[Synchrodyne]

Thanks very much for the education on Ireland vs Eire – I was previously unaware of that.

Re the Irish adoption of what later became known as System I, is there any information available on the process by which it came to be chosen, rather than say System B? As far as I know, the first public proposal of the System I parameters was in the May, 1960 TAC (Television Advisory Committee) Report, although I haven’t seen the report itself. I think that the same report also proposed that the UK should adopt 8 MHz UHF television channels if the rest of Europe did the same, the latter aspect seeming to have come to fruition at the 1961 Stockholm meeting. But actual adoption of the TAC proposed 625-line standard in the UK would not have been reasonably certain until the 1962 Pilkington Report, and I suspect that it may have taken some time for the recommendations to be translated into confirmed action. So the Irish decision to take up System I must have predated any finality about adoption of the TAC 625 line system in the UK.

Re the lettered VHF channels, I think that I’ve read somewhere that they were used in the UK by some cable or wired relay services, which would tend to confirm that they had been pencilled-in should Bands I and/or III be recast for 625 line TV. A curious aspect of the Band I channels A through C is that the carrier frequencies are 0.5 MHz higher than one might have expected, e.g. 51.75, not 51.25 MHz for channel A vision carrier.

Cheers,