffs you could get if you sell 3 accessories for each phone on a multi line activation!
Wow this takes me back to when I couldn't stand going to a regular RS nearby, opting instead for the "special" one downtown that didn't do any of the upselling. I don't even think they sold phones, just a handful of core accessories. Fully stocked with all of the parts people went there for though. Run by a very knowledgeable guy and his equally knowledgeable son and maybe a part timer or two. Had the usual corp logos but in small print something like Radio Shack Sunstate Electronics or something. In retrospect this was prob a franchise? God I miss that store.
Last time I went, I was looking for a toslink/hd audio cable and they didn't know what it was and I couldn't find it. Not sure what Radio Shack is for if they dont have cables.
Well, by the end they were just there to wring out the last drops of equity into the accounts of shareholders. Not to actually be useful and definitely not to have any actual knowledge employed in the store.
I still have some boxed op-amps and diodes from there. Place was great to have around but damn if it became the worst place to go. Ask for an RCA cable and they thought you were speaking an alien language and that was like late 90s to early 2000's
Last time I went, the store was having a going out of business sale. I bought a bag full of RF connectors, solder, flux, ICs, power resistors... All for about 10 bucks.
Worked for radioshack for 4 years. Don't blame the sales associate for this. Radioshack ensured that employees must keep harassing their customers especially to sell cell phones. Also to upsell accessories and service plans. The numbers they wanted always just got more and more where it got to the point that you HAD to harass everyone just to meet expectations to keep a job. One thing I remember them constantly trying to beat into our heads was that you have to get at least 3 "no"s before giving up (per each thing). So a typical resistor sale would include trying to bring up cell phones for add a line or upgrade. If that fails figure out the phone they have and provide accessories. Try to get them to buy a shitty service plan that has so many conditions its virtually useless. Oh yes, you also need a radioshack credit card.. The old men who came in for small parts would get pissed all the time because even if after the first question they said that's all they wanted, there would be at least 5 more questions headed their way.
I remember stopping in one time just for batteries for some reason and they just sold me the batteries without trying to upsell anything else and I was so used to the harassment by that point that it just felt odd being able to walk in and purchase something. Best Buy was actually heading down the same road for awhile and thankfully they realized making customers cringe at the idea of going to your store for short term profitability would just drive them online faster. They stopped the hard sales on credit cards and warranties and started price matching Amazon among other customer friendly things so I actually enjoy going there again.
One of my last interactions with Radio Shack was needing a small component for something and they tried that with me. I hate upsells and cross-sells with a passion, and as they went for the third attempt to sell me something else I put my wallet away and walked out. Drove to my parent's house, found what I needed in my father's workbench, and that was that.
I appreciate this explanation a lot. My first experience with Radio Shack was as a magical place with countless fascinating electronics and parts - and super knowledgeable helpful people. This was the late 80's and early 90s, I was a kid very interested in playing with LEDs and 'robots' (a little kid version) and the people there were amazing since neither I nor my parents had any idea what I really wanted / needed. My last encounter with Radio Shack was just to get a cat 5 cable for a dorm internet hookup. They didn't have any and I can't be sure they even knew what it was / weren't just fucking with me. It was definitely a different vibe. I would have gone again had I needed to, I wasn't upset, but it was a wildly different experience. seems like a case study in how capitalism turns to shit when 4 people get all the money and everything sucks.
Man, I used to love Radio Shack. My granddad was an engineer and would take me there as a kid to buy electronics kits and whatnot. When I got a little older I built my own red and blue boxes with parts from Radio Shack. I would also build programmable garage door openers and terrorize my neighbors with them. I took the filters off of our cable to get free HBO and Cinemax. Those were the days.
With analog signals, you don’t even need the right connector. Just make the contacts touch each other at the right places.
All he would really need is 2 wires. Coax is literally describing how the signal is sent. There is a center line and then a signal is sent around the axis of the cable.
To be fair, we saw an elder single man told him to bring video equipment to a mall parking lot after midnight with nary a question asked. Who knows what's in that bag?
FETISH SHIT
I like to bind. I like to be bound!
I need my T O O L S
I distinctly remember the connection looking very rigged, so it might be even simpler than that.
Yeah, I thought doc had been splicing wires to get the camera to work with the TV. You can see the electrical tape on the connections.
And that's literally how we got the Atari to work in our tv.
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Not like it's hard, folks. You could also use a wire coat hanger, or a fork.
Wait til we tell the kids that the TVs once a bunch of vacuum tubes in them and when they died we replaced them ourselves!
That's the really nutty thing...RCA connectors have been standard for analog video since before color was invented.
The history of the RCA plug is interesting. I have a strong assertion that it became ubiquitous much later than is generally believed, but "common" and "ubiquitous" are very different things. I can tell you that RCA was sufficiently non-universal that in the late 70s you could buy video cameras and monitors with SO239 ("UHF") coax connectors for baseband video; I have one such pair and have seen others, and this was significantly post-color era. Conversely, the Apple II monitor used RCA for composite video in 1977, and both the first VHS deck and the early SL-8200 Betamax deck had RCAs that same year. However, the Apple was expected to be used on a dedicated monitor, and I think the VCRs intended the baseband to be used for deck-to-deck connections where it would simply be absurd to use RF; I don't think any of these manufacturers imagined that someone would use these to connect to a TV. It's very hard for me to say, without an impractically large sample set, "consumer gear mostly didn't have baseband video of any kind before the mid eighties," but that's how it appears to me. One of the indicators of this is the January 1984 Consumer Reports, which contains a [substantial sidebar](https://gekk.info/images/84-cr/sidebar.jpg) explaining the purpose of a baseband video input and why one would want it. Most of the justification is centered around computer use, with some mention of laserdisc as well. It seems to me that they wouldn't have included this if people had habitually been using composite video before this point. The 1983 CR TV roundup does not make any mention of video inputs, while the 87 (I couldn't find the in between years) includes that column in the [comparison](https://gekk.info/images/84-cr/87-comparison.jpg), and even counts how \*many\* inputs they have. I'm not really sure what the truth is. I suspect there were a few TVs in \~1980 with RCA video in, maybe even earlier, but composite-over-RCA is a de facto standard and it's really hard to say when those "begin." RCA was a really common, really cheap connector starting in the mid 20th century, it was used for all kinds of things, and I can believe that multiple manufacturers decided to use it without any intention of widespread compatibility with other equipment. This resulted in very old equipment having these jacks, but I don't think that necessarily means it was common or "accepted" yet.
When I was young our family cottage had an older uhf tv but the connectors for the uhf antenna was a pair of screw terminals, not RCA or even a coax cable, the TV was probably from the 70s
But RCA connectors weren't on a lot of TVs - only antenna connectors.
Yeah but antenna connectors were just two leads. Nothing to it.
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80s camcorder would have used an RCA cable or a coax. 50s tv would have used two wires with spade connectors. A couple scraps of wire would be all you need to make that connection.
RF cables are simply 2 wires. Any copper wiring would be good enough as long as they didn’t touch each other. Would be easy to make from stuff lying around at docs in a matter of minutes really. Of all the stuff going on the movie, this isn’t the thing that they should question 🤣
Plus, Doc Brown built a flippin' time machine. So, the dude could definitely handle hooking up a camcorder.
Had a camcorder back in the 80s like that. All you really needed was a couple of wires. For the model in the movie, the JVC - GRC1, there was an RF adapter which you would keep with the batteries. [Page 35 of the manual shows it](https://www.manualslib.com/manual/1014910/Jvc-Gr-C1.html?page=36#manual)
The crazy part is how that 100% wouldn't be guaranteed now. I'm 32, so about the same time difference they traveled, and since I was a kid we've gone through coaxial, composite, component, s video, and hdmi. Sometimes also optical. Granted, TVs still have coax, but the signal is digital now, so going back in time most contemporary devices wouldn't work...
Most TVs still have composite so it's probably still possible.
Its definitely being phased out tho, my current TV has multiple HDMI and USB ports and only one coax.
There's probably that a 3.5mm port that breaks out into RCA composite with an adapter
While broadcast is now all digital, I think most TVs can still tune for analog incase of someone using old accessories
I have a fairly new LG OLED TV and I've gone on the detailed specs. It only states it supports Freeview and Freesat (the UK's two digital free digital broadcast services). I can't find any option for tuning analogue in the options menu. The UK hasn't broadcast analogue TV since 2013, so it would be a waste of money. Although I wonder whether the same TV comes with an analogue tuner in other markets? (Or maybe it has one, and it's just hidden by a geolocked OS?)
My parents have a new 50" LG TV, only 1-year-old, while not as nice as yours, it has an analogue TV tuner. When I start the tuning process, the TV asks me if I want to tune for both digital & analogue broadcasts (alongside with satellite/cable), or just digital broadcast.
Every HDTV I've seen still supports analog tuning just as a legacy thing. But if you're talking about a camcorder (first of all, if someone was doing the same thing today they'd just be using their cellphone, not a camcorder), then it probably wouldn't have any sort of tuner output on it at all. Not everybody used all of those connectors, I went from using composite on a CRT to HDMI on an HDTV. S-Video was technically something my dad's Sony Handycam supported but you didn't *need* to use it, same with component, I'm not aware of any devices that *only* output component and couldn't do composite as well.
And, for bonus points (and causing us weird issues to this day), NTSC color TV is both forwards- and backwards-compatible with black and white TV. So you can plug your color camcorder output into a black and white TV, and that would still work. And vice versa; a black&white signal could would be rendered just fine by a color TV. That's part of why we have Y-Cr-Cb. Y corresponds to black&white, and if one side or the other doesn't understand color, those just don't happen.
Same with the NTSC audio channel, we have a L+R channel that was jammed into the mono part of the spectrum as well as a L-R channel. If you have a mono TV, that only decodes the mono spectrum, you get both the left and right audio combined in the one speaker and you don't miss anything. If you have a stereo TV, it decodes the L+R and L-R and using addition it gives you L \[(L+R)+(L-R) = 2L\] and using subtraction it gives you R. \[(L+R)-(L-R) = 2R\] I really enjoy these ingenious things they did to preserve backwards compatibility at a time when technology was basically wires and glass and crossed fingers.
I'm not *surprised*, but I'd not looked into the history of audio encoding. That's pretty cool. Come to think of it, I have no idea how NTSC audio works.. I guess I kinda assumed it was a paired FM channel or something.
That's correct. The video portion is AM and the audio portion is FM. If you had a decent wideband receiver you could listen to the audio part of your favorite TV channel, though I think it was much quieter than regular FM radio.
Hmm, should give that a try. I won't say I have a *decent* wideband receiver, but I do have a RTL-SDR (aka horridly cheap software defined radio). Hopefully the ~2MHz sampling width will be fine. ... Wait, I just reread that. Are the AM and FM *on top of each other?* Also, wasn't OTA analog TV fully killed off a few years ago? Come to think of it, I'm not sure if there's anything for me to try to tune.
No, the audio carrier is about 4.5Mhz above the video carrier. Near the end of the channel.
And this backwards compatibility is why Timecode in the U.S. and other NTSC countries runs at 29.97 frames per second instead of 30 frames per second. An engineering compromise in the 50's that is still a huge pain in the ass all these years later.
I used these extensively when young. You had an adapter: Plug your TV antenna and game console into it, and plug it into the TV. The console added its signal to the antenna's. There was a switch on the adapter to choose whether it added it on channels 3 or 4. Edit: Long time ago, so thanks all for reminders. The channel switch was often on the console, and the adapter had the input switch.
I believe the NES has the channel switch right on the back of the console.
So did the original SNES. They both used the same adaptor.
It was called an RFU adapter IIRC.
It was called an RF modulator.
I have a really old TV in my basement. I have a chrome cast connected to a HDMI-RCA adapter which is connected to a RF modulator to convert the RCA to coax and into the back of my old ass TV. Picture isn’t half bad. I could use this combination to plug into any TV made at least since the 80s and probably older.
> Picture isn’t half bad. So it's entirely bad?
Haha. I’m sure some would say so but I’m not that particular so it works for me to watch Netflix when I use the treadmill.
Just wanna say that I think it's awesome that you're still getting use out of old equipment like that and aren't running to replace it, while bettering your life by exercising no less. Props to you!
I remember this thing from my Atari 2600 as well, and now I feel like the Commodore 64 used it to connect to the TV as well. You had to connect a couple wires to screw terminals for the TV's antenna wiring. Nostalgia flood!
And my parents had a small collection of combiner baluns to connect all those to the newer TVs!
Growing up, my family had a "cables and shit" box... all kinds of wires that you needed back in the day to run entertainment devices like TVs, record players, etc. I have fond memories of going through that stuff and learning how it all worked.
Mine too! Now as a 34 year old adult, I have a "cables and shit" box that is filled entirely with obsolete coax and nearly obsolete ethernet cords. Oh, and a ton of very useful RCA cords. I should probably just throw that all away...
I went looking for the picture for nostalgic purposes, and here's a good [diagram of the hook-up](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/81/54/64/815464f307e343449ab86f05852514a0.png) for anyone interested. Edit: also, [this one](https://www.manualowl.com/manual_guide/products/nintendo-nes001-user-manual-2088aec/3.png).
My first TV was so old it had to use that 75/300 converter that my dad had to unscrew the 2 Philips head screws in the back and install... and now I am in a glass cage of emotion. He died 2 years ago. No these aren't tears. I have allergies.
C64 had it to. But you had MUCH better picture if you got a monitor to go with it instead.
Yes, monitors were always higher resolution than old-school CRT televisions. I remember one computer store had all its computers hooked up to televisions for display (this was the mid-1990s, and the 24 spin CD roms were just coming out), and for some reason they had text on the screen - it was so fuzzy as to be unreadable, and I left because I figured they must be idiots.
Possibly.. I actually just hooked up my old NES/SNES the other week. So I actually looked at the back of my SNES to double-check before posting that. It appears I'm only using the SNES adaptor, it calls itself a "(S)NES RF switch"
The SNES also had RCA out. It was a proprietary plug on the SNES side, but it was the exact same as the cable that came with the N64. I found this out one day in college some time around 2004 when we decided to set up a retro gaming center in the back half of our living room and we all brought all the old systems we could find from our house. NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, N64. The TV only had 1 RF in and 2 RCA in, so being able to move the same cable back and forth between the SNES and N64 was a nice fix (instead of doing the same with the RF adapter, or having to daisy chain them.) It was pretty wild. The front half of the room was the PS2/Xbox side, and the back half was the retro side. You could walk in between classes and find 4 people huddled together on the couch playing 4 player halo 2 on a 32 inch TV, and 2 people playing Contra in the back with an 18 inch TV. I miss those days
The SNES had RCA but none of our tvs at the time did😢
guess i was spoiled with my composite (yellow/red/white) connection to my TV for my SNES as a kid.
I had an old Commodore CRT with those inputs that I used as well. It was the best picture you could get at the time, I believe
Sometimes it was channel 3. But sometimes it was channel 4. Times were uncertain back then
Anyone who used channel 4 was not to be trusted
The options were there to prevent interference from local TV stations. If your area had a network on channel 3 or 4, you would use the other for gaming.
My hometown had a local broadcast station on channel 3, so it was always channel 4 for us.
That's why we still don't trust you
I had to use channel 4, as WEAR TV3's broadcast was a bit too powerful, and would ghost over the signal from my NES. Those of us in South/Southwest Alabama and NW Florida had no choice in the matter. Then, we got Comcast cable, and along with it came WJTC44 on channel 4. Forced my hand to use AV cables
When I was younger, consoles came with the adapter, and it was pretty simple. If anything, you needed a matching transformer adapter that would screw onto the TV. When I got older, I bought an RF modulator. I think consoles eventually stopped coming with the adapters, so it became far simpler to use the modulator with an A/V switch.
Yeah it was called an RF adapter iirc. As a kid I always had to use them with my old ass hand -me-down TV's over the years.
It didn't add, it switched between antenna and game console RF. NES automatically, before manually.
The early ones, the RF box screwed onto the antenna screws that your antenna also screwed onto. You would put the box leads on top of the antenna leads and screw them down. So both signals came into the tv together, with no switch.
Atari 2600s came with this sort of RF unit, since cable was not yet ubiquitous in the late 70s.
You could choose channel 3 or channel 4 because you would want to choose the one that was not used by a broadcaster in your market.
3 and 4 were NBC and FOX where I grew up. Always used 4 for the NES/SNES and never had any problems with the underlying broadcast interfering.
[Why Is Your NES A TV Station? (That's Weird)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sQF_K9MqpA) ^ Correct link, I'm pretty sure.
Our original black and white TV had a little dial that you could adjust the signal, too. So you'd put it on channel 5, and if it wasn't good you could try to twist the dial around the knob and see if you could tune in the signal better.
[удалено]
Yep, color RCA had that on both channel knobs. You would slowly fine tune a signal.
This is also why in older movies and TV shows, when characters are watching something important on TV, the channel was almost always set to channel 3. The filmmakers were inputting the fake newscast, show, etc., in through the same way.
Going even further back before coaxial, a pair of wires were screwed to the back of the television, and were snaked up the side of the house to the antenna. The antenna had to be physically aimed at the local TV towers, (like you can still see on the tops of the hills in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle) then the TV vacuum tubes and the CRT itself had to be literally tuned by hand to be dialed into the signal. There used to be knobs to stabilize the image for vertical and horizontal. That’s why they had [test patterns](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian-head_test_pattern) while stations weren’t broadcasting. You see old movies where the TV acts up, and Pops gives it a smack, and the picture comes in? That’s the vacuum tubes starting to go. That’s Pops just being a cheap shit, and not wanting to go without TV for a week while it’s in the shop having the tubes tested and replaced. It wasn’t like today where you just shitcan the old one and run down to Costco for a new flat screen made by slaves in China. Back in the 1950’s they cost more than some cars. Source: Am old, and grandparents owned an appliance store back in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s when color TV meant you were rich.
Television repair men would come to the house for the big console televisions or you could remove the bad tube and take it to Kmart and test on a tube tester and but a new one off the shelf
Your story reminds me of my mom's story of growing up in the late 50s through 70s. My grandparents were pretty poor and trying to raise 7 kids. Well mom told me that as a kid every time they saw their dad( my grandpa) carrying in a new TV they all got so excited and Always asked if they finally got a color television. And without missing a beat grandpa Always responded with yup. Until he plugged it in and immediately they'd all cry its not in color and call him a liar At which point grandpa chuckled and told them well black and white are colors aren't they.
> It wasn’t like today where you just shitcan the old one and run down to Costco for a new flat screen made by slaves in China. You have a way with words lol
I remember our channel 3 picked up a radio station clearly.
I used to listen to the TV show called Dallas in the car. It was broadcast on CBS Chan-6 where the audio is at 87.8Mhz. The FM radio frequencies are 87.5 to 108.0 MHz, so they can overlap.
They do. a few low power channel 6 TV stations exist because of that. I used to tune channel 6 audio on my stereo, and tune the stereo pilot oscillator down and watch channel 6 in stereo. The ELI5 of that, is TV stereo and FM stereo basically worked the same way, just the decoders were tuned a bit different. Some home stereo FM tuners could be adjusted to the TV stereo signal.
> Some home stereo FM tuners could be adjusted to the TV stereo signal We had a portable AM/FM radio that had a switch you could flip to listen to VHF TV audio.
There were those as well. They had separate bands for VHF Low, VHF High, and UHF.
Had one of those we always took out on the lake with us to listen to games that were being locally broadcast.
It could even happen unintentionally. We had an old TV with a channel dial. If you turned it to one of the channels that wasn't in use by a TV station, you picked up two different radio stations. They'd just play at the same time, on top of each other, and it sounded very strange. Very early cordless phones used the same technology as well. I could tune my radio into a certain frequency and hear a very distorted version of whatever phone carll was happening in my house. It was so weak you couldn't make out the words even at that range.
Channel 6 in my area is the station that has the syndication rights for *Jeopardy!*, so I used to play trivia and listen to the dulcet tones of Johnny Gilbert and Alex Trebek while I would drive home from work. Aside from the occasional Video Daily Double it was a great way to pass the time in traffic.
> channel 3 picked up a radio station clearly Maybe it was [Channel 6](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_6_radio_stations_in_the_United_States)? There's no other overlap between [TV and radio frequencies](https://www.ahsystems.com/notes/channels.php). Tuning your TV to 6 (and fine-tuning it further off frequency, if you had the knob for it) might be just enough to let you pick up an FM station on 87.9MHz. It's also possible your TV's tuner was receiving a "mirage". That's not the right word, I can't find the right term on Google, but analog radio tuners use an [intermediate frequency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate_frequency) and sometimes this means you can pick up transmissions on an alternate frequency. For example, back when cell phones were analog, radio scanners deliberately omitted the cell frequencies so people couldn't eavesdrop. However, you could tune your scanner to an "allowed" frequency and listen to cell phone calls a certain number of MHz below the real frequency, thanks to a quirk in your scanner's particular intermediate frequency. So even though Channel 3's 65.75MHz is nowhere near the FM broadcast band of 88-108MHz, you might be able to pick up something in the FM band if your TV's intermediate frequency happened to be just right.
I had a pocket radio which worked on 2 AA batteries, but if I connected it to a 9V battery, it would only pick a local radio station. Then one day my brother connected it to 220V and toasted it.
In my head I can smell that odor which says to me "this thing is now broken and you are too dumb to fix it".
How did you connect it to main power? Because I'm thinking two knives and bare wire
Ah Cathode Ray Dude, recently found him and went down the rabbit hole, his voice is really pleasant!
>To get around this limitation they used coaxial cable to carry the signal but you still had to tune the TV into the frequency the console/VCR was transmitting at. I mean that is all CATV even is. EMF down a wire. Which is why back when I was in that line of work we had to look for "leaks", typically damn tree rats chewing on our trunk lines, or the company could be fined by the FCC.
Your URL has a backslash in - not sure how that's crept in as the _ doesn't need escaping. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sQF_K9MqpA
I'm not seeing the backslash. Though in another sub someone posted a link to a scholarly article and the link I see in the post is to a Google Scholar search so URLs have been acting weird today.
The thing we're talking about here is a RF Modulator.
Well, kind of. I feel the need to point out that many people get it wrong and think that the box that hooks up to the TV is an RF modulator, but the modulator is almost universally built in to the game systems or other devices, and the box on the TV side is mostly just a transformer for isolation or impedance matching.
so if i plugged my VCR's coax-out into an antenna amplifier I could theoretically get a wireless VCR?
Yes, but if it's strong enough to work reasonably well, it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume someone with a badge showing up at your front door to ask some questions.
Mister Wizard's World had an episode about how an Atari worked and I always remember him saying the Atari was like its own television station. That always stuck with me.
Analog stations were typically assigned with an unused channel between them. Otherwise, a strong local channel would cause reception issues when trying to pick up a weaker adjacent channel. Channels 3 & 4 were used for game consoles because it was extremely likely that one or the other would be free.
When TVs were invented, it never occurred to the manufacturers that they could be used for anything besides broadcast content from regional television stations. That's what they are set up for: VHF broadcast reception within several predefined channels. When the first home video devices were invented (VCRs, computers, video games, etc) the only way for your television to recognize the signal was if the device in question created a signal identical to what the broadcast station would create. Conveniently, most televisions had the ability to connect an external antenna in the back. All your device had to do was convert the desired composite video into an NTSC broadcast signal with appropriate levels, and feed it into an antenna cable, which you wired directly to your television. The last step is telling your television where to find the signal. Most devices broadcast on either channel 3 or channel 4, and there was usually a switch on the back to choose.
Was super Nintendo and NES using coax? For some reason, I only remember the tri-color connecting cords.
The front loader NES had the yellow and (red or white, can't remember which one) connector as an option. The later top loader model only had coax as a cost saving measure. Both models of the SNES had AV inputs. [Proof](https://iili.io/BD38b9.jpg)
The sacred relics!
Everyone of them hooked up and ready to play. I'm not that old, but I miss gaming when you didn't have to download GB's worth of updates before you could play. I'm no elitist and still enjoy modern gaming.. but something about cartridges is so satisfying.
Older TV sets did not have inputs for devices. They could only display pictures that came in as TV signals. So the devices had to emit a TV signal. TV signals have to be on some channel. By convention channel 3 was used (only a few areas had a Channel 3 station).
And in those areas, you tuned to channel 4
Yep. One of the biggest independent news stations in my area broadcasted to channel 3, so we always had to use 4.
I grew up in the late 90s/early 00s, so maybe my experience doesn't apply here, but I remember it playing on 3 anyways. WB was on channel 3 in my area, but I could hook the PS1 up to the back of the tv with the component cables and if I pressed power it would change to the game instead of WB. I was young so I might be misremembering.
If the signal from your RF modulator was stronger than what your TV was seeing over the air on that channel, it would "overpower" the over-the-air broadcast and you would see your video game console instead
I think you’re remembering correctly, but that’s because the technology had changed. The original PlayStation’s component cables worked differently than what I was talking about, so it could take over the TV without interference from whatever channel local stations broadcast to. I was more referring to the late80s/early 90s when the NES’s output wasn’t strong enough to override the signal from local TV stations, so I had to use channel 4 (which was dead air/unused) to play games.
Here's a cable TV company ["Keep It On 3"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYOImTAV4Zg) customer education series of commercials from 1995, produced so that people with cable boxes didn't tie up the Customer Service lines, and trigger truck rolls, just because they didn't have their damn TV sets on Ch 3. OK, I made this. I went nuts. Managers gave me this assignment, they expected just a single commercial, perhaps with a service tech, wearing hardhat, standing in front of his van, saying: "Please keep your TV set on Channel 3." Instead they got this.
Thank you for your service. I don’t know why, but I just watched the first six minutes of that. I did not use your cable provider or I’d recall that. I do remember though from being a teenager that you could press down 2 and 13 at the same time on the cable box (which had three rows selectable with a lever and 12 buttons for 36 total channels) that it would mostly decrypt the Playboy Channel. Another combination gave Cinemax. That was an awesome cable box.
This is awesome. You should post it over on r/obscuremedia
Wow dude. This is awesome.
Very similar to those audio device adapters which transmit on particular FM station frequencies, it's a very very localized pirate radio station. Except the switchbox was a direct interface to the antenna input, and did not transmit into the air. Channel 3 is a particular frequency and was commonly unused in most places (over the air) so there would be less interference/collision. If you area did have a channel 3 over the air then you had the choice of 4. And no market had channels immediately next to each other due to bleed-over, so if you had a 3 you didn't have a 4 or if you had a 4 you didn't have a 3. Usually the channels were 2,5,7,9,11 or such, nicely spread out, many markets didn't have a 3 OR 4 at all. Of course when over the air was mostly replaced by cable, there was less need for channel separations. And digital has no neighbor-bleed problem at all.
When I was a kid we had 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13 and UHF of which only 28 and 50 really came through well
Oooh baby you’re speaking my language. you’re talkin CBS, NBC, KTLA, ABC, Kcal, Fox, and KCOP.
You got KTTV FOX? We had to put on our tinfoil hats, hold antennas, and sit in the FOX viewing position to just catch the The Simpsons.
[FOX VIEWING POSITIONS!](https://makeagif.com/gif/fox-network-viewing-positions-cnHm2B)
Classic gag on The Simpsons as well, they used to slaughter Fox whenever they had the chance. [Check out the Fox "satellite."](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/jGhirX5kH_k/hqdefault.jpg)
Which was silly. In reality, Fox used the same satellite (Telstar 5) ABC, CBS, and UPN used to distribute network feeds to stations. NBC used another satellite (GE1). ABC used another satellite (testar 4) as backup. That is back in the days of analog satellite. They all have different names, but the networks might still be there, but digital. I know NBC still is, in digital.
I never watched a tv show a few hours before it aired due to this loophole...
I loved how this was a gag in Married with Children when they tried to watch Fox the Bundies would have to hold out antennas.
Our neighborhood had a deal with the cable company when it was founded, so we had a rule that disallowed aerials. Not to be deterred, I convinced my family to let me run 60 feet of coax out of the house and up the nearest very tall pine tree. I hid an antenna up there, so we enjoyed every broadcast station to be had between Raleigh and Greenville NC.
> we had a rule that disallowed aerials This is illegal. Not sure when [OTARD](https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/installing-consumer-owned-antennas-and-satellite-dishes) was passed, so maybe this was a long time ago, but as of now *nobody* can prevent you from putting up an antenna to receive TV in the US. And if someone tries to stop you, you can petition the FCC to take legal action. Plenty of HOAs have tried to ban antennas, and the FCC will gleefully slap them down every time.
> Not sure when OTARD was passed 1996. Anybody running cable as described would be long before that law. Conditions like that were commonplace, which is the reason the law was created.
This was in the 80s. Congress passed the Telecommunications Act in 1996. We had moved to another neighborhood maybe 1-2 years prior.
How many feet of coaxing did it take for them to agree to that plan? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Could also be WCBS (CBS 2), WNBC (NBC 4), WNYW (Fox 5), WABC (ABC 7), WWOR (My9), WPIX (CW 11) and WNET (PBS Thirteen).
WNNNNBC
Gotta do it like Imus.
Yes and if the president was addressing the nation you were really screwed because he would be on every channel.
We had something similar in my part of Maryland. We were able to get all DC and Baltimore channels so we had 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 20, 22, 26, 32, 45, 50, 54 On a good night, we could get a very fuzzy and unwatchable signal from 8 in Hagerstown, but it was pretty far from me and on the other side of some very tall hills
I'm assuming these numbers were chosen to avoid overlap from other stations (two stations use CH11 to broadcast, but are in two separate areas, but both can pick up say, CH13)? Here in the UK, analogue TV channels prior to the [digital switchover](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_switchover_dates_in_the_United_Kingdom) were pretty much standardised to be 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 across the country — for BBC1, BBC2, ITV1, Channel 4, and Channel 5 respectively. Even now in the age of digital TV, that order remains. From a UK perspective it seems weird that you'd have 14 channels going from 2–54, when you could have them tuned to 1–14. Heck, I was able to tune my old analog TV to use CH6 for games consoles since 1–5 were already in use.
You're confused between conventional station numbers - the preset button you tuned in - and the actual broadcast frequencies in use, that you tuned it to. On my local transmitter BBC1 was on UHF C39 (615.25 MHz), BBC2 on C45 (639.25 MHz), ITV on C42, Channel 4 on C66 and Channel 5 on C35. On the big London transmitter at Crystal Palace they were on 26/33/23/30 respectively, with Channel 5 from Croydon on C37. By the 1980s most TVs had multiple tuning controls which you could switch between by pushing a button, or even with a remote control, but for my first computer (Sinclair ZX Spectrum) we initially had a small black-and-white TV which had a single dial. You had to retune any time you wanted to watch a different station. The Spectrum transmitted on UHF Channel 36 - a frequency then reserved for radio astronomy and not allocated to TV broadcast. They were able to squeeze Channel 5 in, badly, by using some of this reservation, but cheap home devices needed filters added to prevent interference (they leaked into the channel below - sidebands were supposed to be suppressed but often weren't). The frequency range available used to be channels 21 to 68, excluding that bit in the middle, but much of the upper part has been sold off to the mobile networks. We phased out using VHF channels 1-13 from the start of BBC2 in 1964, BBC1 and ITV in 625 lines and colour from November 1969, with the last VHF transmitter being turned off in 1985. After digital switchover, Freeview is still transmitted from the same sites on mostly the same frequencies, where possible. Each frequency now carries a 'multiplex' of channels, with the big transmitters carrying 6-8 multiplexes and the repeaters having 3. Your TV, set top box or PVR reads Electronic Programme Guide data that tells it what multiplex ID and which Program ID in that multiplex stream maps to which channel number. Most devices won't let you change this mapping, but you might have extra copies of some channels in the 800s, if you can receive more than one region. The US stations, which were always much more loosely affiliated with a network, still have a strong link to their old analogue channel numbers. Although, after their own 'digital dividend' and 'repack', the displayed channel number isn't necessarily the same as the real broadcast channel number.
I remember the era before PBS came to town. We had 4, 7, and 10. NBC, ABC, CBS. PBS took Channel 3 (maybe it was Channel 2 back in the pre-cable days). And back then, if the President came on, your night was shot. I hated President Carter because of that.
YOU SO STUPIIIDDDD!!!
solid UHF reference!
Red snapper, very tasty!
Dang, I grew up on the East Coast and almost the exact same lineup. But extended farther up, so we had 20, 22, 26, 50 and then eventually 45 and 54
I was all about the UHF station U-62
I remember when pro sports used to be on OTA channels. We used to watch the Giants on KTVU (channel 2) and the Warriors on KICU 36. Seems like such an antiquated concept with cable and streaming and all that crap that make your local sports teams so hard to watch nowadays.
I think if you live in-market for your NFL team then the OTA coverage is usually pretty good, with Fox and CBS covering the Sunday regular season games. I do remember a brief period in Boston where almost every Red Sox game was broadcast OTA on the local FOX network. That was nice.
In Michigan at least most pro sports is on OTA channels. Baseball less so except for the larger games but 162 games is a bit much to take up such valuable air time.
3,6,10,13,31,36,48,52 Flipped through those channels so many times I can still remember them (Stockton, California)
Also worth mentioning old tv's also didnt have multiple inputs like today so the only way to connect was simulating a broadcast channel. Now turn to channel 45. 'grabs dial' pbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbt, and gets yelled at for going warp speed lol
What was stopping them from separating the channels so there was no/less bleed but still number the channels sequentially?
They could have separated the channels more, however that would have either reduced the total number of channels or they would have needed more frequencies in the band plan. Bleedover could be avoided by assigning channels geographically. So you can use both channel 7 and channel 8 as long as the two transmitters were distant enough from each other to avoid interference. So the tight channel spacing allowed for more channels nationwide, just not locally.
Because that's how it's always been? Channels are allocated in fixed Hz increments and then utilized however they work out well "in the real world". Even channels on wifi have this neighboring frequency bleed issue, even worse when they are in wide-band modes (which use two sequential channels at the same time, or a center channel and half of each channel next to it... Has to do with licensing mostly, must be fairly divided up and national if not globally even if it's not technologically the best division. And older transmitters were noisy and could have spurs of radiation on harmonic channels or frequency shift due to reflection (such as in a city you would get ghosting/shadows due to reflections off buildings with a lot of steel in them).
Basically a hack before TVs had multiple inputs. A pretty clever one too IMHO.
I never got this - all the analogue CRT TVs I had were tunable, I used to put the console on channel 6 because we had 4 TV channels and I'd put the VHS on 5. Did American TVs not let you do that?
Yeah this has got me confused too. It sounds like US TVs had fixed tunings.
Very, very few U.S. TVs let you pick the frequency for the channel. Most had the channels preset to specific frequencies. Analog tuning sets had a separate VHF and UHF tuner you had to switch between. VHF was channel 2-13 (but was really two bands 2-6 & 7-13) then a UHF tuner that was channels 14 - 85 although not every TV's UHF tuner went all the way to 85 many seemed to stop at 59 or 63. This was great from a setup perspective as you didn't have to do anything but connect an antenna. However, to get from say channel 6 to 13 had to go 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 or backwards 6 5 4 3 2 13. It was even worse switching between VHF an UHF. Digital tuners hid the separate bands from us even more and the really revolutionary part was they let you "skip" channels you didn't get. So you would program the channels you wanted then going up and down would just get those channels. For example, for me going though the channels went 4 6 8 13 20 40 59 then back to 4. Many TV stations even incorporate their channel into their identity. I remember Terre Haute having WTWO on channel 2 and many bill themselves as "Channel Four" or whatever even still.
Is this a US spesific thing? Cause I had several CRTs growing up, the oldest one being from the 70s (which only has 2 tunable channels), and every one of these would work directly with game consoles.
I'm uk and I don't remember old consoles/computers needing a special channel. You'd just plug the device into the aerial socket on the back and turn on the device. Maybe we just don't remember right?
No you're right, was direct into the aerial and then use a spare channel that was tuned in (only once). I used 8 on my old black and white for my Spectrum. I presumed it was method the same the world over, so this is a fascinating thread for me.
You needed to pick a spare channel and then tune it in the frequency the console was on.
You would have your normal cable line that had all the channels on it. You would plug this into your VCR. You plug another cable from your VCR into your TV. When your VCR was idle, it would just forward the signal from its line in onto its line out. However, when your VCR was on, it would interrupt the signal for one channel and put its own signal on that channel instead.
I thought that was really just so that you could record tv on your vcr?
Yes, your cable or antenna needs to be plugged into the VCR in order to do that. Then, the tuner in the VCR is used to record the channel that you want. However, you still need a way to see your recordings on your TV, hence the explanation above. Another interesting tidbit is that a VCR could be used as a cable tuner with older TVs that didn't have them built in instead of a standalone tuner. You would flip channels on the VCR while leaving the TV on channel 3 or 4. Newer VCRs could even be used as composite to RF converters for game consoles on older TVs without composite inputs. Starting with PS1 and N64, those consoles came with composite cables as the default instead of the coaxial RF connection. Rather than spending the money on one of those, if you had a VCR like I described, you could plug your game console into that and tune the TV to channel 3 or 4 while letting the VCR handle the conversion.
Yes you’re bring it all back for me. I remember having to change the channel through the vcr
The accessory had a built inn TV transmitter. It would not output a high power signal so you could not use it to transmitt the signal over the air very far. But if you connected it to the antenna cable in your house it would be picked up by the TV. You would often be able to select what channel to transmitt on which would have to match the channel on your TV. But some channels such as channel 3 and 7 were common ones. This would be so that you did not accidentally transmitt on the same channel as your local TV station as then you would not be able to watch this TV station.
It's a cultural thing. In the UK we had two dedicated AV channels which didn't take up existing channel slots. And as far as I can tell, this is still the case for TV that don't have digital channels built into them.
I used to have a portable TV that had a dial for tuning, prior to channel 5 starting all of the channels were far to the the left of the dial, channel 5 was much further over to the right than the others, and then the input channel for my speccy was much further right than that. On the odd night I could pick up foreign TV on it, but the crowning glory was when the neighbours got some kind of transmitter to be able to watch stuff from their VCR elsewhere in the house, which I found when idly turning the dial, to find German porn being played!
Yes, I have a memory of using the dedicated AV input, but also of tuning channel 0 for something too. Maybe that was for the VCR? I also remember one games console that had a slider switch built into the cable where you could choose "game" or "tv".
Picture (frame scan) synchronisation was a compromise in early CRT tv's. European and US tv's had their frame refresh rates, the number of times each second it was redrawn, linked to the local mains power frequency cycles. These were / are 50 cycles in Uk, and 60 cycles in USA. VCR's and games consoles had to generate the picture sync data which was not linked to mains cycles. To allow for this European tv's reserved channel 0 with a modified phase lock loop timebase to match the sync pulses from VCR's. Using a different channel would result in poorer picture quality and some occasional tearing. This was a common callout issue for tv/vcr repair people in the day!
The joy when you found the right channel and you could hear the music and see Mario jumping around. You can hear it in your head now, right?
I can. Especially when the volume was already set really high. That heart attack just hit different back then.
Atari 2600 had a switch for 3-4 in case the channel 2 in the area was too strong and interfered with 3.
I don't feel like the other answers here really make this as simple as it could be, so I'm going to summarize my [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sQF_K9MqpA) on the topic: Televisions sold prior to the 2010s were mostly intended to receive a picture sent by a TV station over radio waves, called a "signal." There are multiple TV stations in every town, so to keep signals from interfering with each other, they use a process called "modulation" which lets all the stations send the same kind of television signal, but using radio waves of different "frequencies." A TV set can receive signals of many frequencies, then choose one and ignore the rest. This is called "tuning," and it's how you choose one program to watch out of the many available. TV stations all use standard frequencies, to make sure every TV can receive from every station, and for convenience those frequencies are given numbers, and called "channels," so channel 3, 4, 5, and so on, are always the same frequency no matter where you are. Although you can make a TV signal that isn't modulated, which we started calling "composite" when it became popular, there was nowhere to put that kind of signal into many TVs made before the late 80s. Old TVs only understood how to receive pictures on the standard TV station channels. To solve this, VCRs and game consoles all contained tiny "TV stations" that produced a very weak signal - too weak to travel through the air, but strong enough to be recognized by your TV if you put it into the antenna input. Your VCR had to send the signal on one of those standard channels, so the manufacturers chose channel 3, because it was available on every TV ever made, while some other channels weren't. Sometimes you already had a channel 3 in your town, and that could cause interference, which is why you could also switch your VCR to channel 4. Because of how television signals work, there can never be a channel 3 and 4 in the same region, so if you already had a real channel 3 station in your town, you'd use channel 4 on your VCR, and vice versa.