Not related to Australia, but I thought this short youtube clip of my 1950 Admiral TV set would be of interest. This set works (after restoration) pretty well , but with some intercarrier buzz in the sound.

How is digital television coming along in the US?

The reason I ask is that analogue television in Australia will pretty much be a thing of the past in a year or two, in fact some rural areas here are already digital-only. A few weeks ago I had to let another member know how to build a mini relay station to convert digital to analogue and am wondering if you guys are in the same boat.

Nice telly by the way. I've not yet seen one with the rounded corners like the screen on that one has.

Digital TV here can be fussy to receive, if the signal strength is low or has "ghosts" (these don't show in the images, but degrade the receiver box decoder's performance) or interference. It either works perfectly, to a narrow range of breakups and pixelation, to nothing at all. We use "8VSB" modulation, "COFDM" might work better in some cases.

And the FCC wants to crowd the broadcasters into a smaller UHF band, so they can "sell" off the newly emptied channels to cell phone companies.

I liked the Admiral TV set. I also liked the '60s Kool cigarette ad. When did they ban cigarette advertising on TV in the States?
We had Admiral TV's in Australia, but I don't know if it was the same company as the one from the US.

I have a AWA model 202C, from 1956. I believe this was the first TV model sold by AWA. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of it to show as it is at a friends place at the moment. My friend has been helping me to restore it and while it now works we are having some teething problems with it. When I get it back I'll post some pictures and also ask for some advice.

Analogue TV will be switched off in Melbourne on either 10 Dec. 2013 or 31 Dec 2013, as the dates vary depending on which web site you read. I've already stocked up on Jaycar's RF modulators in preparation.
I'd like to have a TV party on the switch-off date. My dilemma being which station to tune to on the day. HSV 7 was the first TV station to officially open in Melbourne (4th Nov 1956), but both 7 & 9 were having test transmissions well before that date.
Cheers.

Admiral TV in Australia was indeed the U.S. company, which caused problems for them. Their products were thought of as "foreign" and their design was considered suspect. The parent company's involvement in Cold War politics didn't help either.

Sue -

Admiral's "design was considered suspect"

Was this on account of the American standard using a narrower tuning band allocation than the Australian frequency plan?

I know that in band planning circles Australians considered our wider bands (and guard bands) to be better practice for better quality, where the Americans were looking to put as many stations as possible into the band and accused us of "gold-plating" our band plan.

Maven

Here's a still image of the same Admiral set showing game 2 of our "World Series" baseball championship best of 7 games.


It was 1971 when cigarette TV adverts stopped.


See this advert at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0dcsJ5CMnI

This set uses an IF around 20 to 26 MHz, instead of the later standard of 41 to 47MHz. The USA was going to have a channel 1 around 45MHz, but that was deleted as propagation via skywave would occasionally happen, making a mess of things.

Your Admiral sets would have to be built to do 625i 50Hz (PAL in B&W), as well as a differing sound IF intercarrier frequency, and differing channel frequencies. My set has 3 video IF stages, and one sound IF intercarrier stage. That should make for decent performance when this design is changed to fit Aussie specs.

The reason why their products were thought of as "foreign" and their design was considered suspect was maybe because they used printed circuit boards long before other manufacturers did!

They entered the market with cheap 21" sets, too, before anyone else. I'm sure it wasn't the first or last time people worried that a big U.S. company might be taking a loss to wipe out the local competion. Their designs were criticised because their earliest Australian sets had an American-designed chassis with a 21MHz I.F., rather than the local standard 36MHz I.F.

In the early 1960s I was visiting a schoolmate whose parents owned a hotel, so they weren't short of a quid. They had a huge Admiral TV with cordless remote control for channel changing, something that I'd never seen before. And, even back then, the problem of "where's the remote?" was an issue.

It worked on audible clicks and when eating dinner they showed me how hitting a fork with a knife accomplished a channel change, so problem solved.

They were a brilliant idea, those remotes. No batteries needed because they were ultrasonic glockenspiels!

The fork trick - how great!

If only I had learned to control the infrared remote by striking a match, I might have won more channel and volume contests on the home front!

Maven

If my memory serves me correct the Australian government of the day set a standard screen size of 17" & most of the early Australian TV's were only 17" & Admiral TV's were the only 21" sets that were made from the very start of television in this country & there was no factory in Australia that was manufacturing 21" CRT's at the time & that's how the US company Thomas Electronics set up a plant in Australia to manufacture the 21" CRT's that Admiral needed for their TV's which trod on a lot of local manufactures toes.

It wasn't till about 1957 when all other manufactures started to produce 21" models & by then AWV & Philips were also producing 21" CRT's locally to meet the demand.

There were 2 versions of the AX20Y4 chassis as it was known here which was the Australian version of the US 20Y4 chassis, the initial production run had the US standard video IF frequency of 21.5MHz & then later production units went over the the mandated Australian standard video IF frequency of 36MHz.

Admiral TV's were geared towards the higher price point compared to locally produced sets & would cost about 239 guineas.

John Hunter wrote the following about Admiral TV's in Australia:

"Meanwhile, the Admiral was the first in Australia to offer a 21" CRT as well as incorporate printed circuit board construction. The other unique feature was the choice of I.F. Needless to say the 21" CRT was popular with the public. But the servicing personnel unfamiliar with PCB's weren't so enthusiastic. But causing particular concern was the video IF. The Australian standard was 30.5MHz for the sound and 36MHz for the video (this changed by the early 1960's around the same time as the change to 13 channels . However, in the U.S. the standard for video I.F. was 21.5MHz and Admiral simply kept to that here.

This was seen as an opportune moment for the other local set makers to put down their competitor. (If we can't offer 21" then no one else should!) It got to the point where they tried to actually get a law through parliament to ban Admiral. The scare tactics used were that the non-standard I.F. would result in sets with an inferior picture, the theory being that 21.5MHz was not a reserved frequency in Australia, and therefore the Admiral sets may pick up spurious interference. Needless to say, it wasn't a problem and the sets worked very well. Admiral did change to the local I.F. later, but were gone from local TV production by the mid 1960's. ("I don't have any complete 21.5MHz Admirals, but I do have a Philco brought in from the U.S. and I do concur that the 'non standard' I.F. isn't a problem, even in today's more crowded RF environment" [J.H. 9/9/02])"

I was told by a manager at Hills (Admiral Aust service agents) that Admiral pulled out of Australia after the 1961 recession. >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession_of_1960%E2%80%9361

Not sure if their decision was driven by difficulty in the USA or if the recession spread to Australia.

Since US recessions seldom synchronise w Australian ones, we can presume the motive was from their US operations

Actually the 60/61 Credit Squeeze did affect Australia because it started the spectacular downfall of HG Palmer retail chain (which by the way had their own dreadful store-brand TV)