Fine Tuners - What Was That All About

[Battenkill50]

We had a set top tuner with a dial in the late 50s atop the old Dumont TV receiver. We lived in western New England where there was only one channel available (WRGB Channel 6 from Schenectady) until the channel 10 in Albany put a relay on top of Mount Greylock broadcasting on channel 19.....

kw - Melbourne FL

 

[IM42A]

No, because PAL has a refresh rate of only 50 Hz, versus NTSC's 60 Hz (well, 59.94 to be exact). So the electron beam is doing more sweeps across the picture tube, but more slowly, making the scan lines closer together.

I'm probably just technical enough to make a total idiot of myself, but I have tried playing PAL videos on an NTSC TV, using a PAL VCR or DVD (just did this for the heck of it) and running it through AV cables, and it chopped off the bottom one-fifth of the picture, as well as rendering it in black and white.

Strangely enough, I've found that some North American HDTV receivers will pass through PAL video, as well as audio, with no problem, in color, no converter needed.

 

[KeithE4]

Strangely enough, I've found that some North American HDTV receivers will pass through PAL video, as well as audio, with no problem, in color, no converter needed.

You sure those aren't dual-standard receivers? I didn't know such receivers existed, but maybe they do.

 

[IM42A]

You sure those aren't dual-standard receivers? I didn't know such receivers existed, but maybe they do.

They may be. When you feed PAL into it, the PSIP (or whatever you call it) says "PAL".

They might have included that feature for gaming purposes. It just seems to be an odd feature for budget-priced HDTV receivers. Whether such receivers could be used in regions that use PAL is kind of a moot point, as OTA analog TV is on its way out. (And then there would be the voltage issues.)

 

[kevtronics]

Strangely enough, I've found that some North American HDTV receivers will pass through PAL video, as well as audio, with no problem, in color, no converter needed.

Most flat-panel TVs are multi-system even if they don't advertise it. When it's simply a few extra lines of code in a DSP chip, it's easy to implement multiple systems as an extra bonus -- just like the HD Radios that can secretly decode C-Quam AM Stereo.

But the TV still needs a different tuner module to receive European TV channels, because the frequencies and audio/video offsets are different, and these days Europe uses DVB-T for digital TV while North America uses ATSC.