Talk:List of experimental television stations

Untitled

KPHO-TV, Channel 5 in Phoenix AZ signed on in 1949 and is still on the air.

It was the first TV station in Arizona.

EoGuy (talk) 06:36, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

That's nice, but it hardly qualifies as "experimental" as the format of North America television signals had already been well-standardised by 1941 and there would've already been a hundred US stations on-air by 1949. The "experimental television stations" on this list are all pre-1941, some of them going back to the earliest and most primitive experimentation (circa-1928) where the so-called "television" was not a cathode ray tube device but a mechanical spinning disc with a blur of lights controlled from a shortwave radio broadcast. WRGB in particular was prone to this sort of experimentation in the late 1920's as Schenectady, New York is the home of General Electric. There was no detail in these "mechanical television" images and no standardisation of their format or broadcast frequencies, but they were the first experiments in the new medium.

By the late 1930's, TV was close to being ready-for-market but a few key parameters (such as the number of lines in the picture and the frequency for picture and sound) still were not fully standardised. A TV from this era might have fewer lines than normal of video and AM sound instead of FM - so might not work today even with a standards-compliant analogue signal. This lack of standardisation held TV in the "experimental" phase.

The only post-1941 station which belongs on this list is KC2XAK and then only because "operation Bridgeport" was a UHF repeater rebroadcasting WNBT on UHF 24 in 1949, back when TV only went up to VHF 13. UHF was added to standard TV's (nominally) in 1952 and even then was a corner soon cut from most receiver designs to save cost (80% of the original 1954 UHF TV stations were out of business before the year was out). In 1949, a UHF TV station *would* still be an experiment. KPTV used the original KC2XAK transmitter during its brief UHF life (it soon moved to VHF 12) but by then this was nominally a new but standard channel, not an experiment, so it really doesn't belong on this list.

Legally, experimental stations had a slightly-odd pattern of broadcast callsign, typically inserting a digit into the ID, amateur radio-style, or an X for "experimental" (so KC2XAK) where 2 indicated the NY/NJ region - not sure why this didn't get 1X as CT is New England and stations like radioamateur W1AW had '1' in the calls. Zenith's KS2XBS had experimental calls because of their infernal pay TV tinkering, at that time an experiment which only worked in monochrome. The most recent "experimental" analogue broadcast TV station to come to mind is Star Ray TV as a low-power television station serving part of Toronto before Canada had community low-power TV on any standard, official regulated basis. An "experiment" from a legal and policy standpoint, but certainly not from a technological point of view... LPTV was already proven elsewhere.

I suppose a digital television station would've qualified as "experimental" as recently as the mid-1990's... maybe later if it was using some clever but unproven idea like distributed transmission with multiple same-channel digital transmitters carefully synchronised to fill in gaps in the main signal. At some point, however, this stuff becomes proven technology and therefore no longer an experiment.

In some cases, this article contradicts individual-station articles (such as Zenith's experimental Chicago station - which the station's page lists as electronic, not mechanical) or is outdated (WRGB may be one of the rare stations on this list with a digital VHF signal, still VHF 6; most low-VHF stations went UHF digitally). 66.102.83.61 (talk) 01:55, 24 May 2012 (UTC)

Montréal/Toronto

Not sure why the two 1930's mechanical TV experiments in Canada were listed as predecessors of CBF and CBL TV. The experimental stations were privately owned and left the air in the 1930s. CBF/CBL are R-C/CBC owned-and-operated stations which built TV in 1952 by adding a -T to the existing bogus radio calls (CB is Chile). The obvious place to park any Ted Rogers Sr. tinkering is CFRB "rogers batteryless" radio (which the family no longer owns) or, failing that, various Toronto AM/FM/TV outlets operated by his son as Rogers Communications a generation later. I see nothing to tie papa Ted to the CBC O&O station. The CBC/Radio-Canada flagships appear to have been new stations from the ground up, not experiments. K7L (talk) 13:08, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

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Title misleading

This is a list of experimental television stations in North America, i.e. USA and Canada (but not Mexico). There were many more experimental television stations in Europe and elsewhere, see; Prewar television stations. The List should be titled accordingly Jamesmcardle^(talk) 22:36, 15 June 2022 (UTC)