TV Trade, Broadcasting or Other, just tell your story

It won't be a blast from the past, but next time I'm in town, I'll try to snap a picture of a "Gotch's of Selby" service van, still to be seen plying its trade around town.

As an aside to that, there is also a fully restored Yellow "British Telecom" Austin Allegro van that can be seen roaming the streets - complete with ladders on its roof!

Not a rental company but worked for Philips for a total of 33 years. I was workshop based from 1973 until 1983 when I decided to change departments and go into Technical Advice....the Trade helpline basically. Those were the days when dealers could phone for advice on odd faults or just a sanity check for some of the Philips power supplies.....! One bonus of this job was that a couple of times a year, we got to go to some of the Philips factories based in Europe. Dreux, Brugge and Eindhoven were the three main factories at the time and we'd come back with lots of 'pre-sales' technical stuff ready for when the sets were launched onto the UK market.

Great days, never to be repeated.

Hi Rich,

Was that a service offered for free to dealers or was there an annual support charge? Did you offer the service to independents ( at a price) who had say the G8, G11, K30, K35  etc  in their rental range.

How was the department organised? Was there a tier system such as 1st line, 2nd line 3rd line? Third line being the more technical or was it just all highly skilled techs and a free for all. Did you all have to be up to spec on all the ranges that were out there? Did you get bench time on new models? How did you build up field experience to know about stock faults etc.

Hi Chris.

It actually underwent a number of changes over the ten years I was in the department. Originally there were about 10 engineers and we covered white goods as well. It was always a free service and in the early days it was open to everyone. There were (I think) two phone numbers with around five lines each, one for white goods and one for everything else. We all came from the workshop originally and were expected to do 'hands on' in the workshop or (as we preferred) in the  Product Support department about two weeks out of six especially when new chassis appeared. One of our functions was to note any common faults and report them back to the factory (Croydon) in the case of G8 and G11 so they could be investigated and modifications introduced. I've already written a 'Trade Story' on this so best to have a look at that rather than repeat everything here again. See  https://www.radios-tv.co.uk/philips-technical-advice-for-the-trade/

You could also have a look at  https://www.radios-tv.co.uk/spares-off-the-shelf-and-quick-repairs/ another account I wrote about regarding the two-tier repair service that was offered during one of the changes. Not really part of the Technical Advice service but part of the customer repairs service.

These were great times at Philips. A pity that one of the leading designers of televisions and video equipment now only markets 'Badge Engineered' sets made a designed in China by Funai.

Hi, I left college in July 1987 and got a job soon after at the Co-op TV service dept. in Peterborough. I started as a bench engineer and soon ended up doing service calls and became a field engineer. There was me, two other field chaps, an installation guy, and a bench engineer. We had a manager and two reception girls who took phone calls and booked the visits to customers.

The sets mainly ranged from a few G11's, many K30/35,  and Ferguson TX's plus cheapo stuff like Hinari videos to lovely VCR's like the Ferguson 3V32. Hitachi VT11E rings a bell too. I did see an occasional RBM 823 but they were scrapped almost on sight.

The Co-op was a mix of rentals and bought sets, the rentals were usually Philips based sets under a COOP guise.

I had a  D reg Vauxhall Astra diesel estate car in blue (like the one pictured above). I ended up doing loads of miles, we had to cover Peterborough, Bedford, Kings Lynn, Cambridge and Haverhill down in Suffolk.

By 1990, I was fed up with the driving and took a job at a smaller firm and remained in the Peterborough area. I stayed there until the HIFI industry beckoned me a year later.

I started out at has a 15 year old at a quite large rental/sales company in Bolton. Left at 18 as I did not like the prospects there and went to a small shop in Wigan were I stayed for about 16 years. That job was field service initially but quite soon there was just me to do all the repairs TV, radios, grams, tape recorders, budget HiFi etc, field work and bench. Had good test equipment usual sig gen and AVO 8, but when colour came out and we started with the HiFi the boss splashed out. Decent 15Mhz bandwidth scope, Simple crosshatch for the van and the Philips PM5508 for the workshop, the model number could be wrong. Wobbulator for RF/IF alignment, Philips Sterep FM generator, a THD measurement setup, I think that was Sugden.

The wobbulator and stereo gen were used on equipment up to the middle/late seventies, by that time IF panels needed less alignment, nearly all done with the one filter and stereo decoders were no longer discrete and were one pot adjustment. The other equipment was well used, not sure if the engineer who took over when I left knew what they were for.

All a long time ago.

Frank

After 13 years, I left the BBC (in 1972) and joined Ampex, the inventors of video tape recording, as a systems engineer designing and installing studios, OB vans, edit suites and the like and later as product manager for cameras, routers and vision mixers. 1978 saw me a chief engineer at a TV company in Germany making training programs, commercials and producing cassettes for the rental/purchase market with about 300 slave machines. Then it was back to the UK in 1882 for 4 years as an engineer selling studio equipment to broadcasters and systems houses. This kit included vision mixers, very large routers (eg 128 x 128), digital effects systems and the glue (VDAs, SPG etc.) necessary in every facility.

Finally, I and a colleague were made redundant due to complaining to the owners of the company for whom we worked , that the MD was making very strange decisions about running the company - the MD won that particular battle and we were "let go" with a decent severance agreement. It was very satisfying the the aforesaid MD was fired about 4 months later!

Not having jobs to go to we decided to start a TV systems company (1986). I had good BBC contacts and my business partner had good ITV contacts which certainly helped. During the next 20+ years the company prospered and we installed TV stations and facilities in many parts of the world - a terrific experience for me. Unfortunately, as broadcast technology progressed, I didn't! IT was making huge inroads into TV stations, starting with digital servers. For me, that was the end and I retired in 2008 and the rest, as they say, is history.

So I have had very little to do with domestic TVs although I must add that it was my company which convinced the BBC that JVC monitors were plenty good enough to be used as preview monitors in their studios with the much higher grade monitors used only in engineering and similar super-critical positions.

Hi Brian,

Its great to hear about the other side of the circle of Television for without guys like you and Mike what would the receivers have to show other than snow.

It must have been wonderful working for the Beeb in their hey-day. So much has changed and although some will always say for the better, I fear the is not quite true. I think for many things in life the past holds many more achievements than now. Once we had a great Public Broadcast service that pumped out diverse quality entertainment. Once we had Concorde that too is consigned to the past, it seems sad that the best seems to be behind us now on so many fronts and not just the two mentioned here, the list is endless.

I must say, Chris, that the 1960s were probably the best time to be in the BBC. To my mind it was in its heyday, good programming and very high technical standards. It was also a time of advances in technology what with semiconductors and the prevalence of 2" VTRs. I think it very illuminating that even though the kit used valves and was much more unreliable that its modern counterpart, the service was kept going with the efforts of trained, expert engineering staff.

Guess who the management decided could be sacrificed on the altar of efficiency - engineers. The engineering department was decimated in the 1980s/1990s, so much so that people like Mike are now contractors, not employees!

And it's called "PROGRESS".

My dad spent his entire working life at Philips in Eindhoven. (Doing what I'm not exactly sure). His brothers tried it too but left after a number of years as they weren't happy there. I've never had any connection with the company other than as a demonstrator for one of their main dealers. (My dad made sure we got the latest sets before anyone else )

I worked at Rediffusion from 1964 to 1983. Most of the TV sets were 405 line when I started. Rediffusion also had some valve radios on rental back in the 1960's. When they stopped maintaining the radios they just let the customers keep them as they were of very little value.

It was fun in the 60's and 70's and at Rediffusion we worked 7 days a week, even Christmas day for field service. (A great day for tips!).

I have been both a workshop engineer and field. Both had there pros and cons.

I suppose the nice thing being in the workshop was not having to face "irate" customers.

As we all know It all went downhill in the 80's and Rediffusion rentals were taken on by Granada, who I worked for for a very short time. 

The areas we covered from my branch was south west London and parts of Surrey.

John

It was a dark and stormy night...

Born and raised in Kingsbury, London NW9. By 1978 I had completed a traditional apprenticeship at EMI (Hayes, Mddx.) and graduated engineering school. I knew that I wanted to work in "television" - at least the behind the scenes technical side.

Arriving at EMI about ten years too late to enjoy broadcast cameras that needed about four blokes to lift, I landed in EMI Medical LIMITED, just as the EMI CT Scanner was ramping. It used CRT monitors - sort of like television, right? 

In early 1979 I was invited to join EMI INC. and traveled to Northbrook, Illinois (about 40 km north of Chicago) My six weeks assignment was renewed a couple of times and I was still there when Thorn acquired EMI. Dark days for everyone, right? Somehow I had been transported from metro London, UK, to the mid-west prairie, near the town that made Al Capone famous. The summers were hot, the winters nasty, the locals friendly, and Ronald Reagan was elected as the President.

Rather than return to the UK I found a Chicago start up making a Scanning Laser Acoustic Microscope, which used CRTs and analogue video, how cool is that? The IP (Intellectual Property) for the laser scanner came out of the R&D labs at Zenith Electronics, better known for their domestic TV production, and the Rauland CRT plants in Chicago. I headed up engineering, hired a couple of staff and dug into Bragg Cells, RF Amplifiers, SPGs, Video DAs, and neon-helium lasers. Fun job! I was employee number 13, we had over twenty staff when I moved on a couple of years later.
I was recruited by a Chicago medical imaging company that put Ultrasound and CT images on X-Ray film. You guessed it, using CRTs and analogue video! We reached out to Brimar and GEC in the UK to make special CRTs for us. Small world, really. Designing a multi-standard analog X-Y display was challenging!

Not any old TV CRT was good enough for our film printers, and that lead me to discover a company making high resolution monochrome CRTs. Probably one of the last still standing in the west by the mid-1980s. They in turn invited me to relocate to Rockford, Illinois (about 150km west of Chicago) and head up their monitor electronics team. Rockford had over 120k residents, but it was a painful lesson. 'Metropolitan' is not the same as 'Cosmopolitan'. London - Chicago - Rockford, I toughed it out for five years.

USA Black and White TV production declined in the 1970s but bank ATM, office automation (better known as Word Processing) were on the rise; which kept the CRT factory busy. Personal computers borrowed heavily from the TV receiver trade. We made about one million monochrome CRTs annually for everything from the first Apple Mac personal computer to 30mm Red, Green, and Blue CRT 'dots' used in gigantic stadium video score boards. Production lines made everything from 4 to 23 inch tubes.

But "television" was calling to me, I had to obey!

Armed with a dozen copies of my resume (aka CV) I paid my way to Las Vegas and the 1989 NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) trade show. Like a kid in wonderland... Studio cameras, OB Vans, Satellite Up-link Trucks, Chromakey weather men and weather girls, dollies, pedestals, Vision Mixers, SEGs. If I had died that day this must be my heaven.

A couple of promising job interviews on the show floor with both big and small shops and I returned to Rockford with an invite to interview at the Grass Valley Group, in Grass Valley, California. An old gold mining town in the Sierra Nevada foothills (about 250 km NE of San Francisco)

"Go West Young Man" (credited to the American author and newspaper editor Horace Greeley in 1865) I did, honest!

Arrived in Grass Valley just a couple of months ahead of the Loma Prieta Earthquake (17 Oct 1989)
Grass Valley was a nice little town of less than 10K. Of those about 1,500 worked for GVG, the county's biggest employer. Nestled in the foothills on rural back roads there was a colony of analogue types (many ex-BBC) turning out hand-build video magic. We bragged there were only two kinds of broadcast engineers; "those that had GVG kit and those that wished they did". Customers praised our analogue video path's performance "to be as good as a coax cable". Diff Phase and Gain, path matched delays, stability and repeatability, that lead the industry. We even has a cluster of Emmy statues in the front lobby.

Oh joy, I had my dream company, my dream job, and there was even a CRT or two in play.

But digital was heading our way! The broadcast game was about to be turned on it's head. The high tech nineties would change everything by the close of the twentieth century. Apple Macs, DACs and re-entrant DRAM would kill us all in analogue video land. And it did!

Oh, the irony. Just as monolithic Op Amps were taking on analogue video, MUSE and other HD fledgling specs were pushing bandwidth to thirty Megs. While Current Feedback gain-of-two stages were now build around 8 pin DIP ICs. Next generation kit was heading to serial digital SDI standards and analogue engineers heading to the history books.

Lucky me! A small semiconductor company in Silicon Valley (a bit redundant, that...) needed an analogue video engineer. They were to take their monolithic disc drive channel amplifier ICs into the broadcast and computer graphics market. While at GVG we discovered these op amps had the best dPdG specs.That career move took me to Silicon Valley (which isn't a geographic place, more of a state of mind). Hint; it's the south end of the San Francisco Bay Area.

I stepped out of the R&D lab and in front of the customer, as Western Region Field Applications Engineer. My territory was now "West of the Mississippi, and as far north and south as I needed to go." If there was an airport I surely went there. Had great opportunities with Philips/BTS, Utah Scientific, GVG, Tektronix, HP, many small video houses around LA.
I arrived there about the same time as the internet. California's second gold rush? Another boom and bust? We started the twenty-first century on a fantastic upswing! New Millionaires created everyday. Out of state license plates at every traffic signal, if you weren't creating a "dot-com" you were behind!

Then 9-11 happened. Planes were grounded for days. Americans stopped having as much fun. Dark days ahead.

Somehow I survived. My first semiconductor company went public, IPO stock! Silly spending. I bought a ton of old studio cameras and other goodies off eBay. I created my own escape reality at home. The sun was shining again.
I was recruited by a semiconductor competitor, located in Fort Collins, Colorado. Soon I had an office at HQ while still living in Silicon Valley. Not such an easy commute to work (About 2K km, or three hours by air and another hour in a rental car) many, many days a month at airports. My territory was now "USA; from sea to shining sea".

It didn't last. The semiconductor industry took hints from Pac-Man. Big fish eats up little fish. Some twenty years later I'm now at the number 9 semiconductor company this year, we were number 11 last year, before we bought the number 15 company in Austin, Texas. Just announced we're sold again! To become the number 5 semiconductor company next year. None of the half-dozen semiconductor companies I've worked for in the valley are still here. Pac-Man has been busy!

I've seen much of Asia while in the chip business. Plus, more recently trips to our ancestral mother ship in Holland.
But it's nice to come home and flip on a few old analogue video boxes, and return to my first love. CRTs included.

Hi Peter,

Thanks for a very interesting post, just the sort of relaxing read one needs over the first cuppa

Its nice to acquaint ourselves with our members past and their backgrounds, which was of course the purpose of this thread and one which you've met in bucket loads.

That is a very interesting and varied career Peter, thanks for posting, makes mine look very tame.

Frank

I've not worked in the TV trade or the broadcast industry but inspired by Peter's tale though you might like to peer into my background.

My story

As I say not related to the TV trade or Broadcast industry but there is a  very slender, loose TV association . I hope therefore the following will not bore you all.

My story starts in 1975, why 1975? Well at the tender age of 12 that was when I decided I wanted to work in computing. I was a keen fan of Star Trek and anything Sci-fi  so computing was the future. My brother who was 9 years older than me was working for British Relay ( the tenuous and loose TV association) and had a pile of Honeywell service manuals at home. I poured over these not fully understanding all I read but was hooked and fascinated. 

At an all boys comprehensive I was in the top B stream class, was an average student, excelled in art and Technical drawing and average in other subjects but to be honest not very good at math, it frightened me witless. When options time came around in 1977 the discussion of subject choices and careers arose, I wanted to take on computer studies. I was told by my teacher and careers advisor that I could not take computer studies as that was for the A stream only and as I was not so good at math, I should seriously look too some other career choice.

Oh how times have changed where all are given the same opportunity these days,  still this was a time when teachers would throw wooden blackboard rubbers at students across the classroom to instill order. Canes were used and one in particular, my form math teacher, used to ensure his new cane was smashed on the desk to make the end splay to deliver maximum pain. Perhaps this is why one year to mine and everyone else's astonishment, I came top in class for math, something that was never to be repeated.

Roll forward to 1979 I leave school with 9 CSE's, not a good year to leave or to start trying to find a job. This was the winter of discontent, Maggie had just taken office and the employment prospects were dire enough. I started applying for every junior IT job I could find. Unlike today this involved getting a local newspaper on a Thursday ( the job section day)and writing letters asap. Then going to job centres and seeing if they had any trainee positions. I applied for anything and everything, I even went to an interview as a punch card operator. To my horror on that one I discovered that the role was 100% female occupied and you were expected to be able to hit at least 18,000 key depressions per hour, needless to say I wasn't successful.

After almost one year of no luck and being effectively unemployed my parents who had supported me thought I should seek my other area of interest, Technical Drawing. To cut long story short here I got offered a job in an architects office as a copy boy. In other words I would be copying already produced plans. It was a fair commute by train and at the end of it I would be left with just £3 a week. I decided to reject it, as you can imagine this did not go down well with the parents or the job centre.

By now were are in latter part of 1980 and frustration was setting in on all sides, especially with the job centre careers advisor. One job they tried to send me to was for the local football team, Brighton&Hove Albion, it was cleaning boots !!  I had a bit of an argument with her and asked what on earth that had to do with IT. In frustration she said, “well look, I have this new scheme just introduced. Its not a job but a six month work experience, its YTS, its only £23.50 per week but you get to work in IT to get some experience”. To say I bit her hand off would be an understatement, this was the opportunity I for so long had hung on for.

The company was one of the largest utilities on the south coast employing over 5000+ and what's more it was within walking distance of where I lived. I vowed to myself that I would do anything and everything that was asked of me and more. The six months flew by and was the best time I had experience since leaving school. They dropped me into all the IT departments for experience, Operations, Technical support, Engineering, Programming, Networks etc. Now with YTS there was always a chance at the end of the course you would be offered a job, sadly for me there was nothing available and I had to leave. During this time thankfully I had impressed all I had come into contact with, my passion for IT and willingness to work hard noticed. One particular ICL engineer who covered the south east recommended me to a local  council he covered, needless to say two weeks later I started as a trainee operator.

Six months into this job the utility I had worked my YTS placement at contacted me directly and said a position had become available not as a trainee but as a junior operator. They were not going to advertise it and it was mine if I wanted it, no interview necessary. This made my day but presented me with a dilemma, I would have to resign from my first job and my father was not impressed after all the trouble I had gone through to get one in the first place. I understood but it was a great opportunity. I liked the company the people and they were a pre-release site for ICL. This meant  we would get all leading edge hardware before others. Also for an 18 year old in 1981 I was offered £12,500 basic with overtime on top, which was a 4K+ pay rise which was a lot of money back then.

I resigned from the council, was called all sorts of things and told not to work my notice. They wrote a letter to my new boss complaining about a no poaching agreement and tried to recoup some training course fees. The new boss told them to.....well I won't repeat it.

This is pretty much where the story starts and ends. I worked for this company man and boy for the next 30 years. I started when there were no monitors on mainframes just Teletypes an ICL 1900 running George III. Mainframes filled an entire floor of the office block. The mainframe exchangeable disk pack drives ( EDS-200) were the size of washing machines and were only 200MB, tape decks like wardrobe sized reel-to-reels. I saw dumb terminals arrive, the start of desktop computing, followed by the PC arrival and distributed computing. I started operating on mainframes then after 5 years moved into technical superstructure support. Here I was installing patching, maintaining and programming code for ICL's VME operating systems. VME standing for Virtual Machine Environment, yes 20 years before Virtualisation became popular on Intel based MS platforms ICL was leading the way back in 1980. When mainframes crashed I was frequently performing hardcore dump cracking which involved translating pages and pages of Hex into readable text to determine where and why it fell over.  Back in 1980 we had the 2970 (12MB mainstore) series dual which could be soft split into two separate systems via a config panel Scotty would be familiar with. Then later with the quad 3900 series with water cooled plenum and on the fly soft splitting. Anyone here who worked with ICL at the time might remember VISA? VME_Inoperable_System_Access. The mainframe is dead but an ORAC type box within still functional allows the engineer to gain access and build outwards to a working system.

By the late 1980's we were branching out into distributed computing and I started working on Unix based systems, again in a technical support role. Here I was exposed to all flavours of hardware and operating systems from SUN and SunOS/Solaris and ICL's DRS6000 and DRSNX. And plenty of bourne-shell, C-shell programming. By this time PC/Intel based computing was on the rise and I found myself working with Novell Netware 3&4 and Microsoft NT 3 – 2000. Also a stint in web server support, web app support with some web design thrown in good measure. Except for the IT members amongst us, I suspect you're all glazing over by now.

To conclude, after a spell in Networking, and having worked in nearly every IT department, with many years in the company and how it all worked, I ended up as a Technical Architect designing IT solutions for them. Sadly privatisation, off-shoring to India saw with the inevitable decline in standards that changed the company not for the better. I saw through most of the off-shoring and left not long afterwards retiring.  Over the years in the job I had many people join my team most with IT degrees, many looked down on me as I had just an average comprehensive education. That snobbery soon faded when they were faced with a fault they could not fix and little old comprehensive boy walked over and fixed it. I often wanted to go back to find the school teacher and careers advisor and say, “not a bad 30 year career for someone who you said would never work in IT".

Finally and bringing us back to TV's, until 2010 I had never touched the inside of a TV, had no idea, some will say I still don't, again what I lack in knowledge I hope I make up for with passion. Now I couldn't image a time not fixing CTV's. As I frequently remind my almost 14 year old lad who is fast approaching his options year, “never be told what you cannot do, if you have a passion for a subject you will prevail, dare to dream”.

Hope I've not bored you all senseless

A couple of photos to show the first two mainframes I worked on. The first was ICL 1900 running George III operating system, no monitors just tele-types. Note the printers, they were the size of small sheds. To change media type you had to swap paper-tape spools. The second show the superb 2900 series much more advanced and with the luxury of CRT monitors to interact with the O/S. The operating system was now VME/B and we ran two emulators called meep and signet to be able to run George III applications on it. To the right of the OPER you can see the split configuration panel I mentioned earlier in the post.

An excellent and entertaining post, Peter.

I think I can see why you don't include your location in your profile, though!

nuvistor said
makes mine look very tame. 

There's been a few times on my roller-coaster career when I'd have chucked it all in for something "tame". Reading other's bio stories here reminds me just how fast the modern world is changing. The interesting point is that we all change as needed. Life's a journey. Enjoy it!

Terry said
I think I can see why you don't include your location in your profile, though!  

Actually, I'm still exploring this site and haven't found where to edit 'Location' data. Any hints?

Chris said
Thanks for a very interesting post, just the sort of relaxing read one needs over the first cuppa
Its nice to acquaint ourselves with our members past and their backgrounds

What if you'd asked "tell us about yourself in less than five hundred words"... Now that would have been a challenge for me!