I remember the analog era. That lasted quite a while and it worked well (bad signal just meant a slightly more snow in a picture). Then on digital era I have already transitioned from DVB-T to DVB-T2. When changing a channel in those 70ies or 80ies televisions, it happened instantly. Now we have huge amounts of computing power, but every press on remote feels like the command is queued somewhere for a second or two. I hate using today's televisions and tuners. While the picture and sound is considerably better, the usability is horror. Also Teletext worked always fast and was instant. Today, if you try to open simple program guide, it feels like it is compiling a kernel on a background.
As a radio hobbyist I found this fascinating.<p>There is a large amount of literature on the design of old-style radio circuits (MF and HF, eg shortwave), but surprisingly little available on the design of modern VHF/UHF consumer electronics.<p>In particular I found it interesting how the manufactures coped with the crazy proliferations of different TV broadcast standards around the world.<p>The authors home page at <a href="https://www.maximus-randd.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.maximus-randd.com/</a> looks like being a huge source of interesting reading for RF enthusiasts.
This is a wonderful site and I would highly recommend it to anyone in TV or RF engineering. By that, I mean the complete site not just the TV tuner history pages (i.e.: <a href="https://www.maximus-randd.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.maximus-randd.com/</a>). This is how the internet <i>should</i> be used to convey information. Not only is the information therein both comprehensive and very detailed but also the 'cleanliness' and clear layout of the pages across the site is second to none. It's a long while since I've seen such a well presented and well laid out site <i>(even JavaScript is used sparingly and not abused as is usually the case across much of the web)</i>. When I create my next website, I'll certainly keep the presentation of this site in mind.<p>The information about tuners is remarkably comprehensive (it's certainly the best I've seen in a single documented collection on the subject). I don't work with TV tuners on a day-to-day basis but I've had a lot to do with them in the past—and that goes back to the vacuum tube/turret type well before we had varicap* tuning (so I feel competent to comment on the site).<p>That said, there are stacks of valuable information on this site about tuners and other stuff that I was either unaware of or not very familiar about. There's nothing more I can add as to do so would be superfluous—as the excellence of this site speaks for itself.<p>_<p>* <i>[I recall initially hating varicap tuning due to its propensity to suffer cross modulation (which meant that one had to ensure that TV channels had roughly the same RF input levels and that strong out-of-band services were kept out of such tuners by installing filters/traps in the antenna line before the tuner input—lest herringbone patterns result).]</i>
Amazing site -- safe to say this info doesn't exist anywhere else, at least not online. It covers some of the earliest TV development work in the 1930s all the way to satellite/DBS in the 2000s.<p>Worth looking at the older stuff, just for the examples of European industrial design in the WWII and later eras.
This reminded me of the story of the EF50 valve and 'PYE IF strip', so I've added a submission:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25735404" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25735404</a><p>'The history of a pioneering tube that was developed by Philips Research and that was, next to the magnetron, “The most important tube from World War II” - Ronald Dekker'<p><i>One of the problems Bowen was facing was that while early 1939 all components of the Airborn Radar seemed to have fallen in place, he still had only one receiver which up to that moment no supplier had been able to duplicate. But then quite unexpected his old professor comes up with a golden tip:<p>"Quite by chance in april or May of 1939, I heard some encouraging news from Edward Appleton, my old professor at King’s Colledge and now Jacksonian Professor of Physics at Cambridge. He told me that the Pye Radio Compagny, still hoping that there would be a television industry in Britain, had set up a production line for 45 Mc/s TRF chassis and had actually made a trial run. I went hot-foot to Cambridge to see B.J. Edwards, the Technical Director of Pye Radio, and was rewarded with a remarkable sight – he had scores [!] of TRF chassis just the type we were looking for. These used a new valve with an octal [sic] base, which had not yet appeared on the market. It was the EF50, a valve which was destined to play almost as important a part in Radar war as the magnetron itself."<p>Bowen took a few samples of the Pye chassis back to Bawdsey and quickly verified that it was significantly better than their old EMI chassis; it was also smaller and lighter. Touch and his men quickly put a 200 MHz mixer (at that time still based on an acorn tube, but later replaced by an EF54) in front of it and the receive problem was as good as solved.
</i>
Fascinating view into the history of Philips RF developments in 1990-2000 timeframe. Absolutely loved it!<p>WSP (World Standard Pinning) "standardization" story with management naive dreams of selling own products in Asia without cannibalizing home European market while simultaneously moving Consumer Hardware Development to Asia .. where all the hardware was thereafter designed with Asian parts first was priceless.<p>Philips TV division deciding to second source, skipping Philips Tuners division thus eroding own company market share and profit. Then in turn Philips Tuners division commissioning a cheaper clone of Philips MOPLL from Siemens with a huge minimal volume quota, consequently eroding Philips Semiconductors market share by 25% and forcing Tuner division to manufacture inferior products with already obsolete part. Just beautiful, <Chef's Kiss>, Pure genius!<p>> The most devastating development, however, was purely internal and of severe structural impact.
Back before the RTL-SDR era, there were a number of writeups on building homebrew spectrum analyzers out of TV tuners. Example: <a href="https://www.qsl.net/n9zia/spec/w6hph.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.qsl.net/n9zia/spec/w6hph.pdf</a>