The Very Early Telly Thread

As far as I know there were no ETP-1 crates located at the ITV companies, for 'ITV' they were only at the region's primary Tx site. As you say the only ETP-1s not at IBA premises were the ones at C4 Charlotte St, and S4C in Cardiff.

Was ETP-1 of any use to the regional companies for internal line up purposes? I know the BBC used F and continues to use its successors to line up monitors and in vision displays.

ETP-1 wasn't anywhere in the same league for professional set up use, as (for instance) a Tek 1411 test generator.

http://www.ioffer.com/i/tek-1411-pal-generator-tektronix-spg12-tsg11-tsp11-tsg1-572182342

ETP-1 was just a cheap test card generator, (cheaper than a PM5544 that at least had a circle in it !) for
use as a tuning signal, (with C4 in mind) that also looked significantly different to TCF (that by 1980 was synonymous with only the BBC). I suspect the IBA wanted something that could be 'identified' with C4, as they expected to be transmitting hours and hours of it daytime on 4

As you say, and where I worked in ITV, we never had an ETP-1 test generator, we had no use for it in house. We did have a PM5554 (probably 2 or 3) but the ETP-1 test pattern was of no real use to us and we had a lot of portable test pattern generators for many different uses apart from monitor alignment.

In the control room galleries the vision control staff could switch 100% colour bars or Pluge to the monitors. If anything more was required the support staff would likely visit and bring whatever portable test signal generator was required to produce whatever test signal might be need to adjust the monitor. Other than that a faulty monitor would be swapped out and brought to the workshop for adjustment or repair.

In the CAR area various test signal generators were permanently installed that could feed 4 different signal chains to the large central matrix that most of the technical areas had access to - including one NTSC test signal for standards conversion use. At least one of these generators could be switched between various patterns to aid flexibility.

Edit: I Test signal 1 was 100/0/100/0 colour bars - Test signal 2 was 100/0/75/0 colour bars - Test 3 was switchable but usually left on grille - Test 4 was NTSC colour bars.

We never had or used Test Card F internally, it would simply not be good enough for setting up a monitor in a critical viewing position. I'm sure it was good enough for domestic tellies in the field though.

Which was its purpose of course. I do find it odd that the BBC used it for 'internal' set up, (as you point out) there are far more appropriate signals for professional use. I suspect the pictures you see of BBC galleries etc with all the monitors showing TCF are for marketing/artistic licence purposes.