Re: ive always wondered

[Garrett Wollman <wollman>]

<<On Tue, 16 Oct 2001 12:58:04 -0400 (EDT), Sven Franklyn Weil <sven@gordsven.com> said:

> TV Channels 1 - 13 are still used in Europe (Germany, Netherlands, etc.).
> The UK abandoned it in the 1980s, I think, opting for UHF.  I think the
> reason was because of interference with continental transmitters.

That's not my understanding.  Look at what transmitter manufacturers
are advertising to European customers: lots of high-power UHF kit,
little or no VHF.  In most European countries that I am aware of,
there may be one or two services in Band III (what we would call
VHF-high), and anything licensed within the last few years is UHF.
Older TVs made for European markets often do not even indicate channel
numbers at all; one was expected to locate the local TV 1, TV 2, and
TV 3 services ``by eye'' and then tell the TV tuner which one was
which.  In some countries, Ireland for example, VHF channels were
identified with letters rather than numbers, but of course only the
engineers would have cared since for normal people there was just
RTE 1 and RTE 2 and who cared what channel they were on.

> Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Central America and the Caribbean all use
> both the NTSC VHF and UHF bands (the same system as in the USA).

Not entirely true.  (This is Scott's cue to talk about watching TV on
St. Maarten/St. Martin, assuming he's still awake after reporting on
the Trial at the Edge of Forever.)

There are actually a number of bizarre TV systems in use in Central
and South America.  In addition to traditional System M (525 lines, 60
Hz, 6-MHz channels) with NTSC color, there are also places which use
System M with PAL color, other places which uses System N (625 lines,
50 Hz, 6-MHz channels) with NTSC color, French dependencies which use
System K-prime (625 lines, 50 Hz, 8-MHz channels) with SECAM color,
and probably a few places with plain old PAL-B/D.

-GAWollman