Is It Possible To Broadcast A Video Game Accidentally?

[Markxxx]

I seem to recall in the late 70s, my mother got me the game "Pong," and I hooked it up to my portable B/W TV.

And every so often, I guess i'd hook it up wrong, because my mother in the living room would complain she could see me playing it on my set (Which was in my bedroom). My next door neighbor said, she could see it every so often as well.

Now I was in my bedroom with a B/W portable with rabbit ears. My mother in the living room and my neighbor in her rec room, both had color TV, with rabbit ears as well.

No one seems to believe that it was possible. Maybe I'm remember wrong? The "Pong" game used to be on Channel 3 and we don't have a channel 3 in Chicago, of course that was in the 70s in analog days.

It was never a strong signal, it didn't overpower the main channel but you could clearly see the game being played. I guess my neighbor and my mother had to been watching channel 2 right? (In Chicago the VHFs were 2, 5, 7. 9 and 11).

So my question is, would it be possible to hook a game up wrong as to cause this? Or do I remember incorrectly? And if it was possible, what caused it to broadcast?

Thanks.

 

[FreddyE1977]

In the late 80's I had a cable converter box that was going kerflooie on me, and we noticed that
we could receive the bottom 13 channels via rabbit ears on the set in the bedroom.

 

[anotherguyTN]

I discovered that if you connect an antenna to the TV out connection on a VCR that it would broadcast in the house to the other TVs, and possibly further out. This isn't something I did on a regular basis, but could it be possible that something like this is what happened?

 

[arnoldevns]

The simple answer is "yes" - but you have to have something hooked up wrong.. or loose.

 

[Markxxx]

I was a kid at the time and we would unhook the rabbit ears and hook up the game to my portable, So it's probable I hooked it up wrong on occasion.

 

[w9wi]

Absolutely.

I worked for a channel 3 TV station in Wisconsin. One day, we got a call from a viewer about 40 miles from the station -- he said every day at 11am, suddenly our competition on channel 15 would wipe out our signal. Then, promptly at noon, the interference would disappear.

We were pretty sure there was nothing that could go wrong with a channel 15 transmitter that would interfere with channel 3 40 miles away . We asked the guy, "do you have a VCR?", we were pretty sure we knew what was up...

...but he insisted he didn't have one.

He actually turned up at the station a few weeks later, a bit red-faced. Turns out his wife had bought a VCR without telling him (?!) & hooked both the input *and the output* to the antenna. She then programmed it to tape a soap opera off channel 15 every day at 11. VCRs at the time output to the TV using RF on channel 3... thus, every day at 11 it clobbered us...

We don't know whether any of his neighbors had problems. Chances are they were all at work. At least in theory, at that range it certainly could have interfered over a block or two.

 

[Darth_vader]

Yes; if you hook up an aerial to the RF-out port of the video game unit, it is 100% possible.

In fact, a few years ago I was retransmitting the output signal from my Pansat by feeding it into my VCR, then connecting an aerial to the RF-out port set to channel 4. And I did that primarily for the benefit of a little portable TV set I had in another part of the apartment. KATU was still on channel 2 at that point, which is why I used 4. The complex (that whole section of town, for that matter) is also in a huge null for KRCW-LP, so I didn't really have to worry too much about my sidebands walking on channel 5.

 

[kenglish]

I discovered that if you connect an antenna to the TV out connection on a VCR that it would broadcast in the house to the other TVs, and possibly further out. This isn't something I did on a regular basis, but could it be possible that something like this is what happened?

That's why the Europeans have PAL connectors, with opposite sexes, for input and output.