ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade Non-US Electrical Systems & Trades "Esoteric" countries and their wiring practices?

I've also seen PAL called "Pictures At Last" and "People Are Lavender". As for the cost of equipment, in the early days of British color (O.K. "Colour" then! ) there were actually two types of PAL decoder used in receivers.

PAL-S was the simple system which just displayed each line as it was decoded and relied upon the human eye to average out any phase error (i.e. a phase shift which would turn a yellow area toward red on one line would automatically shift it toward green on the next line due to the V-signal phase inversion). The PAL-D (Deluxe) decoder used a delay line to electronically average out the phase error before it reached the CRT. And it cost more, of course!


Generally, 625-line PAL gives very good pictures. but then 525-NTSC is capable of excellent results too. I've dealt with all three of the main systems (625-PAL, 625-SECAM, 525-NTSC) and given good clean signals with properly adjusted equipment they are all capable of delivering good quality pictures. In fact, when I was at Goonhilly we would regularly have a bank of monitors displaying images in all three formats and it was very difficult to tell them apart without looking at the telltale mode lights.

In fact in a studio environment, NTSC has some advantages over PAL, such as improved vertical color resolution and the ability to make tighter edits on videotape.

Where PAL scores heavily is under "average" broadcast conditions. NTSC is very sensitive to phase shifts in the color subcarrier, which result in hue errors. That's why American sets have separate hue and saturation controls.

With PAL the color reference oscillator in the receiver is accurately locked to the transmitted signal so that only a saturation control is needed. Thus PAL tends to give better results when the signal is less than ideal, although the difference is perhaps not quite so great as some people would have you believe.

As has been mentioned above, the distribution network for TV signals can do all sorts of nasty things to the signals. Cable TV is common throughout America, but all systems are not equal! I've seen a few cable networks where the quality of the signals is really bad (certainly below FCC minimums for broadcast quality). It takes only a few bad connections on the cables (or one or two unauthorized taps!) to really mess up the impedance matching and create some horrible phase shift errors. PAL and SECAM will also suffer from bad ghosting and other gremlins in such circumstances.

The old French system was actually 819 lines, and was monochrome only. You can't call it SECAM, because SECAM is the color system (Sequentiel Couleur A Memoire), which as you say was adopted in France with a change to 625 line standards.

I've heard various arguments over why France favored SECAM over other systems, including the one that it was to protect French manufacturing interests. Although SECAM wasn't widely transmitted until much later, it was being developed in the 1950s though, and thus pre-dates PAL, at least in its first version. It also went through several stages of development, and today there still exists a variant of "standard SECAM" which is used in some Middle-East countries.

VHS and Beta video formats for PAL and SECAM are different. The basic luminance and sound recording are identical, only the color signals are handled differently, so it's possible to play such a tape in the "wrong" machine and get a black-&-white picture.

By the way, in some circles SECAM is known as "System Essentially Contrary to American Method." Never let it be said that engineers don't have a sense of humor!

Neither have I! I suspect that somewhere along the line somebody might have misread and corrupted this abbreviation from "OIRT". The latter is the official broadcast standard used in many former Eastern-Block countries (I forget what the initials stand for).

Not only did they adopt SECAM rather than PAL for color (which in itself would still have allowed people near the border to watch Western TV in black-&-white), they also used different channel assignments and spacing. A major difference is that system B (most of Western Europe, except France) used 5.5MHz spacing between video and audio carriers whereas system D (Eastern Europe) was 6.5MHz. That would prevent anyone tuning in the "wrong" stations from hearing any sound!


[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 01-12-2003).]

The plug description is much better than the other ones I've seen.
What about adding the polarized NEMA plug to A?
Picture D answers the old question whether there are BS 546 plugs with the cord emerging straight.
Some E plugs I've seen (old "French only") were not round but shaped like a triangle with rounded corners.
The "shaped C plug" is called "contour plug". It has 4.8mm pins and is shaped like a Schuko plug.
In Italy there are also wall receptacles that have an Italian 10/16A and a standard Schuko receptacle side by side. Lots of equipment in Italy is sold with Schuko plugs, hence lots of adaptors. Really looks like the good 'ole italian plug is going down the drain in favor of Schuko!
Australian sockets are always grounded, but plugs aren't necessarily!
Italian 16A plug has 4.8mm plugs, so you can't plug contour plugs into an italian receptacle (frequently heard girls yelling about not being able to use their hairdryers). As a matter of fact our room at a Torino Youth hostel had a receptacle which would _only_ take 16A plugs! Imagine the cursing of 4 people wanting to charge their cell phones!

Wow, now I know more about PAL/SECAM/NTSC.

Yes, I have also seem the name contour plug. I have to add a drawing or picture to explain what it looks like. I was thinking of placing this under the 2.5A plug section.

I couldn't find a drawing of the type E plug, so I simply made one from dimensions of the combination plug. All cordsets seem to be the combination type.

[This message has been edited by C-H (edited 01-13-2003).]

Years ago I came across an article on pirate TV in a magazine that also told of how Eastern Europeans would drive to the borders with Western European countries and hook up portable TV sets to the batteries of their cars to watch the Western TV networks.

Also, a lot of people (in Poland) would build their own sattelite dishes and receivers.

I assume people living in East Germany could tune in the West German TV channels and vice versa, right?

What happened to the East German TV channels? Were they just absorbed by the ZDF, ARD and 3 networks or did they stay on as additional channels along with new ARD, ZDF and 3 relay stations?

CH:

Here's a picture of a French plug and socket for your website. I stole it from Castorama:

Male plug side view:



male plug face view:


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The plugs and sockts are manufactured by Legrand (who has a nasty website, by the way).
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Here is a shot of a French earthed wall socket:

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Here is a shot of an un-earthed two-pin socket:


[This message has been edited by SvenNYC (edited 01-13-2003).]

[This message has been edited by Webmaster (edited 05-24-2004).]

Tack!

In the GDR most people could watch western TV, except for the Dresden area. For this ARD was also called "ausser Raum Dresden", i.e. "except Dresden area". The 2 national stations DDR 1 and DDR 2 just died and the hardware was probably either absorbed or taken down (outdated equipment,...).
The SECAM videos I tried to play on PAL recorder and TV actually had color, but with weird patterns all over. The NTSC Super Nintendo I own works perfectly on a PAL TV, only in black and white. I tried that for quite some time before buying a used NTSC/PAL TV set.
Concerning plugs, where can you get fuses for 13A plugs? I guess in Ireland many shops carry them. (I'll probably travel to Dublin next summer, and I need a new fuse for our adaptor (my dad blew the old 2A one by plugging in a hairdryer, so I gotta replace it with something that can stand a 1200W hairdryer and is _not_ aluminum foil), and I think trying to get one here will be more difficult).

We have two rather separate themes here at the moment, so I thought it might be an idea to create a separate thread for the TV-related part of this discussion: Go here .

Ranger,
The standard BS1362 plug fuse can be purchased in almost any hardware/electrical store in the U.K. or Republic of Ireland. (Although you'll pay through the nose for them at your local hardware store compared to an electrical wholesaler).

3A and 13A values are available almost everywhere; 5A is stocked by some (but not all) stores. Few domestic retail outlets stock the other values (1, 2, 7, 10A) as these are not specified for use in BS1363 plugs any more.

If you want to get your fuses sorted out before you leave Austria, if you e-mail me with your postal address I could send you a few.



[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 01-13-2003).]

Hey guys, the product I wanted does exist!



Now, why don't they ship appliances with these?