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If you’re a collector of older TVs, you’re probably facing the problem in some form of having no transmissions to tune in to. With many sets you can use a SCART or other A/V input, but nothing beats using the thing as it was intended. [BorisDigital] had exactly this problem, and since he worked in a TV transmitter control room in the 1990s, he’s made a small TV station that looks and operates like the real thing.
It’s a 10 inch rack stuffed with goodies, each of which replicates the function of a piece of broadcast gear which would have cost a small fortune back in the day. At the top is a transmitter, a relatively inexpensive board from China. Below it a clock and audio monitor powered by a Pi Pico, then a vectorscope, waveform monitor, and monitor powered by a set of Pi 5s with USB video digitisers, a pair of SD card video record/play units — yet more Raspberry Pi — and at the bottom, an automatic scheduler powered by another fruity board from Cambridge. If you’re not into TV the construction may be worth a second look. Those neat looking rack front panels are 3D printed with different filaments for the lettering, and are both robust and stylish. We can already see how this could be used in our work.
We miss analogue TV, partly because it was a wonderfully intricate technology that, beautifully, just worked. it’s a few years now since we reported on the last gasp of analogue TV in the USA, about a decade after it was turned off where this is being written.
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