FUNDAMENTALS OF TELEVISION

Unit 1: TV Fundamentals
Simple block diagram of TV transmission and reception Scanning process - sequential Horizontal and vertical scanning flicker and interlaced scanning Need for synchronization, blanking and equalizing pulses and their details. Aspect ratio vertical resolution and video Bandwidth Relationship among them. Composite video signal serrated vertical symmetrical pulse. Positive and negative transmission VSB transmission of video signal merits and demerits. Inter carried sound system - TV broadcast channel allocation Different TV standards CCIR B system in details. Additive mixing of colors color perception - chromaticity diagram Luminance and Chrominance signal I & Q signal their polarity Bandwidth for color transmission. Television is a telecommunication system for broadcasting and receiving moving pictures and sound over a distance. The basic idea of television is "radio with pictures". In other words, where radio transmits a sound signal (the information being broadcast) through the air, television sends a picture signal as well. You probably know that these signals are carried by radio waves, invisible patterns of electricity and magnetism that race through the air at the speed of light (300,000 km or 186,000 miles per second). Think of the radio waves carrying information like the waves on the sea carrying surfers: the waves themselves aren't the information: the information surfs on top of the waves. Television is really a three-part invention: the TV camera that turns a picture and sound into a signal; the TV transmitter that sends the signal through the air; and the TV receiver (the TV set in your home) that captures the signal and turns it back into picture and sound. TV creates moving pictures by repeatedly capturing still pictures and presenting these frames to your eyes so quickly that they seem to be moving. Think of TV as an electronic flick-book. The images are flickering on the screen so fast that they fuse together in your brain to make a moving picture.

The Heart and Soul of Your Television

At the centre of the standard projection-style television set is the all-important Cathode Ray Tube (CRT). You may have heard of a CRT before, but what exactly does it do? The answer to that is surprisingly simple and amazingly complex at the same time. In science, the term cathode means a negative terminal. The opposite of a cathode is an anode, which means negative terminal. In a CRT, the Cathode is a heated filament that creates electrons. The Ray is the stream of electrons that emanate from the cathode filament, and the Tube is the large glass vacuum (otherwise known as your picture screen) that houses the entire thing. Its that simple. Now its time for the complicated part.The cathode, or negative-charged heated filament, creates negative charged electrons in a stream (the Ray part of the CRT, remember?). These electrons are compacted by a focusing anode terminal and an accelerating anode terminal, which causes the electron stream to be compacted into a tight beam travelling at a high rate of speed. This electron beam is then directed at the inside of the flat screen (your viewing screen) at the opposite end of the tube. The flat area is coated in a thin layer of phosphor, a substance that lights up when it is struck by the electron stream. The inside of the picture tube is also given a thin coating of conductive material, ensuring that all those electrons have somewhere to go after they hit the phosphors. Now, if this was all there was to your CRT, all you would see when you turned the television on would be a tiny little circle of light, much like that tiny light in the center of old television sets when you turn them on or off. The electron beam needs to cross every pixel of phosphor on the screen to show an effective picture, and it does this with the help of steering coils. A steering coil is a series of copper wires wrapped around the CRT to make an electromagnet. These electromagnets can create two separate electromagnetic fields within the CRT, one vertical and the other horizontal. The electrode beam can be manipulated by changing the strength of these electromagnetic fields because it carries a negative charge. Using an X and Y axis style grid, the beam can be moved to point at any part of the picture screen.

Monochrome
For the first 50 years of television, the most common television sets in peoples homes were black and white sets. This was because black and white was the technology standard of the day, while colour sets were unreliable at best. During the 1940s and 1950s, even if one could afford a colour television, it was disheartening to turn it on and realize that most broadcasts were black and white transmissions only. This is not the case today. In the age of High Definition Television (like Sony HDTV) and digital broadcasting, black and white television screens have been relegated to mostly cheap security video monitors and camping televisions. There may always be a market for black and white or monochrome television technology simply because it is so easy use (by television standards, at any rate). The CRT in a monochrome television is pretty much the same as a colour television, but with a few important exceptions. Where the phosphors of a colour set are bunched in groups of blue, green, and red, the phosphors in a monochrome set are all white. That means that when an electron beam is directed at them they give off white light. To get black, the phosphors are simply switched off. This balance of white phosphors and black ones are able to create the many soft greys of a monochrome set. By manipulating the amount of light the white phosphors give off and which phosphors are turned off, a monochrome CRT can reproduce a perfect black and white version of any image.

Colour
In a colour CRT, things work just a little differently. Instead of a single electron beam, as in a monochrome CRT, there are actually three beams. Since the phosphors are grouped into blue, green, and red pixels (take a close up look at your television screen and you can see them), the colour CRT is constructed to direct beams at each group. By varying the intensity of the three beams or turning one or more of them off completely, thousands of colour schemes can be achieved. When all three of the pixels are struck simultaneously with the same level of power, then the pixels mix to form white light. When they are all shut off, a black effect is achieved. In both colour and monochrome CRTs, the phosphor pixels are separated by a device known as a shadow mask. A shadow mask is simply a filter devised to keep the electron beams from spilling into other pixel groups. A shadow mask is like a metal plate covered with rows of tiny holes. Each tiny hole lines up with a pixel grouping.

Different Analogy of TV
The different pieces of a television signal are: Intensity Information Intensity information is used to tell the television how bright or dark the phosphors need to be at a given point. Horizontal Retrace Signals Horizontal retrace signals tell the television when it is time to move back to the left side of the screen after is has completed a line. Vertical Retrace Signals Vertical retrace signals occur in the broadcast signal 60 times per second, and tell the television to move the beam back from the bottom-right side to the top-left side so it can paint a new image. Chrominance Signal A Chrominance Signal is added to a monochrome signal to add colour to the image. Essentially, it is a separate frequency that tells the television how to modulate the electron beams so that they will produce the right colour combination for each pixel grouping. This part of the signal is ignored by old monochrome televisions.