A Brief History of the ATV Repeater
The BRATS ATV Repeater was not the first one in the world, it was the second. The exact date it went into service
seems lost in time but it was somewhere in the early 1970's. In those days you needed an STA to set up a TV repeater.
If my memory serves me the call was W3HAM or something close to that. The STA was needed for only the first year,
after which Bob W3WCQ placed his call on the repeater and was Trustee.
The first home for the repeater was at City Hospital where we had space in the penthouse. An interesting sidelight
to having it there is that one day Bob got a phone call to turn on his receiver. He did and there was a channel
2 coming out of the repeater. A mad dash down there found some workmen eating lunch and watching TV. This
was before we had cabinets for this stuff and the men had seen the TV and thought they could watch TV while they ate.
The first repeater had a down converter at the receive antenna and a long run of co-ax to a Sony 7 inch TV.
The TV had been modified to bring out the AGC and video. The transmitter was one of the car phones modified
with a video modulator with a separate transmitter and antenna for sound. After a while we managed to borrow
a single channel, crystal controlled channel 4 receiver to replace the Sony. On-carrier audio made it easier
for the transmitter to access the repeater. All you needed was a car phone transmitter crystalled up on the
right frequency, with a video modulator, a microphone and a camera and you were ready to go. I thought that
there would be interaction between the two signals but it worked just fine.
Around 1980 the City sold the hospital to the Feds and we had to move out. Since we already had equipment (a
receive site for the 030 machine) at Good Sam Hospital we were able to move the ATV repeater there when we lost
the use of City Hospital. Co-incident with the move were some upgrades. For the receiver a Scientific Atlanta
"Frequency Agile" tuner was purchased (the kind used by cable companies) and the tube type power amp was replaced
with a transistor amp. Along the line many other changes have been made: Mike Dees made a controller,
I made a 1200 input, a sound detector with very sharp skirts (to minimize nearby interference) and several
other improvements including an 800 output.
As for the sound, we decided that the 030 machine would be used on most nets so that we might interest more
people in ATV. Also a consideration was the need for squelch for the sound on receiving TVs.
If you disagree with anything I have said or want to add to what I have said I invite you to write your own
article. I am sure that Mayer would love to have more articles from the club members.
Heru W3WVV
Western Union Stops Sending Telegrams
After 145 years, Western Union has quietly stopped sending telegrams. On the company's Web site, if you
click on "Telegrams" in the left-side navigation bar, you're taken to a page that ends a technological era
with about as little fanfare as possible: "Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all
Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we
thank you for your loyal patronage. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact a customer
service representative." The decline of telegram use goes back at least to the 1980s, when long-distance
telephone service became cheap enough to offer a viable alternative in many, if not most cases. Faxes
didn't help. E-mail could be counted as the final nail in the coffin.
Western Union has not failed. It long ago refocused its main business to make money transfers for
consumers and businesses. Revenues are now $3 billion annually. It's now called Western Union
Financial Services, Inc. and is a subsidiary of First Data Corp. The world's first telegram was sent on
May 24, 1844 by inventor Samuel Morse. The message, "What hath God wrought," was transmitted from
Washington to Baltimore. In a crude way, the telegraph was a precursor of the Internet in that it allowed
rapid communication, for the first time, across great distances.
Digital sound inferior to FM
Music connoisseurs have slammed the quality of digital radio broadcasts in the UK . They claim that the
BBC and commercial broadcasters are packing too many stations into their digital transmissions and as a
result the sound quality is suffering. Digital radio is touted as offering better sound quality than analogue
radio. It suffers none of the hissing and crackle that blights analogue broadcasts. Digital radios are also
easier to tune than analogue sets. However, owners of high end hi-fi systems claim the sound quality from
digital radio is worse than the traditional FM broadcasts that digital radio is intended to replace. As one music
buff said: "On a small portable it is not an issue, but if you have very good FM reception on a hi-fi system,
digital radio is nasty." The problem is that broadcasters can only transmit a set amount of information within
their allocated digital frequencies and this has to be shared between their stations. As a result, BBC
Radio 1, 2, 4 and 6 are broadcast at 128 kilo-bits per second and Radio 5 Live is transmitted at 80 kilo-bits
per second. This compares with the 256,000 kilo-bits per second of sound quality offered by a typical
Compact Disc. Responding to criticisms of the quality of BBC digital broadcasts, a BBC spokesman said:
"We believe that we are providing good sound quality on all our digital networks and recent research bears
this out. Around 95% of digital radio listeners rate its sound quality as excellent, good or satisfactory." GB2RS
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