"tommyknocker" wrote in message
...

Ah. So it was, technically, a scam (a hoax designed to elicit money).
As
has been pointed out earlier, doing this sort of thing was easy with
technology in existence in 1953. I've never seen a "flying spot
scanner", but I'm sure that it could reproduce a test pattern and feed
it into a homebrew TV transmitter. Distance wouldn't be required; the
tx
would just have to be concealed in the next room.


Exactly. We had a flying spot scanner in my High School electronics
class. It used a small picture tube as a sweeping light source. There
was some sort of light sensitive matrix as a receiver. A slide, about
3"x4", could be placed between the tube and the matrix. The only slide
we had was the familiar Indian Head Test Pattern. There was just enough
room to slip a few fingers and wave them around. The easily amused
among us could wave our fingers around and watch them on TV.

That thing was so cool.


And at least for the
US stations, the scammers had a ready source of test patterns-old
American technology magazines. (The "Soviet" ID slide in English
reveals
that when they couldn't find them, they made them up.) One of Snopes's
sources is a book by Carl Sagan; he surely had the scam in mind when
he
wrote "Contact". I still can't figure out why the gaping holes in the
story-chief among them the fact that Britain's TV standards were
unique
in the world-didn't tip people off. But maybe people WANTED to
believe.



I'm sure the engineers knew about the different standards. But they
also knew that sets could be modified for different sweeps and
modulation polarity. Non engineers probably didn't know about the
differing standards.

Frank Dresser