The intern

A girl on the test card is pretty low on the PC scale but we had you beat. Our test cards had injuns chiefs, in full headdress on 'em.

Not only British, much of EU and northern Europe with 625 lines and 50 frames / second.

Cheers, James Arthur

How would your intern know that it was 60 Hz or 15,750 Hz? What point of reference would it have?

There was no roller derby in the first years of TV!

Maybe Mickey Mouse, or a baseball game.

A spectrum analyzer would show that the signal is VSB AM. Then, demodulated, the horizontal and vertical syncs will be obvious.

Video is pretty obvious on a scope. You can see camera pans and jumps.

My uncle Sheldon said that, under some conditions, he could actually see the TV images on an oscilloscope, without z-axis modulation, somehow. I never saw it myself.

Roller Derby was boring. If you liked it, there are a few episodes on the ME TV website:

I was a TV Broadcast Engineer, and I saw it often in early hand drawn cartoons. It was interesting to see Quickdraw McGraw walk across the screen of a Tektronix RM529 Video Waveform Monitor.

My question about the frequency is, 'How would they know what OUR reference was.' It is not based on an universal constant. Since Hz is cycles per second, they would have to know how we measure time.

Obviously we measure time in syncs. Why else would we use that particular repletion rate? (Does it matter?)

Double de-refence. Read it as "the intern measures sidebands, spaced at, what frequencies we (the human readers) call 15,750Hz" and etc.

Tim

If the aliens are familiar with vsb am, yes.

But they might have no idea what those pulses are/mean/do. Their technology might be different.

NT

you must have never seen it to say that.

NT

PC in 1967? Sigh :)

The girl is

You may - or may not - be surprised to realise TCC exists:

Maybe they live in caves and their best technology is spears. But if they have antennas and amplifiers, they can surely figure out 1950's television signals. It's pretty obvious.

I like this one :-

Brian

Maybe interlaced scanning might mess them up a bit.

It was originally implemented to get away with limited bandwidth - might take them a while to figure that out.

To us it is. To them it will be totally alien.

Our technological development path is partly fairly predictable, partly chance. An alien planet might go through a quite different technological development path.

NT

Which may not include vision or hearing, or may be in different frequency ranges.

Cheers

A difference in visual wavelength wouldn't matter and a different audibly frequency wouldn't make an sense. One or the other missing is possible similar senses would be necessary for survival.