I think special_k post looks like it was AI generated, it is mostly bollocks.
Izzat right? I was all ready to thank them for their post.
Sitting here on the other side of the pond, it all seemed quite credible to me. But how would I know?
As its you that asks sweety 😁
Well, the claim was that there were no
commercial television stations within the UK, before the late 1980s.
Verbatim:
There was no commercial TV stations [in the UK] until the very late 1980s
A commercial TV station to my obviously limited understanding is one that was financed independently from government funding, and this is done the same way as it is in America with adverts and later with sponsored programmes.
There were several separate companies who ran different areas, but only one was originally allowed in each area.
These commercial stations did
not have to adhere to the mandate that the BBC did.
Edit: the only difference between the USA pattern where some individual programs were solely made for the purposes of advertising a single organisations product, and the UK pattern in, is that in the UK explicit advertising was to be confined to advertising breaks in programs, though product placement was allowed, so "Soap operas" would have perhaps had several products being placed in one show, although no reference or introduction would be made; an example of this in the UK was the crime drama "The Sweeney" where the show placed and promoted products from the Ford Motor Company.
Why special K then brings in "public service" description is just to bluff the original point,
As for the transmitter powers... There's Google if you want the boring facts... but those little things don't seem to matter to some... I'm going to make an assertion here that the nearest transmitter of any kind to the UK that had an input power of 2MW during the time when the analog TV transmitters under discussion were operational was the one used to broadcast Radio Luxembourg on the medium wave broadcast band... check if you like... currently the transmitter site at Solt in Hungary is the only one that can boast that power I believe.
Detector vans...
As others have said the process of detecting a crt superhet television receiver is rather trivial, why there are those that don't accept it being possible IDK?
That is the official story but, as always, without evidence. The simplest explanation that fits with surviving evidence (prosecution records, vans you can see in museums) is that they just lied.
Thats just an opinion... I posted the GPO journal of the era that details the design of the equipment, and the article with the pictures of one of the original vans.
So we have to accept that this was all fake?
My reason for being interested...
I was born in Germany and lived there for the first ten years of my life, and so really don't remember much of the era of analog television transmissions in the UK. However, my mother is Welsh and Grandpops was an engineer for the GPO... he serviced the equipment used in these vans... he told me that the uhf equipment was so good that from 50metres it could pinpoint a televisions position in a dwelling
if it was switched on of course, and also which channel was being watched.
He said that there weren't many units in service, less than ten in the country at any one time, and the sight of them periodically patrolling the streets was generally enough to send the licence dodgers scuttling to the post office to buy their licences... it's possible there were also 'dummy' vehicles, because of this.
The big drawback with the equipment was that it couldn't discern a monochrome TV from colour, and so if you could buy your TV and give a false address then you could just buy the licence at the lower fee...
As I said in a previous post, the detectors were a tool that was used in the identification of licence evaders, and could not be used as evidence if in the rare cases it was taken to court
Generally people were pursuaded to just buy the licence.
But hey! People should believe what makes them happy, this doesnt matter, it's all history.
But it was sloppy reading from Xena E
What did I miss?
X