BBC's service to the US over cable seems to be pretty serviceable. They have at least one channel on our local 999-channel digital system, and they also have a number of offerings on OTA PBS. PBS is a nationwide consortium of TV and radio stations, mostly initially operated by large universities.
Our digital TVs still have controls with the same basic concept. Something about adapting to room lighting, preferences. On some digital sets, the profusion of such controls can be quite bewildering. Many are tucked away in submenus and protected service menus.
For about the last 20 years of its life, NTSC became very stable. Adjustments to the picture controls were very infrequent - mostly done when the TV was set up. For the first 10 years, it was a nightmare.
True.
Care and skill.
Sounds good to me.
Touching the terminals is not so easy, in actual use. There are only narrow gaps around the sides of the outlet and the front of the terminals is maybe
1/4" - 3/8" back and blocked by plastic.
No, no, no it was hit by flying pig dung. :-)
Geoff.
More likely they thought that getting the free TV from France was too much competition.
UHF only TV's could not receive it.
Geoff.
Do you mean that the US style socket has a removable faceplate? UK ones certainly don't, unless perhaps some metalclad industrial units. With a gridswitch unit, you'd have to be pretty determined to touch a live terminal with the faceplate off.
Ron
Oh good, we're going to argue about who can boil a kettle the fastest... you couldn`t make it up! ;)
Ron
In message , Mike Tomlinson writes
Correct. I still have one of the first Sony sets to enter the county which had to use a slight variant of NTSC to get past the PAL patents, it's fitted with a hue control which in effect rotates the quadrature subcarrier (as in NTSC) to get the correct skin tones (the wrong colours being caused by sub-carrier side band attenuation).
No argument - the UK ring system seems to be vastly superior over our US 15 and 20 amp circuits when it comes to delivering more actual AC power to appliances.
Yes. unscrew a screw or two...
Handy when you repaint the walls.
And if you want different style wall plate front piece, they have zillions of them.
Agrees with my experiences in Germany.
You forgot to add the smiley!
Just on the offchance that you meant this seriously I'd ask just how many people in the UK would actually want to watch French TV?
Many TVs sold in the UK had multiband tuners, and frequency converters were easily obtainable. So of all the many factors that stopped the British watching French TV that one was by far and away the easiest and cheapest to solve.
David.
The last time I was in the States I complained to someone about just how utterly dire all the radio stations were that I had tried to listen to on the radio in my rental car. The response was "try PBS" which I did, and found that about 50% of the output was simply a relay of the BBC world service.
David.
Of course it could, but harmonizing spectrum with the continent might have been beneficial as well. Have these plans been published?
gr, hwh
On Monday, February 6th, 2012, at 13:47:19h +0000, Ron exclaimed:
It is now time to call in the experts to discuss whether or not quickly boiled water tastes better than slowly boiled water, depending of course on how it is going to be used, probably for making tea.
This should keep the thread going for at least another 50 posts.
Obviously water boiled with AC is far superior to water boiled with DC. Alternating current jiggles the molecules up more.
Tea should always be made with boiling water.
Ron
You do need to realize that many of the programs on BBC America are not BBC programs or programs made for shewing on BBC, but are in fact programs made by or produced for the commercial tv network ITV, and possibly one or two for the state owned commercial tv network Channel 4.
Actually PBS is a separate organization from the local tv stations, it is not a consortium, so local stations affiliate with and pay PBS to carry the network programming to fill their schedules.
And PBS is TV only. Public radio stations affiliate primarily to NPR (some to American Public Media, and even fewer to Pacifica) not PBS.
Except in a very few cases where they pay PBS to broadcast the audio from PBS's Newshour.
In the case of the Detroit public TV station, WTVS, is a little unusual at it has always been non-university owned (the Detroit Educational Television Foundation) unlike neighboring WUOM Ann Arbor (University of Michigan) and WKAR East Lansing (Michigan State University).
Rather difficult since there are no PBS *radio* stations. PBS is a *television* network.
A typical sign of an Public Radio International affiliate station (previously known as American Public Radio, the smaller rival to NPR).
Carrying a PRI relay of BBC World Service is far cheaper than paying for NPR programming, so many smaller public radio stations prefer this option for obvious reasons.
Of course it would have been better for the public, but it was better for the Thatcher administration and business friends and supporters to sell off the spectrum for commercial use since higher profits could be made that way instead of tv broadcasts.
Well it might, but in practice there don't seem to have been many problems caused by not harmonising spectrum use with the the continent. To be honest I think the government made the right decision, the limited VHF spectrum available in Bands 1 & 3 would only just have been enough for one extra
625-line TV channel.
I read them in a copy of the Journal of the Royal Television Society published some time around 1961. Can't be more specific than that I'm afarid.
David.
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