Yes, it's pleasing to know that some people are interested to our passions and bring ahead the story of the electronic technology. The same thing has happened to me too. Last year I knew a guy, that collects vintage television sets and has the hearth's desire to learn all these things, that I thought could interest only to my strange mind...
However for greater precision, that wich I said yesterday about the Italian people that didn't know the old "roundie" tv sets, is not totally true. Near Florence here in Italy, a very particular person, Mr. Montagni, imported a batch of new unsold Zenith tv sets. In the laboratory of his company, he modified the color circuits and the accord frequency, for making them suitable for our tv system and PAL color. In fact, aside the "flip-flop electronic switch of the color phase, the PAL system is very similar to the NTSC. Only the carrier frequencies are different. Here we have the intercarrier audio frequency at 5.5 MHz instead of the 4.5 MHz of the USA system, and the color carrier at 4.43 MHz instead of 3.58 MHz. The same type of modulation are used and the color is almost alike until the electronic PAL switch. Instead the french SECAM is based on a complicated system and the number of lines changes depending on the wave band. Furthermore the audio signal is modulated in AM and the video polarity is positive instead of our negative modulation.
Mr. Montagni sold a lot of these Zenith tv sets in the first years of the seventies, when in Italy the color tv broadcasting there wasn't, for receiving some color broadcasting televisions coming from Switzerland and France, repeating their transmissions and converting them in PAL system. Some people, in Tuscany, maybe remember those "strange" tv sets with a roundie cathode ray tube.
Unfortunately, a lot of these tv sets still wrapped, were destroyed because unsold. It's a really shame! They were still new!
