TV transmitters

The louder you shout, the easier it is to hear someone at a distance. Louder noises make bigger sound waves that have the power to travel further before they get soaked up by bushes, trees, and all the clutter around us. The same is true of radio waves. To make radio waves that are strong enough to carry radio and TV pictures many miles from a TV station to someone's home, you need a really powerful transmitter. This is effectively a giant antenna (aerial), often positioned on top of a hill so it can send signals as far as possible. Not everyone receives TV signals transmitted through the air in this way. If you have cable television, your TV pictures are "piped" into your home down a fiber-optic cable laid beneath your street. If you have satellite television, the picture you see has been bounced into space and back to help it travel from one side of the country to the other. With traditional television broadcasting, picture signals are sent in analog form: each signal travels as an undulating (up-and-down moving) wave. Many countries are now switching over to digital television, which works in a similar way to digital radio. Signals are transmitted in a numerically coded form. Many more programs can be sent this way and, generally speaking, picture quality is better because the signals are less susceptible to interference as they travel.

TV receivers
It doesn't really matter how the TV signal gets to your home: once it's arrived, your TV set treats it exactly the same way, whether it comes in from an antenna (aerial) on the roof, from a cable running underground, or from a satellite dish in the garden. Remember how a TV camera turns the picture it's looking at into a series of lines that form the outgoing TV signal? A TV set must work the same process in reverse to turn the lines in the incoming signal back into a faithful image of the scene that the camera filmed. Different types of TV sets do this in different ways.

Photos: Early TV receivers. Left: A typical black and white TV from 1949. Note the tiny screen. Right: An HMV 904 combined TV and radio unit from about ten years earlier. The loudspeaker is on the left, the radio tuning dial is in the center, and the TV screen (again tiny) is on the right. Both use cathode-ray tube technology and are exhibits from Think Tank, the science museum in Birmingham, England.

Fotografii: Televizoare timpurii. b stanga se afl un televizor alb-negru din 1949. n dreapta: Un HMV 904 care a combinat un TV si un radio intr-o singura unitate cu aproximativ 10 ani mai devreme.Difuzorul se afl in stanga si cranul TV in dreapta. n mijloc se afl un panou care ne arat frecvenele radio. Ambele folosesc tuburi catodice si sunt exponate la muzeul de stii Think Tank din Birmingham.