Equalizing pulse needed?

And after 60 years and countless units built you need to change this because? If you have any intention of interfacing with commercial/consumer units, you'll find out in short order that needed or not, they're needed. GG

Why would you think they are not necessary?

I just completed a video encoder/decoder design and the target display devices (1 NTSC and 1 Component video) both required EQ pulses. The NTSC monitor was very "forgiving" and would sort-of lock to anything that resembled sync., but I wouldn't trust that any other monitor would do the same.

I haven't heard of any changes to the RS-170 standard, or any new NTSC specs lately.

No standard change, only device capabilities increased. See

While the NTSC monitor I output video to was very forgiving, the RGB display was not. The RGB display (the main target of the video encoder/decoder system) would *not* lock (sync-on-green BTW) if the signal was not within the specification of RS-170 -- including EQ pulses. I tried to get the RGB display to work without them, but it would not.

So as you pointed out... while there indeed, some devices that function without EQ pulses, there are obviously still some devices that require RS-170/NTSC as-written.

The video encoder/decoder chips I used are from Analog Devices (ADV7179, ADV7181a). They are not obsolete. They allow you to manually "play" with the synchronization over a wide range of possibilities, but the chipset also has the proper NTSC as a preset standard (as well as PAL, SECAM, and variants of the 3). If Analog Devices still produces chipsets that produce video according to the standards (TI and others do, also), that tells me that things like EQ pulses are still needed.

I also built composite sync inside an FPGA, including the EQ pulses (for possible future upgrades to this system).