Remembering Analog TV, TV Licensing , VHF and UHF.

Forums › Home Theatre (including HTPC and EPG Collector) › Remembering Analog TV, TV Licensing , VHF and UHF.

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#1500535 27-Feb-2016 21:48

joshhill96:

The good old days where broadcast TV was in it's peak, SKY launched but there was no other digital option until Freeview arrived in 2006, for some it was only receiving 2 channels even 3 if you are lucky!

I remember when I was living in the Far North, we had no UHF band transmission so it was all VHF from several repeaters linked from Whangarei, terrible reception but still watched TV.

Share your ATV days...

Looking at what has happened to NZ TV (and news) I'm 100% for bringing back the broadcasting fee as a way preventing the politicians from further degrading our local media.

This government has been the worst ever - so far - in tearing up the public broadcasting charter, shutting down TVNZ 7 and choking the life out of Radio NZ by freezing its funding for the past 7 years.

On this basis I can't consider voting for National. Their actions have degraded not just out local media.....but democracy with it.

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Behodar

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#1500538 27-Feb-2016 22:03

I feel young after reading some of these posts :)

We had 1 and 2 (in colour) when I was growing up, along with a front-loading VHS recorder. We had no shortage of tapes full of cartoons, and I didn't know it at the time but I'm pretty sure that they were all pirated! By the mid 90s the old player was starting to chew up tapes, and I remember that we got a brand-new one from the Warehouse during an opening day sale (1995-ish?). Bliss!

TV3 had launched at some point before then but if I recall correctly it wasn't available here in Whakatane immediately. I also remember 4 launching, and that definitely wasn't available here. MTV worked if you had a UHF aerial though!

oxnsox

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#1500541 27-Feb-2016 22:16

My 3 key memories of analogue TV are:

Hiding in the bushes, with other kids, and watching the neighbours colour tele as they were the first to get one. In those days a lot of people rented their B&W TeeVee's

Few years later helped an Uncle deliver and install colour TV's. In those days there were really only 2 choices. Philips K9 (which was also a Pye) or the cheaper AWA (also Thorn) units. Sometimes an onwer would refuse a Thorn unit insisting the AWA was better and we'd have to take it back out to the Van, where if there was other alternative we would swap labels and carry the same unit back in!!

Finally, a few years later, with some mates in a remote no signal location, we took the 12" Pye TV we had for use with the ZX-80 selected the 'snow' on the appropriate channel, wound up the cricket commentary on the radio, and after a beer (or so) were all happy 'watching' the match. It 's amazing what you can visualise in the noise of an analogue signal when you want to match it to a commentary

joshhill96

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#1500568 27-Feb-2016 23:55

Linuxluver:

Looking at what has happened to NZ TV (and news) I'm 100% for bringing back the broadcasting fee as a way preventing the politicians from further degrading our local media.

This government has been the worst ever - so far - in tearing up the public broadcasting charter, shutting down TVNZ 7 and choking the life out of Radio NZ by freezing its funding for the past 7 years.

On this basis I can't consider voting for National. Their actions have degraded not just out local media.....but democracy with it.

I agree, reason to stop the funding of TVNZ 7 was not a valid reason and would have been hugely popular when the whole nation would have flicked to digital TV in late 2013, the reason I don't understand is why TVNZ Kidzone 24 is still on SKY commercial free, its taxpayer funded content on paywall, the deal with TVNZ didn't last very long and should be unencrypted on satellite and available on DTT.

The license fee would have prevented the on going channel launches and decommissioning with digital TV. - TVNZ wise.

SATTV

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#1500571 28-Feb-2016 00:30

Where do I start, I was born and raised in Hamilton and my parents had a black and white tv, only one channel at the time, then we got the K9 (mk1) in 1975 or 76 I think, we got it as Dad knew someone at the Pye factory in Waihi, it als cost about 6 months savings.

We had that TV for 9 years before it died and we replaced it with a thorn TX9. It was the last of them as horn had gone out of production. My parents got the 5 year extended warranty as TV's were expensive to fix.

Roll on to 1989 and I started my apprenticeship at TISCO filling the beer fridge, fixing Audio, and Microwave ovens, occasionally fixing TV's, I hated fixing VCR's, I could never get the cassette mechs to align.

I had to fix my parents tv a couple of times, 1st was a dry joint, second was a faulty picture tube. The 2nd tube did not last long and my parents bought a 29" panasonic.

Along came TV3 and NZBC wanted too much for TV3 to set up at Te Aroha so TV3 / JDA bought a farm just out of Cambridge called Ruru and installed their transmitter there, there were two issues, 1) Areial had to be pointing to a completely different direction and 2) TV3 was in Highband VHF not lowband.

Around the same time, F&P stopped making TV's in NZ, as they were the last one the tarrifs were removed and a 14" TV went from$700 to $400 overnight and that was the pain point and the TV repair business was on the decline.

We had a full time aerial installer but we all pitched in and were putting up aerials and diplexers all over the Waikato.

Not long after that, sky cam along with 3 channels on UHF, with 1/2 an hour once or twice a day of unencrypted transmission so you could tune in your VCR ( you had to take the video and audio out of your VCR and then into your sky decoder ( that you had to buy ) and then the signal was clear and on a low band modulator )

A year or so later they bought in their decoder that had a tuner built in and you did not need a VCR.

You could record they sky channel but playback was hit and miss as the VCR tape would stretch and it would not decrypt all the time so we modified peoples VCR to take the encrypted video out and decode it and back into the VCR unencrypted.

In about 1992 we got NICAM in the Waikato and I think we had it on 2 and 3 only as NICAM on 1 interfered with Military.

I then moved to Auckland after my apprenticeship and moved in with a mate of mine in Papatoetoe, he would not let me put up a TV aerial as he did not want to pay a license fee.

I remember C4 coming on line.

In 1995 I left Tisco and moved to another company called Broadtech ( we looked after several radio stations around NZ and parts of TV3 and TV4, we were a sister company to JDA )

At the time sky was talking about going satellite and digital.

Sky did not have the right technology to go digital straight away so their first satellite broadcasts were analogue, I only saw one analogue box and that was in the far north.

While I was at Broadtech, Skytower was being built and TV3 and C4 had transmitters up there, great view if you could get to where the aerials were otherwise in a steel room. JDA were having issues with their MP4 microwave link to skytower so an external aerial pointing to Waitarua and a VCR provided the link until the Microwave link got sorted.

I was made redundant when we lost a major contract and there was not the work to support us.

I went to another company in 1998 and they relocated me two years later to Sydney.

I came back in 2003 and was adicted to a TV series on ABC called The Bill, it used to show here but was not at the time, I could get ABC of the Optus B1 satellite if I recall. I bought a satellite dish and receiver and got to watch ABC for three weeks before they killed that transponder.

My Satellite receiver sat idle for a while then I put a motek motor on it and was able to turn my dish to 8 different satellites and see all sorts.

My favorite was news feeds.

After 13 years, I pulled my dish down a couple of weeks ago, downloading and streaming now my preference.

I never go to experence the "skip" from Australia to NZ but in summer customers in Raglan regularly reported Australian channels clearer than TV1 and 2 and wanted it all the time.

I have heard of people on the west coast able to get Digital TV from Australia on occasion when atmostpherics allows.

Cheers

John

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raytaylor

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#1500574 28-Feb-2016 02:53

DarthKermit:

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JimmyH

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#1501731 29-Feb-2016 19:04

blakamin:

DarthKermit:

blakamin:

I want analog back!

(my car has a TV and I can't use it) :(

All you need is an inverter and a freeview box in the car to make it work.

You must have never seen BMW wiring!

I think I have a little transmitter somewhere that works off 12 volts (about 500 milliamps from memory), takes composite audio/video inputs and spits out a UHF signal to which you can tune analog TVs. It's how I used to get the feed from my Sky UHF box to my bedroom back in the day, and also let both the spare room and a little portable LCD TV that had a 2.2" screen and ran of AA batteries tune in the signal as well. It's about the size of a cigarette packet, has a telescopic antenna, and you used to be able to adjust the output frequency with a screwdriver. The quality was never that great however.....

Should work a treat in the car coupled with a 12V freeview box

(possibly illegal to use that frequency band now I suspect?)

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andrew027

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#1501957 1-Mar-2016 09:09

HotDogBreath: "thank you very much for your kind donation"

Being allowed to stay up until midnight watching the Telethon on our Phillips K9. Those were the days.

As a teenager in Auckland I played bass in a few bands. One of my mates, a drummer in a different band, phoned me one day and said they had a spot on Telethon and their bass player couldn't make it so would I stand in? Would I what! So we got together and practiced for a couple of hours, until I had three of their songs down pat. Then we turned up at the studio the next day and were told we weren't allowed to play live, only mime to one song. Gutted. We didn't own a VCR then, so I never saw the act.

That same year Blam Blam Blam (also friends/ex-band mates of mine) protested not being allowed to perform live by doing their bit "playing" brooms and vacuum cleaners.

JimmyH

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#1502351 1-Mar-2016 18:58

Linuxluver:

Looking at what has happened to NZ TV (and news) I'm 100% for bringing back the broadcasting fee as a way preventing the politicians from further degrading our local media.

I'm not.

Firstly it wouldn't fix your stated problem - as the government would still control broadcasting funding, by setting the level of the fee.
Secondly, it's meaningless in this day and age - unlike back when we had a fee, you can't assume that the purpose of a TV is primarily, or even at all in come cases, to watch free-to-air broadcasts. So charging TV owners a fee to cover FTA provision is nonsense.
Thirdly, what about households that don't own a TV (a trend which taxing TV ownership would accelerate)?
Fourthly, a broadcasting fee is savagely regressive.
Fifthly, I suspect you may have forgotten how hated the fee was becoming. How bad the rebellion against it was becoming. And how much the costs of enforcing the fee were blowing out relative to the money collected.

All in all, I don't actually see much of a case for the State to fund TV at all now. Rather than charge me a fee for a broadcast I don't want and would be unlikely to watch, I would rather they left the money in my pocket so I could spend it on my entertainment of choice.

alasta

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#1502362 1-Mar-2016 19:13

JimmyH:

All in all, I don't actually see much of a case for the State to fund TV at all now. Rather than charge me a fee for a broadcast I don't want and would be unlikely to watch, I would rather they left the money in my pocket so I could spend it on my entertainment of choice.

I agree with your views on the old broadcasting fee, but I am becoming increasingly convinced that public service broadcasting is the only way we are going to get quality domestic news and current affairs because it's otherwise not commercially viable.

Linuxluver

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#1502490 1-Mar-2016 22:07

JimmyH:

Linuxluver:

Looking at what has happened to NZ TV (and news) I'm 100% for bringing back the broadcasting fee as a way preventing the politicians from further degrading our local media.

I'm not.

Firstly it wouldn't fix your stated problem - as the government would still control broadcasting funding, by setting the level of the fee.
Secondly, it's meaningless in this day and age - unlike back when we had a fee, you can't assume that the purpose of a TV is primarily, or even at all in come cases, to watch free-to-air broadcasts. So charging TV owners a fee to cover FTA provision is nonsense.
Thirdly, what about households that don't own a TV (a trend which taxing TV ownership would accelerate)?
Fourthly, a broadcasting fee is savagely regressive.
Fifthly, I suspect you may have forgotten how hated the fee was becoming. How bad the rebellion against it was becoming. And how much the costs of enforcing the fee were blowing out relative to the money collected.
All in all, I don't actually see much of a case for the State to fund TV at all now. Rather than charge me a fee for a broadcast I don't want and would be unlikely to watch, I would rather they left the money in my pocket so I could spend it on my entertainment of choice.

You charge the fee to support content provision. There. That solved the old-tech problems.

The fee would be set by an independent commission....not the politicians. Just as the Reserve Bank today sets the OCR.

This is all very easy if the political will to do it is there....and it's up to us to vote for people who have that will. Otherwise we remain with a media crippled by private business political agendas or public broadcasters under the thumb of the government of the day - which is where we are right now.

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quickymart

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#1502508 1-Mar-2016 22:37

Growing up in the Grey Valley, outside Greymouth. TV1 was around for ages, Channel 2 came along in 1983, and TV3 in 1997 (by which time I'd moved to Dunedin and three! channels). We had great TV reception where I grew up, but the phone line was absolute crap - gold dredges, electric fences, pops, clicks and hums on the line. It's still like that today. Dialup is (at best) 2400 and ADSL peaks out at 0.5k. I guess that's what you get when you're 7kms from the exchange :(

Still in the broadcasting vein: radio reception (Radio Scenicland) was really bad too - we could barely get 747AM (sometimes 1521AM would come in from Reefton), until my parents bought one of these in 1990 and we were (just barely) able to receive it:

http://oninoheizo.tumblr.com/post/132357205341/vintage-general-electric-superadio-ii-model

Fifeshire FM came along around March 1992 (a Nelson station we could receive all the way from Murchison!) and Radio Scenicland converted to FM in November 1992, making our poor radio reception days a thing of the past.

Sorry for rabbiting on here...I get nostalgic about the "good old days" of broadcasting in NZ!

gzt

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#1502509 1-Mar-2016 22:38

It kind of made some sense in the days of one TV per household but started to look very silly applied to a 5" b&w TV/radio. I'm not sure exactly what you are proposing as a replacement. Per year per receiver sounds a bit silly these days.

Imho there was no one moment it was just an anachronism and went with the times.

Although we replace tvs so often you could probably grab some good revenue from a $25 per TV sale tax ; ).

Broadcasting fee is not really required if you truly believe it is a public good like health or education just fund it from the general fund.

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#1504976 2-Mar-2016 14:18

It's the characters I remember. Slim Sherman, Emma Peel, Richard Kimble, Daleks, Ellie May Clampett, Mike Nelson, Little Joe Cartwright, sultry sensuous Dusty Springfield....

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#1534977 18-Apr-2016 14:12

I remember going from Ak down to Gore to a relatives farm on school holidays.
South Island TV was 3 weeks behind Ak TV (or was it 4weeks)

I guess they used to show the programs in AK, send the reels to Welly, then to SI etc .

I also remember the TVNZ POP music shows , instead of clips of the overseas artist singing the song, they had NZ singers doing covers of the current
hits
I also remember, as a small kids, seeing the show "The Prisoner" and thinks, wtf is this weirdness. Huge bouncy ball chasing people

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