I assume The Dish is one of your favorite movies then?

@@rallymax2 absolutely! It is such a beautiful thing to go and see. The movie doesn't do it justice.

It is epic

And that from the guy who once told us that Apollo 10 was underfueled so they would not try to land :) * Interestingly it was Tom Stafford who pushed (everybody) to having color tv on board. *They were obvously underfueled BECAUSE they would not land but had to simulate a LM coming back all the way from the surface for rendevouz and docking. I always wondered how Stafford and Cernan would have reacted to that level of distrust in their professionalism and intelligence from Nasa. Or imagine the chat Slayton and Kraft would have had over that.

I've always said that song is the ultimate debunking of "staged landing and actors" conspiracies.

@ especially cos he said “year of the month”, not “month of the year”! Any director would yell cut and have them redo the line!

I hope they sing too!

Same, especially since we got a colour TV to see it!

Also from the UK, I remember my parents actually waking me up and getting me out of bed to watch the first landing, I was 4 years old!

Also from the U.K. initially. Gloucester to be precise, I was thirteen on the day of the moon landing, staying up all night. Well worth it. Marc has sort of drawn us all together here to celebrate this event and those that came after it.

I was 3.5 years old and my parents didn't even think to show me Apollo 11 or any of the moon landings. I chastise them about it from time to time.

@@owensmith7530 I think at 3.5 you wouldn’t have comprehended the awesomeness of this occasion, but as you grew older you would have certainly been better aware of the following moon landings. Hope you got to see some of those at the vet least !

@@nigeljames6017 It was burned in to my memory. Then again, even at four I was a nerd that wanted to take toys apart to see how they worked! My parents ha d a way with words, they used to say "so many questions, you want to know the ins and outs of a duck's arse"

I had the unique opportunity to work with the Ikegami HL-77 prototype in the ABC (NY) Engineering Lab in 1976. Even took it out in the field once or twice. The HL-77 was succeeded by the HL-79, and preceded by the HL-35 and HL-33, which were two-piece units with almost-identical backpacks and CCU's.

The orange and cream colored Ikegami camera shown at 19:10 in the video is one of a series of professional ENG cameras introduced around 1980. They were intended for a lower-end market (compared to HL-77s or HL-79s). I believe the model shown is an ITC-730A, but I can't be certain.

In "The Dish" you can hear how the signal from the Moon is received before it is fully over the horizon (and the Parkes dish might have been a degree or two above the horizon) by using an offset feed on the dish for about 30 seconds and then switching back to the straight feed. This is actually in the dialogue of the movie (although not explained at all) but you have to pay close attention. This enabled the switch to the Parkes signal to be made earlier than would otherwise have been possible. When I saw the movie in the theater that immediately cleared up something that I had been wondering about for a couple of decades.

Maybe an NTSC color camera filming a lunar signal color monitor. Note that the LM only had 700kHz bandwidth, not 2MHz like the CM or 6MHz like terrestrial broadcast.

@@johndododoe1411 according to this video, the later Apollo missions had as much as 3 MHz at their disposal. The 700 kHz number was for the monochrome Apollo 11 broadcast. As for the monitor, the CBS color system used a monitor with a color wheel, and none of it was compatible with the NTSC signal. Now for Apollo 11 the standards conversion was done telecine fashion, with an NTSC camera pointed at a special monitor with phosphors compatible with the SSTV signal. I don't know what was used for the color broadcasts because nobody has given a complete account of all the Apollo mission TV setups. The bias is almost exclusively towards the historic first landing. Yes, one option would have been to custom build an electro-mechanical (or perhaps purely electronic) monitor to display the received signal. I don't know if the electro-mechanical rig would have worked because the color wheel would have likely interfered. An all-electronic monitor should have been possible by 1969, and maybe that's what they did. The problem is that the evidence either way is scarce. Because each color field is sent in sequence, it may have been problematic getting the electron guns to hit the correct phosphors separately. It also may have been impractical getting equally long-lasting phosphors for all three of the primary colors painted on one CRT. If so, the option of using three _monochrome_ monitors (all using the same phosphor) and three monochrome cameras might have been the only option. It's more complex in some ways, but simpler in others. I doubt that an all-electronic conversion method existed, because the ability to interpolate that much of a time difference was asking a lot for a system that had to work in real time. Long duration phosphors would have been the elegant solution, as they were in 1969.

@@StringerNews1 I understood the bandwidth limit to be a property of the radio unit, not the TV equipment. Maybe the collapsible antenna added bandwidth after exiting the LM on Apollo 12, provided the onboard electronics (now in Marc's lab) were modified in late 1969 to use additional radio bandwidth on the 3rd channel. They clearly had a conveniently sized Apollo signal monitor as they had one on the CM camera, thus putting one in the telecine conversion rig would have been an option.

@@johndododoe1411 my understanding is that the USB radio system is wideband, but because the CM has two TWT amplifiers, it could devote one to FM video and still have the other for PM voice & data. On the LM they had to use just one channel, but found ways to use more of the existing bandwidth for video. The larger antenna boosted gain, and therefore SNR, and that no doubt helped dynamic range, while the higher frequencies that more bandwidth allowed increased detail. As for signal monitoring, you couldn't have a vectorscope because there was no quadrature encoded color. You could have a waveform monitor, even a "parade" display of red, green and blue fields because of the sequential color scheme. No doubt that helped people on the ground maximize SNR and avoid clipping, but if Bean only got a stick and a box, they might not have trained the astronauts to set black & white levels manually like a TV engineer normally would. I started my career in broadcast ops, and was a video engineer when I retired; having a WFM was invaluable all the way through, but to most it was as dark an art as the microwave STL radio was.

@@StringerNews1 Your arguments seem unrelated to my comments. I didn't suggest using instruments to check quadrature encoding stability live, though I did suggest quadrature color encoding on a lower subcarrier to stay within the available RF bandwidth from the modulator assigned to the task. Nor did I suggest manual camera adjustments by the astronauts, as keeping it automatic was clearly typical of the space program and necessary for unmanned cameras.

Indeed. Had they given him a proper test camera he would already have burned that out on the earth and learned from his mistake.

NASA did an extensive Color Television Study back in 1965-66 that discusses something like this as an option (but 1.25 MHz instead of 700 kHZ). NTRS 19660013061 will have more than anyone would care to know on ways to achieve color in space using mid-1960s technology.

Modern electronic space stuff is built very rugged for two main reasons: resisting to the huge loads of the launch (acceleration and shocks/vibrations) , but also to shield electronics from various radiation's and cosmic rays with thick enough metal. I guess that was already true at the time.

Yes and yes!

Indeed. I meant to say 10 revolutions per second, not per minute...

Just six. But the numbering includes many tests that didn't.

Yes, there was a spinning RGB filter wheel that let the camera produce R-G-B filtered images, but the color sequencing was done at the field level instead of at the frame level (where two fields make up one video frame). So, one field of red, one field of green, and one field of blue. Back in Houston, NASA used a magnetic disk video recorder to record each field and repeat it 3 times. They then matrixed the three color channels into a standard NTSC signal. You won’t see the individual color fields, but if you freeze the image where there is fast motion in the scene, you will see color fringing because the red, green, and blue images that make up the composite video field were captured at slightly different times.

@@JoeDurnavich Hi Joe. So every 1/30th-of-a-second frame from the RCA colour field sequential camera is filter subtracted to generate a red, green or blue image. Back in Houston they receive the red image and write it to disk. Then the green and blue, at which point they have a full colour composite held on disk. Are you saying they repeat that composite image three times, i.e. the network TV signal will have 3 identical frames over each 1/10th-of-a-second? And if so, do they process the next three R-G-B frames at the same time to create a continuous stream? Thanks.

@@horacezontalbeam Figure 27 in the Apollo Color Television Camera Manual shows how the magnetic disk recorder tracks were used. The system operated at the video field level, which are every 1/60th of a second. Let's say we have a system with three color channels for output: red, green, and blue. Houston receives a red field and outputs it it on the red channel. Then it receives a blue field and outputs it on the blue channel while on the red channel it outputs the first repeat of the red field received previously. Then it receives a green field and outputs it on the green channel while on the blue channel it output the first repeat of the blue field and on the red channel it outputs the second and final repeat of the red field. For each video field -- every 1/60th of a second -- it combines the red, green, and blue channels into one NTSC field. So, each color channel is updated every 1/20th of a second but they are offset from each other by 1/60th of a second, which is why you get color fringing on objects in motion.

​@@JoeDurnavich Ok. Please bear with me because I'm trying to understand this from the point of having no knowledge of how analogue TV works. From what I understand, although the frame rate for NTSC is 60 per second, it's interlaced, so every two frames create one frame at 30 fps. The output from the RCA field sequential colour camera is 30 frames of R-G-B in sequence, which is why curiousmarc states you get 10 frames per second in composite colour. The colour fringe occurs because the colours overlap when the movement is fast. My question was, does Houston output the same composited image very 1/10th of a second because you said earlier it is repeated 3 times? If not, are you saying that there are always 3 colour frames, i.e. R1+G1+B1, G1+B1+R2, B1+R2+G2, R2+G2+B2, G2+B2+R3, etc.?

@@horacezontalbeam I think what you have at the end there is what I am getting at. I think I have this right, but this may be a different way of looking at it: The camera is capturing and sending 1R-2G-3B-4R-5G-6B-7R-8G-9B, etc. where the number is a simple sequential field counter. The fields that get displayed on the TV sets on Earth are comprised of a sliding window of three successive fields where the window advances one field forward at a time. So field one on the TV is made up of 1R-2G-3B. Field 2 is made up of 2G-3B-4R. Field 3 is 3B-4R-5G and so on. I'm not sure what effective frame rate you would put on that. It's not really 10 fps like the slow scan black-and-white TV of Apollo 11 was because every composite field is different.

Nope, that was the signal conversion machine in Australia.

French (and Russian) TV studio equipment was generally all-PAL, including the cameras, with conversion to SECAM made at the transmitter. You can't make an analog video switcher (mixer) do a lap-dissolve with SECAM signals.

Same. No audio on android at first, so I watched on my laptop. I just tried again now, and it's good everywhere

Subcarrier signal was missing ^^

Maybe the audio and video streams weren’t fully synchronised on all branches of the YT CDN yet when you pressed play. As I understand it there will be several video streams but only one sound stream. But I am only surmising.

I don't understand what you mean. NTSC always had a color burst signal. It just was not used for 90 deg. phase change on alternate lines as in PAL, making a hue control necessary which many people often misadjusted, expect for people who worked in the industry. If you could switch the receiver to blue-gun-only (unusual on consumer sets), you could set hue and chroma precisely correctly, when color bars were transmitted. I used to have a Sony Trinitron at home that needed no adjustments other than channel and volume for at least 10 years.

@@richardgelber2740 Hah! NTSC had the colour burst? Didn't know that. Thanks for the info! But then PAL is also interleave and I think NTSC is not. Nevertheless, as you say: "It just was not used for 180 deg. phase reversal on alternate lines as in PAL...". I wonder how SECAM solved it. Should look that one up.

@@daicekube NTSC has always been interlaced, even in black and white. Field one had 262.5 lines and field two has the other 262.5 lines, interlaced with the field 1 lines. Picture-tube phosphor persistence made this practical, (along with the nature of human eyesight) and it's not clear that progressive scan would have been satisfactory if it had been used in the 1940's.

@@daicekube Also, the phase difference between NTSC color burst and the color information in the active picture area determines the hue of any particular picture element. However, the lack of the 90-degree phase change of the burst on alternate lines, as implemented in PAL, makes NTSC color hue subject to drift and misadjustment. (I originally said 180-degree phase reversal above, but have now corrected that.)

Yep. Well, analog uplinks with enough bandwidth. The secret was having a massive antenna on the receiving end.

It doesnt

Because lunar gravity is lower than earth. So he falls more slowly. In earth gravity the only way to do that is with a wire or underwater.

Can't go to the moon with any technology lol. It's physically impossible.

@@papalegba6796 Damn... How come NASA and even now, ESA, Roscosmos, JAXA and all the other national and private space companies who have landed craft on the moon, sent it into space, come to ask your advice as you have the answer right there. Man, they really screwed up with that.

you think it could be used to remove FM Co-channels, on terrestrial broadcast radio links? like if there was a strong over riding signal, it could be locked onto, and subtracted to demodulate the signal below it?

And May the fourth be with you!

Yes well done, you are first! If you ever get on the Moon, we’ll upgrade your camera to color for free!

@@CuriousMarc you guys undoubtedly will surpass expectations! This was brilliant.

@@JESUSCHRYSLER5512 umm, a name?

@@JESUSCHRYSLER5512 🤣

@@JESUSCHRYSLER5512 my initials.