The CTC-5 Made it to Germany already!

[RetroHacker]

A lot of really interesting sets at Marcel's museum, interesting how different trends in design evolve. I do rather like the look of the fully exposed CRT face, probably because it's so different. I've never seen an American TV like that. That second Telefunken color set is a very nice looking one, I like the clean lines and the balanced design. Another thing I've noticed is that it seems to be more popular in the european sets to have the controls mounted lower, and the speaker above them - exactly opposite most American televisons, where the controls are normally mounted closer to the top of the set. Another big difference in the apperance of the European sets is the lack of tuning knobs, something that persisted in the US until the 80's. Nearly every American TV from the 70's will have two knobs, one for VHF (Channels 1-13, and a position to select UHF) and one for UHF (14 - 83). My guess is that the European sets didn't have to worry about dealing with such a large number of channels, so pushbutton tuning was practical even without digital tuners. I'm not familliar with the TV system outside the US, I know that most of Europe uses PAL, and France uses SECAM, but I don't know about the channel allocation. Just, from looking at the sets, there are six pushbuttons on that Telefunken, so what, six channels?

Now, that's not to suggest that the US has more channels, we just have more channel numbers. To prevent overlapping transmitters in different areas, the stations are spread around the band a little. It's not uncommon to only be able to pick up three channels in an area, and a couple weak UHF stations.

-Ian

[yagosaga]

Originally Posted by RetroHacker

Another big difference in the apperance of the European sets is the lack of tuning knobs, something that persisted in the US until the 80's. Nearly every American TV from the 70's will have two knobs, one for VHF (Channels 1-13, and a position to select UHF) and one for UHF (14 - 83). My guess is that the European sets didn't have to worry about dealing with such a large number of channels, so pushbutton tuning was practical even without digital tuners. I'm not familliar with the TV system outside the US, I know that most of Europe uses PAL, and France uses SECAM, but I don't know about the channel allocation. Just, from looking at the sets, there are six pushbuttons on that Telefunken, so what, six channels? -Ian

In the 1960s and 1970s we only had three tv channels, they were ARD, ZDF and the third (culture) channel. But ARD and ZDF were the main channels. (The second tv channel, ZDF, came in 1963.) Some people near the border to other countries could get even five or six channels . In my region we had the two GDR channels too, but could see them only in b&w, because the early PAL sets had no SECAM module. Channel range is VHF with channel 2 - 12 and UHF with channel 21 - 69. Our channel width is 7 Mc from picture carrier to the picture carrier of the next channel.In 1984 we got commercial tv, today we get 25 channels (commercial and national broadcasting), our tv system (on the air) now is dvb-t, and I convert it to PAL or to NTSC.