Re: TV standards (was Did Commodore cheat...)

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <silverdr@wfmh.org.pl>
To: <cbm-hackers@musoftware.de>
Sent: Friday, January 18, 2019 3:20 PM
Subject: Re: TV standards (was Did Commodore cheat...)




> On 2019-01-17, at 21:51, Mike Stein <mhs.stein@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> If you talk like external modulators than you may be right (I don't recall seeing those either). In general though we used to use VHF for broadcast in non-NTSC part of the world too. Obviously there wasn't much room in this band so only 12 channels were available for broadcast use on VHF. UHF was added later on and for a relatively long time TV sets had both bands. I /think/ VHF channels were still in use in this millenium.
> ---
> "*Used to* use" ? "*Were* still in use" ? What do you use now?
> 
> Here in North America VHF channels are definitely still in use in this millenium, although with a few exceptions we switched from analog to digital ten years ago; according to Wikipedia Europe also still uses VHF, albeit on slightly different frequencies.
> 
> Am I missing something?

No, actually you are not. It was me. Simply the last time I checked (and the previous, and even one more previous), there was nothing on the TV reserved VHF channels here. This situation persisted at least since the last analogue transmitters were decommissioned several years ago. Probably even earlier as I recall about the late nineties or early 2000s, the transition to UHF was advertised as "necessary" because the VHF transmission was supposed to be discontinued "soon". You made me check again though and it seems that for less than three months (sic!) now, one VHF channel is again in use. It carries now another DVB-T mux on top of multiple UHF based ones.

--------------

Everything I read seems to say that the European TV frequencies are not that much different from ours, so what _is_ using the 174 to 230 MHz VHF band (or 40 to 50) if not broadcast TV?

Considering the scarcity of available frequencies it's unlikely that it's not used at all.