Which got me to wondering – what’s happened to all the old TV and radio equipment that used to be around? Most broadcast organizations don’t get rid of their equipment until it’s practically useless – but has all of it been melted down?
The answer is, of course, that there are enthusiasts for old broadcast technology all over the world who have been busily collecting obsolete equipment. And many of them have catalogued their equipment on the net.
Old Technology in Cyberspace
http://www.oldradio.com/archives/hardwar... Barry Mishkind (‘the eclectic engineer’) has a wonderful collection of old TV and radio gear that will warm the valves of hardened old broadcasters.
Tim Stoffel has a wide range of ancient equipment at his Quadruplex Park museum which lives in cyberspace at http://www.lionlmb.org/quadpark.html . Tim and his collection live in real life in Reno, Nevada. (As far as I can tell from some of the pictures, some of these ancient – and bulky – machines live in Tim’s house with him. It must be a talking point for the neighbours!
Chuck Pharis, a broadcast engineer working for ABC TV in Hollywood, California, is building a museum of more than 70 old broadcast TV cameras at the back of his house (his wife must be extraordinarily long suffering. I’ve just asked my wife how she would feel about such an enterprise and I was left in no doubt as to how little she would appreciate it (the term ‘skunk in a lift’ comes to mind). http://www.pharis-video.com/ is an extensive site detailing Chuck’s interests and his collection.
There is something special about these giant machines, the dinosaurs of broadcasting. Some of them were so enormous, they needed an entire room devoted to a cooling system to make them work. A colleague of mine worked on restoring some old Quad format BBC tapes for broadcast on a modern system. The machine worked like a dream but the tapes had deteriorated so badly, as soon as the rapidly spinning Quad heads had read the information on them, the oxide fell off. This really was a case of getting it right first take. It also meant the programme had to be patched together in pieces because they had to keep stop the giant Quad machines to clean the oxide from the ruined tapes out of the works.
