Earliest BBC2 Sets?

[Colourstar]

Originally Posted by Heatercathodeshort

The model pictured is the Ferranti TC1082 with motor driven tuning on VHF and remote control. Regards, John

Drool! Goodness me that's a beauty. I've never seen one from that range of sets before. Lucky you!

Steve

[steve1010uk]

Originally Posted by Mike Phelan

In the 1970s British Relay "made" a single-standard set by putting a Pye 11U chassis into a new Invicta 20" or 24" cabinet and tube.

These were rented to new customers with the implication that they were new sets, but without actually saying so in so many words!

When we went on field calls some of the more astute customers asked why the chassis was a sticky mess covered in fluff and dust!

I remember these well, i used to work at British Relay in the 70's and we got extra £1.50 in our wage for every one we did, they were called the "GS20"

The sets looked quite nice but the performance was horrible and the new 20 inch cheap eastern european tubes always seemed to have poor phosphors.

They were fitted with a UHF transistor tuner and a small board containing an extra stage of if amp they often worked better and the 6Mhz sound buzzed less with this stage bypassed especially in a high signal area

Steve

[alynG1TBL]

We had a Bush 105, yes I did say 105, which was converted in 1964 and featured a rotary UHF tuner where the Bush badge was. System switch was at the bottom front of set, below the four VHF push buttons. Alyn

[MALC SCOTT]

Hi Steve, I remember those CRTs. They were made in Poland by a company called Unitra. The phosphors were like the surface of the moon!

[AC/HL]

Originally Posted by MALC SCOTT

Rediffusion did the same trick with the MK10 aerial sets. Poor performance but looked very nice!

I think it was something to do with our tortuous tax system, they had the attraction of new sets but without the tax implications.

[Heatercathodeshort]

If a receiver was over three years old it was known as 'decontrolled'. It could be rented/sold without the Government regulations of the mid to late 1960's. If it was 'new' a nine month advance rental was required and if sold at least a third was required as a deposit. Devastating to the radio trade and no doubt many others. The radio trade has always been used to yield taxes of some kind or another. John.

[Gulliver]

I find all the talk of dual standard sets and people watching 405-line B&W into the 70's and early 80's fascinating.

I was born in 1973 and have seen precisely two dual standard sets in my life and have never seen a native 405-line picture or a 405 line only set (outside of museums). The first dual standard set I saw was a junked device my dad retrieved from the garage in 1976. He explained to me about the 405/625 knob. He retrieved the TV to give me "something to play with" as long as I didn't plug it in. I hooked up a cassette recorder to the speaker and played audio recordings of TV programmes through it. Yes, at the age of 3 I could wield a soldering iron!

The second one I saw was a set bought by a friend from a junk shop in 1988. It was working fine and one could switch between 405 and 625 but of course receive nothing on VHF/405.

Nobody in my area was still watching 405 B&W in the 70's, not even the older people. Yet it's clear that in various parts of the country a lot of people didn't switch to 625 until the late 70's...and in some cases 625 wasn't available.

My dad told me a story about how he was unconvinced colour TV would be worthwhile until he saw the colour broadcast of Wimbledon tennis in 1969 in a TV show-room.

[G6Tanuki]

Where I grew up (Mid-Wales/Shropshire borders) everyone used a traditional 3-ele B1 /bayed 2x5-ele B111 antenna setup to get d B&W 405-lines for BBC1 (Sutton Coldfield) and ITV (Lichfield) until the Wrekin transmitter started up in the early-1970s. The signal at our house wasn't very good and I spent a lot of time as a kid at a friend's house about half a mile away where they got a much better picture.

Our first BBC2 was from the Wrekin: prior to that our Parabeam-and-preamp attempts at getting Beeb2 from Sutton Coldfield were totally thwarted by topography - OK, you could get a BBC2 picture but there were plenty of ghosts and no way could any colour-decoder stay locked for more than 20% of the time.

--G6Tanuki

[dazzlevision]

Hello,

I have a GEC BT342 set, which is one of the final range of GEC sets actually designed and made by them, before they became badge engineered Sobells. The BT342 uses the same basic chassis as the previous GEC ranges from the BT302 onwards (i.e. bow fronted cabinets, two vertically mounted PCBs, with 17 or 21" 110 degree CRTs, some models also incorporated VHF/FM radio). The main differences to preceeding models are a 19" CRT and "piano key" pushbutton VHF tuner (it also has VHF/FM radio).

The only reference to UHF/625 is a "UHF adaptor" marking on the rear cover and a small round hole next to it. There is no obvious provision for UHF/625 working inside.

Does anyone have any information about what this "UHF adaptor" might have consisted of?

Regards,

Dazzlevision

[Heatercathodeshort]

Sounds like a last deperate attempt to sell receivers that 'might' work on the proposed 625 line system. 1960-62 was a very bad time for the television industry with all the delays over the Pilkington report. Many very well known names folded in this period.
It would have been virtually impossible to convert the BT342 to 625/UHF. Tuners, I.F. board and timebase would all have required replacement. Cheaper to buy a new receiver.
The BT342 is a very rare model. Regards, John.

[dazzlevision]

Hello,

I think the UHF adapter might have been for the time when the Pilkington committee had not yet produced its final report and it was a possibility that new programmes might be transmitted on UHF 405 lines, in which case it would "simply" be a matter of connecting an external UHF tuner.

If my memory serves me correctly, it was also a provision in early Thorn group sets (i.e. convertible 800 and 850 chassis models), where the VHF tuner had a UHF position, but no system switching between UHF and VHF tuners. The idea being the fitting of a UHF channel biscuit in the VHF tuner...? Unlikely to be very frequency stable...?

Regards,

Dazzlevision

[chycarn]

Originally Posted by Heatercathodeshort

This receiver is the Invicta 7069 produced for Gibbard TV Rentals. It was marketed as 'The Gay Cavalier' in 1964/5. It employs the Pye 11U dual standard chassis. John.

The Invicta 7069 was the TV I learnt on. The VHF tuner had "biscuits" fitted to tune in the BBC and ITV. UHF tuner was an accessory. We installed them and sent them back out on rental. When finally they were retired by the company I bought a dozen of them for £5 each, upgraded them to UHF and rented them out at £5 a month. That was great pocket money of an apprentice like myself.

[slidertogrid]

I had forgot all about this thread! I bought the Invicta mentioned here from Neil some time ago. It lives under my workbench, I must dig it out.
By sheer coincidence I have a metal 78rpm disc that was part of what must have been a very sophisticated burglar alarm system from one of Gibbards shops. if I remember rightly it repeats "Police Police Police intruders have entered Gibbards shop and then gives the address and phone number. it repeats this same message over and over.
The 11U is my favourite vintage TV chassis. I have an Invicta 7070U I have owned since the mid 1970's and about five or six other variants including the formidable Trio.

Rich.

[Focus Diode]

I used to have a. McMichael MT763DST model with a PY33 HT rectifier. Equivalent to the Stella ST195, not sure of the GEC model number off hand.

The issues over low gain with valve UHF tuners over transistor types should no longer be an issue now off air transmissions have ended and modulators are used.

I remember coming home from school and turning the Defiant 9A61U on, finding it set for BBC 2 which gave dreadful results. I assumed at the time this was due to it being a minority interest channel. I was surprised to find when I turned the bottom knob they were other channels at equally poor picture quality! I excitedly told my mother who told me to switch it back to the proper channels! I don't know if we managed or had to wait for my dad to get home. The set was soon replaced by a piano key Ferguson 1500 set. Again the pictures were awful due to using a loft VHF aerial but was lived with 'til we moved in late 1973. I preferred watching my neighbour's Stella Style 70 set, superb pictures with their UHF aerial used on 625 only.

As for 405-VHF use in the '70s everyone I knew with dual standard sets used them exclusively on 625 UHF when BBC 1 and TTT were duplicated to UHFwith suitable aerials fitted. Apart from a couple of occasions from 405-line only sets I never got to see 405 VHF on a dual standard model between 1970-1978 when I got my first d/s set.

Brian

[vidjoman]

A shop where I worked in Bexleyheath for a short time in 1962/3 had a TV set displaying 625 test transmissions together with a display of 405 TV's showing pictures from London, Dover (Southern) and Sudbury (Anglia). Can't remember what the 625 line set was but think it was a pre-production model the guvnor had persuaded a rep to supply for showing.
I changed shops in '63 and there we were very busy fitting 'adaptors' to Murphy TV's well before the start of regular broadcasts. All the 625 sets I saw at that time seemed low in contrast but that improved within about a year as manufacturers improved their TV chassis.

[Hartley118]

Originally Posted by vidjoman

..........................
I changed shops in '63 and there we were very busy fitting 'adaptors' to Murphy TV's well before the start of regular broadcasts. All the 625 sets I saw at that time seemed low in contrast but that improved within about a year as manufacturers improved their TV chassis.

I recall my parents buying a rather good Murphy 23-inch dual standard set around that time. It seemed short of contrast on UHF/625, despite being fed from a good external aerial.

As an experiment, I remember dodging up a common base UHF aerial preamp which improved picture contrast so much that it remained fitted inside the set for the rest of its life. Murphy's problem seemed to be insufficient RF gain at UHF - maybe the designers hadn't finished their job by the time the set had to be launched!

Martin

[peter_scott]

Valve UHF tuners were pretty awful. Low gain and noisey.

Peter

[HamishBoxer]

Also the PC88 PC86 valves did not last long.

[Peter.N.]

..but they did have gold plated pins.

Peter

[Heatercathodeshort]

The reception if you can call it that for early BBC2 was almost impossible even in the London area. A loft aerial was a minimum requirement at Wimbledon and often resulted in a background of slight grain and that was when everything was new and 100%.
Add to this the disgraceful UHF tuner drive assemblies that stuck, slipped, jumped and simply refused to move. The Pye 11U series had a large drum with the channel numbers around it's edge driven by a cord drive system that even Philips would have found difficult to untangle.
Add to this the very low gain of the early valve tuners [the Philips with the copper sheet and plastic back was the best] and the lack of any form of AFC and you can see the old British disease of doing everything on the cheap rear it's ugly head.
The early Philips valve tuner did have an AFC connection but was never used in the UK.
Conditions improved in 1965 with the arrival of the transistor UHF tuner but the poor tuner slow motion drives continued and most of the push button tuners had incredibly bad reset until the arrival of the Bush A640 chassis.
Fortunately the entertainment value of BBC2 was not missed by 99% of the public, lifting the service burden from the television engineers of the day.
If the same problems encountered with the introduction of BBC2 had arisen in 1955 with the first popular ITA transmissions on Band 3 it would have been a nightmare for all concerned. Regards, John