Next time you bitch about trying to get your video blogging software to work, check out what this guy had to scrape together to get an amateur TV station running in 1949. He built a garage full of equipment and had three giant antennas.

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Radio ‘Ham’ Builds TV Station

California amateur sends voice and picture over transmitter made from $500 worth of war-surplus parts.

By Andrew R. Boone

PULSING through the California skies from a weather-beaten back-yard shack, the image of a beautiful brunette flows into television receivers around San Francisco Bay. The boys who have seen her call the vision Gwendolyn.

Reproduced by a collection of secondhand tubes and war-surplus video equipment, Gwendolyn represents the first standard TV image broadcast successfully and repeatedly by an amateur. Soon, from the same station, W6JDI-TV, radio ham Clarence Wolfe, Jr. hopes to televise live images.
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Watch Your Favorite TV Show ANY Time

The race to market a home TV tape recorder is getting hotter. Fairchild’s entry offers a much-improved picture

ONE of these days, you’ll sit down after supper, flip the dials on your home TV tape recorder, and watch a rerun of that afternoon’s base-ball game.

Recently I spent an afternoon trying out a prototype model of such a machine made by Fairchild Camera and Instrument Co. I recorded programs off the air —both pictures and sound—while I was watching the program. Immediately after the show, I played back the recording while the images of the original telecast were still fresh in my mind. Although there was some loss of definition, the image quality was good—as good as most people see on their home TV sets. I watched the playback of an entire Danny Kaye show recorded a few days earlier— without being conscious that I was watching a recording.
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Make-Up For Television

Elaine Shepard, Hollywood film actress, could pass for an Indian in war paint when she wears the new standard television make-up. White high-lighting around the nostrils, eyes and hollows of the throat is necessary for good reproduction. Lips, eyebrows and eyelashes are blue-black.

Spinning Head Tapes TV at Home
Is this the year you mate a home TV tape recorder to your TV set? Two European electronics firms – Philips (Netherlands) and Loewe-Opta (West Germany) are now selling TV recorders specially designed for home use. Both will be available here in a few months.

To capture the details of a TV picture, the recorder must have a three-megacycle recording bandwidth. Earlier prototype home TV recorders were essentially scaled-up audio recorders: They achieved wide bandwidth by moving 1/4-inch-wide audio-type tape past a stationary recording head at high speed (usually 120 inches per second). High tape speed leads to excessive head and tape wear, and gobbles up tape at an uneconomical rate.
Both the Philips and Loewe-Opta recorders use one-inch-wide video-recording tape and a rotating recording head. The tape is threaded in a single spiral around a slotted drum that contains a spinning recording head rotating at about 3,000 r.p.m. Tape speed around the drum is about six inches a second. The rotating head records the TV picture signal on adjacent diagonal bands on the tape. The audio is recorded along the edge of the tape.
Both units are expensive-over $2,000 with accessories-but cost should drop as sales rise.