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Number of TVs in South Devon in the early sixties?


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My Dad grew up in Kingsbridge and although they didn't have a TV at home he did used to visit a neighbour to watch TV. He would have been around 10 years old in the early sixties so there were definitely some people with TVs in Kingsbridge then. I can ask him when I next speak to him if more details would be useful?

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My Dad grew up in Kingsbridge and although they didn't have a TV at home he did used to visit a neighbour to watch TV. He would have been around 10 years old in the early sixties so there were definitely some people with TVs in Kingsbridge then. I can ask him when I next speak to him if more details would be useful?

 

Given that Kingsbridge relies on a local repeater just outside of the town, you would suspect that picking up a signal would have been harder, possibly needing taller/larger ariels. 

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Please do Peter.

Dad says he used to watch the Lone Ranger at the house next door when he was about 7 which must have been around 1960. Before that he used to watch Bill and Ben with the people down the road so that must have been late 50s perhaps? He knows they definitely had their own TV by 1966 because they watched the World Cup on it. That's a bit more for you based on one street in Kingsbridge anyway! Hope it helps a bit. If I can find out anything else I'll pass it on - always fun to have a challenge!

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After the introduction of ITV in Devon in 1961 with BBC(1) on channel 2 vertically polarised and ITV on channel 9 vertically polarised aerials in the area would probably be similar to those seen in in outer London (outer london photos before 1964 should help) with a single vertical dipole approximately 2.8m long (1.4m up and 1.4m down) for BBC and a yagi beam for ITV consisting of the vertical cross pieces being approximately 0.75m long (0.375m up and 0.375m down). All the aerials would point East towards Stockland Hill near Honiton.

 

Looking at the coverage map I would not expect to see any 'H' or 'X' aerials used for BBC in that area, but if there was a BBC reception problem and they were used the BBC and ITV aerials would be separate because the BBC aerials would have to point North towards North Hessary Tor near Oakhampton. 'H' aerials have one element longer than the other and the longer element will be to the south.

 

UHF transmitters did not arrive until 1971 when the 405 line VHF system became obsolete and the now familiar smaller UHF aerials came in to use as people bought new televisions for BBC2 and colour (still pointing the same way).

 

The old ITV aerials looked similar to DAB aerials that may now be appearing in the area that are conveniently pointing the same way as the ITV aerials.

 

That info might help with modelling, but I can't answer the question of how many!

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TV aerials are tuned to the frequency of the transmitter and are different dimensions depending on the channel(s) required. I can remember forests of Xs and Hs (I don't think there was any advantage between one or the other) for BBC (band I) and multi-element Band III aerials for ITV. (These were all Yagis - Log-periodic aerials only really came in with digital transmissions.) I noticed one of our neighbours in Tilbury still has a band III aerial on the roof - disused for over 30 years at least. when I lived in Torquay (almost ten years ago now) there was still an X. (It looked in danger of imminent collapse.)

 

Hi-Fi enthusiasts would have had a band II aerial for FM radio as well (I had one in the seventies). In the fifties/sixties, these would have been tuned to the restricted 88-100 MHz (or Mc/s as it was then) range as the rest of Band II was used by the police etc. (Really high security, as it wasn't very difficult to get a tuner for the whole 88-108 MHz band....) These were usually horizontally polarised and sometimes combined with the band one aerial, as the transmitters were often on the same site.

 

As to the number of aerials it would depend on the affluence of the area. A set cost around £50-100* or more, depending on screen size, cabinet etc. Floor standing models were available at the top end of the range.

 

* Nearly the price of a car (a Ford Popular was less than £300). Before the war a set was around £100, which then was the price of a car (channel 1 London Area only). The first sets were dual standard (no help to reliability!) 240 line and 405 line.

 

If you are interested  http://www.hamuniverse.com/yagibasics.html

 

We were promised colour in the fifties (on 405 line). Trials took place, but it was vetoed by the government. Just as well really, as it would have been N.T.S.C., which as everyone knows stands for Never Twice the Same Colour!

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The number of viewers is recorded in archives at the BBC along with distribution coverage maps, but more exact records do exist ( or did) of the numbers of licences issued each year for an area, I suspect the archives would have been under the control of the GPO at the time, and may be held by them, rather than the current licensing authority and agency.

 

Surprisingly area affluence had little to do with it, poorer areas rented or bought second hand, and by the 1960's the spread was pretty even in all parts that could get a good signal in the UK, the old BBC distribution maps will show the blind areas.

 

Many suburban streets had all roofs with aerials, even in the 50's, any missing were diehard who did not want TV at all. In good reception areas the use of indoor aerials was common, as many believed firmly that detector vans could not pick them up.

 

The real way detector vans worked was to drive along the streets several times very noisily, and wait to hear that the licenses sales had gone up the next day!! I do know, I was trained on the Vans!

 

The most iconic aerial was the H aerial or a tandem H in poor marginal signal areas. The X aerial was for decent reception areas. Directional aerials, Yagi and tandem Yagi aerials came in the late 1970's with UHF.

 

Stephen

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We were promised colour in the fifties (on 405 line). Trials took place, but it was vetoed by the government. Just as well really a sit would have been N.T.S.C., which as everyone knows stands for Never Twice the Same Colour!

 

 

 

 

The first trials after the war were for the Coronation where the BBC were approached by the RCA company to see if they would buy the US made equipment. As it was incompatible with the BBC standard it was used to relay images from three cameras via cable to the Great Ormand Street Hospital for Children and also to the BBC at Alexandra Palace. It worked well, but he BBC engineers stopped the assessment due to concerns(they were right), about stability. The Government ruled it out as well, due to the cost and RCA refusing to allow British makers to produce sets without massive licensing payments. RCA also suggested that they wanted control of content to highlight the colour programs, something the BBC utterly refused to do.

 

Colour slipped into a period where only the US was developing it, till the British and German efforts to develop a new standard came about in the early 60's, when as it was compatible with BW they could test it late at night with films etc.

 

Oddly enough it is forgotten these days that there were many pre-war colour tests made from the Water Tower at Crystal Palace by the Baird Company and Baird himself. This used electronic cameras, and a studio mechanical camera of far more advanced design than at the 1936 tests for the BBC services. The Electronic cameras were supplied by Philo Farnsworth from the States. They were very experimental and the war stopped all development, but for a period of 19 months they did broadcast colour for 3 days a week purely to test receivers, no public viewing, except at the last pre war Radio Show at Olympia, where the Baird company showed a working prototype for domestic use. By this time the Baird company and John Baird had parted from each other, but Baird himself continued with work on colour till his death. He also worked on 3D and had a working example, now stored by the Science Museum in a partial set of parts.. Again he had abandoned the mechanical approach and used CRT's to his own design.

 

Sorry about posting drift!!

 

Stephen

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I gather the supposed principle of the detector van was reception of the stray radiation of the tuner's local oscillator, which must have been of a very low level (it would be the only way to satisfy the claim of being able to detect what channel the set was tuned to (and no use at all with a T.R.F.* set. which some of the early ones were). I always suspected they were really just a bluff....

 

Rental was really a big con. All sets had 'stock faults',which accounted for probably 90% of failures and were quickly repaired 'in the field'....

 

* tuned radio frequency i.e. the radio frequency circuits were all tuned to the one channel - fine as long as you only had BBC and didn't move.

 

Note. all VHF (and higher frequency) aerials are directional. Even the AM ferrite rod and long lengths of wire are directional.

 

Early colour transmissions were not compatible with monochrome and it was not until the invention of N.T.S.C., which transmits the colour information separately from the monochrome signal, that domestic colour became a possibility (1954 in the States). Unfortunately phase shifts during reception cause colour changes necessitating a hue control on receivers. Later developments (SECAM in France and PAL in Germany) eliminated this problem, which is why British sets merely had a saturation control (deluxe sets had a 'tint' control, but this alters the colour balance but not the actual colour).

 

All this is a bit off topic - I trust it's not too boring.

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I started my career as an area engineer for J & M Stone, a national company, at the Plymouth branch just before the advent of service in the area.  I ventured from Exeter to Lands End basically delivering and setting up TV sets due to the rush to buy. Sadly for while the only service was from Wenvoe in S. Wales before Hessary Tor opened and as we lived in a higher part of Plymouth, one of the aerials was pointed in that direction.  Never very successful, it was removed when Hessary started.

 

Wenvoe was fine however on Dartmoor and North Devon and Cornwall but ITV decided on Caradon Hill for Westward TV who built fancy studios in Plymouth.  After that, colour was promised so I thought I would be smart and come to the US to learn all about it and return much smarter.  However, I stayed!

 

Brian.

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The 'X' aerials (known as Antex) were for strong signal areas (which were actually quite large in practice, extending anything up to fifty miles from the transmitter) and were popular because they had good directional properties and would reject signals from behind a lot better than other types. Interference from other areas was much more of a problem than a weak signal so these aerials were very popular, and I suspect very popular indeed in coastal areas where interference would be likely most of the time.

 

The requirement for everyone to have a new aerial for reliable reception of Freeview has seen a lot of rooftop 'tidying' recently when the new aerials were installed, but there are still a few old aerials to be seen attached to very inaccessible chimneys.

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I've never quite understood the thing about the police radio frequencies being inaccessible to the public. Back in the early 80s I had no problem listening in to police conversations in Somerset, using a decent quality, but perfectly standard, AM/FM transistor radio. I suppose there may have been more that I couldn't get, but I seemed to be able to hear what was going on from ~Weston-Super-Mare to ~Watchet to ~Langport, given a bit of dial and aerial twiddling.

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You are not supposed to listen to transmissions outside the broadcast bands, even if you have the receiving equipment (the license only covers these).  Unfortunately the international FM band extends to 108 MHz, but the UK originally allocated part of it for other services, which was asking for trouble.

 

(If you want to mess things up, get a politician involved....)

 

(I hope that last comment doesn't infringe the prohibition on politics!)

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Researching the difference between X and H aerials, I found the following :-

 

http://www.wrightsaerials.tv/albertsattic/005.shtml#img2 

 

I don't think I've ever seen an X aerial mounted horizontally, but band 1 was almost always vertically polarised in this country.

 

When we moved to Italy in 1976, VHF reception in the UK was already obsolescent*, but there the first channel (RAI 1) used VHF and the second (RAI 2) UHF (there were only two channels), though both were 625 line. Many sets had been converted for RAI 2 by the simple addition of an UHF tuner and a switch. The advent of further channels in the eighties produced a crop of tuner failures. There was no problem with the earlier tuners with brass tuning gears but the newer ones had nylon gears. Years of staying in the same place and hardened grease meant the tuner was stiff and, sooner or later, the plastic split rendering the tuner useless. A problem we still suffer from today in our models.

 

* I had a 405 line set. Despite the reduced number of lines, the picture was excellent (it was only a 19" screen), but 22" was the popular size at the time for colour sets (I always thought they gave better pictures than 26" sets.)

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Lots of nice picture of old aerials here:-

 

http://www.wrightsaerials.tv/aerialphotography/ancient/index.shtml

 

Quite a fun website really.

 

The Antex 'X' aerials only work when vertical so you will not see any horizontal ones because the 'H' type is perfectly adequate when horizontal at rejecting interference from the sides.

 

When deciding the polarisation of the original band 1 BBC transmitters it was decided purely on the basis of aesthetics (by learned people in the arts world) that vertically polarised receiving aerials looked better than horizontal ones, so generally the transmitters serving major metropolitan areas used vertical polarisation, and fill-in transmitters in rural areas used horizontal polarisation. This gives a perception that they were all vertical, but not true - just most receiving aerials were vertical because of where they were in the areas served by the main transmitters at Crystal Palace (London and most of South East England), Sutton Coldfield (Birmingham and most of the Midlands and Central England), Holme Moss (Northern England), Kirk O'Shotts (Glasgow and Edinburgh) and Wenvoe (South Wales and South West England). That used up all of the five available channels so most of the other less populated areas such as East Anglia and so on reused the same channels with horizontal polarisation. When ITV came they followed the same polarisation pattern where possible to allow the use of dual-band aerials.

 

When UHF 625 line television arrived aesthetics were not the driving factor and virtually all the transmitters were horizontally polarised. In the mean time lessons had been learned and the rest of the world had seen the folly of vertically polarised aerials for analogue television and used horizontal from the outset for more astute technical reasons!

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I've never quite understood the thing about the police radio frequencies being inaccessible to the public. Back in the early 80s I had no problem listening in to police conversations in Somerset, using a decent quality, but perfectly standard, AM/FM transistor radio. I suppose there may have been more that I couldn't get, but I seemed to be able to hear what was going on from ~Weston-Super-Mare to ~Watchet to ~Langport, given a bit of dial and aerial twiddling.

 

 

As its wide open in the US, I've never understood the UK attitude either!

 

Brian

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You are not supposed to listen to transmissions outside the broadcast bands, even if you have the receiving equipment (the license only covers these). Unfortunately the international FM band extends to 108 MHz, but the UK originally allocated part of it for other services, which was asking for trouble.

 

(If you want to mess things up, get a politician involved....)

 

(I hope that last comment doesn't infringe the prohibition on politics!)

Yeah, but telling someone not to do something, when it's both easy to do and quite clearly unenforceable, isn't really a very effective way of stopping them :D.

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Yeah, but telling someone not to do something, when it's both easy to do and quite clearly unenforceable, isn't really a very effective way of stopping them :D.

 

My comment on 'politicans' and mess' was intended to convey just this idea.... (I was considering putting "Yeah! Sure!" after the first sentence!)   :)

 

 

Lots of nice picture of old aerials here:-

 

http://www.wrightsaerials.tv/aerialphotography/ancient/index.shtml

 

Quite a fun website really.

 

The Antex 'X' aerials only work when vertical so you will not see any horizontal ones because the 'H' type is perfectly adequate when horizontal at rejecting interference from the sides.

 

When deciding the polarisation of the original band 1 BBC transmitters it was decided purely on the basis of aesthetics (by learned people in the arts world) that vertically polarised receiving aerials looked better than horizontal ones, 

 

omis

 

Add 'designers' to the mix and complete and utter chaos is ensured....   :O  :no:

 

The linked website has the polar diagrams for horizontal X aerials. They are rather lop sided, so probably no one bothered. Up a ladder is not the place for complicated fiddling (and the boss wouldn't have allowed you time for it anyway!).

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As its wide open in the US, I've never understood the UK attitude either!

 

Brian

 

I think with only 3 stations to allow for a restricted band was considered sufficient. The obvious possibility of 'illegal listening in' was overlooked.

 

(Politicans and designers at work again!). (The 'think tanks' that come up with all those daft ideas are composed of them....)

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Many thanks to all of you for your informative replies, I hate to say it I am more confused now than when I asked. Just remember that I am a very simple soul and all I wanted really was roughly how many aerials to put on chimneys and would they be H or X(time period early 1960s). I thought as one doesn't see TV aerials normally on layouts I thought it might be a nice touch

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Alan, you should know by now there is no simple answer to a simple question on RMB!  To make a difference, there would have to be a lot of houses on the layout with a fair number having aerials.  They would have to be very fine; having seen some commercial examples which would do justice to telephone poles!

 

Brian.

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It would certainly be a nice touch. Even today aerials are a common site, though now for UHF (much smaller, but at least 10 element). They would need to be made from wire. Copper is probably best, as it would bend rather than inflict injury - the model aerial will be quite delicate, but quite capable of producing painful results if made of a hard metal. A bent mast would be quite prototypical.

 

As an approximate guide the masts would be about 1" or so in diameter, the support component of the actual aerial about half this and the elements about half again. Band I aerials were usually straight forward dipoles and band III looped (for technical reasons following on from their multi-element structure).

 

A typical example is here.

 

http://www.sub-tv.co.uk/pics/aerials/VHFTV-X.jpg

 

The length of the elements depends on the channels served (see my earlier posting).

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