15 Jun
2006
15 Jun
'06
3:41 p.m.
There were, as Tony says, a number of kits and self
build designs available
in the years just before and just after WW2. I have a design for a Radar
tube based set on my bench at the moment, as I'm planning to modify it into
a multi standard monitor (240, 405, 441, 625) for use with a PC based
Presumably your radar CRT is electrostatically defiected, which makes
varying the scan rate a lot easier than if you were using electromagnetic
deflection.
standards converter experiment (we already have it
producing video at 240,
405, 525 and 625 line standards, and should be able to push it to 819 lines
as well). The design is for the video and timebase sections only, using a
VCR97 as the display, with all other valves being EF50 (SP41 or SP61 are the
Incidentally, the VCR97 was the CRT used for the early Williams Tube
memories.
[VCR == Valve, Cathode Ray, of course]
Going back further, the Baird 30 line mechanical
system became popular after
the "Daily Express" newspaper produced and distributed "televisor"
kits -
somewhere I have a picture of them loading railway trucks with the kits.
There were also other suppliers of kits and specialist components, like
Nipkow discs, or mirror screws.
I found 'Newnes Televsion Handbook' in a second-hand bookshop a few years
back. I don't think they realised what it was, the price was pretty low.
It covers _only_ mechanically-scanend stuff....
Cossor produced a kit for a 405 line set, and there
were others. Caseless
chassis, with and without CRT and valves were also offered in the 50's, and
I believe at least one homebuild colour set was based around a readily
available chroma panel from a commercial set.
There was certainly a 'Television' magazine colur TV project, and I think
you got to build the decoder yuorself (probably using the first
generation Philips chipset). I can't rememmber if I have all the articles
for that, but I think I should have some of them,
-tony