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To: mamelukesabre
Amateur TV has been around since the mid-70's when I first started in amateur radio. The "slow scan" variety of ATV works like a fax machine using audio tones over the radio to send a "frame". It's less exciting than swapping pictures via e-mail. The "fast scan" ATV works like conventional television. The allocated frequencies are around 421.25 MHz. You can find a wealth of information here. It appears from that page that hams are digging into digital television too.

A "cable ready" TV has a fairly versatile tuner that covers a variety of channel allocation schemes. The channel assignments differ for "over the air" vs "cable" channels. There are 2 or 3 different channel schemes for cable as well. What is important is that the "cable ready" tuner when turned to CATV ch 57 is dead on 421.25 MHz, ch 60 is dead on 439.25 MHz. CATV channels 57 - 60 fall in the 70 cm ham band. Check your local area for fast scan ATV on 70 cm. You might be able to pick up some transmissions with stuff you have around the house. Passive reception doesn't require a license. If it really strikes your fancy, it is easy enough to study for the license. It's all written tests now. No more Morse code proficiency.

A good Faraday cage is a significant task. You'll have to encase the converter box AND the TV. The security department at my company was making an office area in a Faraday cage to process TS data. It took a couple of weeks to build the cage and about 4 days to certify it using standardized test receivers outside and transmitters inside. Remember you are dealing with high frequencies with very short wave lengths. It's not a trivial task.

229 posted on 01/07/2008 9:32:35 PM PST by Myrddin
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To: Myrddin

It seems to me that a microwave oven is a faraday cage. If I cant find an old one big enough to cram the TV and the box into, I would think I could take apart an old one and figure out how to incorporate parts of several old ones into one faraday cage.


257 posted on 01/12/2008 2:06:25 PM PST by mamelukesabre
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