Apollo Comms Part 22: How NASA Upgraded the Moon TV to Color

[@mspysu79]

The chance to do the impromptu interview of Stan Lebar at the Early Television Foundation Museum was a once-in-a-lifetime event. It went on long enough that we were running out of tape while recording the interview, luckily there were two of us with cameras rolling so one could run out to the car grab some tape and then start recording while the other changed tapes. The interview ended when Stan's lovely wife Elaine said, "Honey we are going to miss our flight"

[@ReneKnuvers74rk]

Again a nice mixture of historical footage, technical details and experimentation. I really like this series!

[@Likeaudio]

It is epic

[@Thisandthat8908]

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.

[@wadesta1986]

I lived in Parkes for ten years and would often go out to the radio telescope. It was one of my favourite places to grab a coffee and just sit. It is such an amazing piece of engineering history. It's been about three years since I was last out there, and I do miss it!

[@rallymax2]

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

[@wadesta1986]

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

[@raymitchell9736]

This whole series of videos needs to be edited and put together to make a documentary, even a multi-part documentary... you are capturing important bits of history that I doubt anyone has ever seen or thought about... We take our technology for granted these days not realizing the miracles of what NASA and all those people had done.

[@titusllewelyn]

Thank you CuriousMarc for filling in some blanks of a story told to me by my older brother. He was an electronics technician living and working in the Houston area in the early 70s. He never worked at NASA, but knew people that did, My brother told me about the early color camera that was pretty much one man's idea and that it contained a spinning wheel. As he understood it, the camera was selected from a group of camera ideas submitted by several companies. My brother passed away before we could talk about it again. Now I know that the man was Stan Lebar and the company was Westinghouse. And of course the reason for the design was the limited bandwidth with the communication equipment.

[@Xboerefijn1]

I love it how you show that the astronauts were not only highly trained space pilots, but also just people really enjoying the things they do on the moon^^

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

[@kaitlyn__L]

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

[@alpcns]

Absolutely fascinating. What a wonderful time that was.

[@feicodeboer]

That S-band system was pretty darn good from the beginning and there were some darn good engineers making the most out of it with the technology available. Impressive.

[@624Dudley]

Thanks a million, Marc & Company. This stuff is the right stuff. 👍

[@TheFleetz]

Just gets better and better, if that is possible! Coming from a TV Broadcast engineering background found this episode particularly fascinating. That said ALL episodes have been brilliant! 👍

[@NinerFourWhiskey]

I remember in great detail watching that Apollo 17 moonwalk as a young child. Thanks for playing it and explaining how they got it to happen. I remember seeing the first moon mission launch from my grandmother's home in Miami when as I had just turned 4 years old. Truly a child of the moon missions.

[@tabajaralabs]

Another INCREDIBLE video...Thanks a lot, Marc and team!!!

[@jensschroder8214]

The good thing about analog TV transmission is that you can still see something even if the signal is bad. Even today's surveillance cameras still use a slightly modified analogue signal. 16:9 instead of 3:4 or 4:5. just longer lines

[@jaut-76]

Just about when I’m drowning in my electronics university essay I can relax for a well deserved few minutes.

[@thebiggerbyte5991]

Wonderful stuff. It's amazing what they were able to squeeze out of the technology they had back then and how ingenious they were.

[@Toymortal]

What brilliant timing for a video to drop as I was just considering taking a break from my pile of work! Fascinating as always Marc and the team.

[@michaelcherry8952]

When I was going to technical college in the early 1980s, I did a presentation on the CBS-Columbia 12CC2 Field Sequential Colour System from 1951. It too used spinning colour filter discs and also suffered from fringing issues. Interesting that they revived that concept more than a decade later for the colour cameras on the Apollo missions.

[@StringerNews1]

Actually the visual portion of an NTSC broadcast signal is only 4.2 MHz, with 1.25 MHz of it being redundant because the NTSC color system uses the same sync pulses as EIA monochrome. The pulses have a DC component, so true SSB wasn't possible. Because the Apollo signal didn't have to be compatible with any TV receivers, the ~330 TV lines of resolution could have been had in just under 3 MHz of baseband bandwidth. And because the bandwidth translates into detail, the ~2 MHz of bandwidth for the LM is pretty close to the ~240 lines that U-matic, VHS and Betamax provided. The color system was essentially what CBS proposed for the NTSC color standard. At the time it was rejected because it was electro-mechanical, and a fully electronic system was considered better. While EIA monochrome had 2 fields per frame, NTSC color had 4 fields per color frame. The sync needed for sequential color would have to be different to get 3 fields per color frame, and interlace would have to go as well. When I was in college, I had a student job in the campus ITFS TV station that broadcast classroom videos to remote sites on channels above 2.5 GHz. Our color studios used the Ikegami HL-79. I was one of the few students who knew how to register the color cameras. I can only guess how the sequential color signals from the moon were converted to NTSC color! But three monochrome cameras facing three monochrome monitors would have been a registration nightmare.

[@johndododoe1411]

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.

[@StringerNews1]

@@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.

[@johndododoe1411]

@@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.

[@StringerNews1]

@@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.

[@johndododoe1411]

@@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.

[@martinsiegbahn3720]

Excellent video as always! And, man, are we looking forwards to see Artemis astronauts walking on the Moon in 4K!

[@CuriousMarc]

I hope they sing too!

[@rickansell661]

OMG. I just realised that I noticed that quality change live! Five year old me was allowed to stay up and watch the landing live on our brand new TV in our social housing home in Winchester (England, the proper one). My memory is obviously a five years olds very fuzzy one but I distinctly remember remarking on the change, 'you can see now', after I had been complaining about the quality and my parents patiently explaining what I could see, which I was obviously comparing against my experience of kids TV. What we didn't know until five years later was that I couldn't make anything out because on top of the Apollo quality and the relatively low quality of the TV my parents could afford my eyesight has massive issues. What I remember as initially being an uninterpretable blob was indeed, to me, an uninterpretable blob! Nevertheless I do remember the jump to being able to work out what was happening - and you have just explained why.

[@IanDarley]

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!

[@nigeljames6017]

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.

[@owensmith7530]

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.

[@nigeljames6017]

@@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 !

[@IanDarley]

@@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"

[@fredflintstone8048]

I always appreciate the great detail that you put into your presentations. Very informative. Thank you for your work, and for sharing. It just goes to show how resourceful engineers can be. Give them a constraint like limited bandwidth and let them go to work on coming up with a solution.

[@BigMouth380cal]

My day is off to a colorful start. Thanks you you.

[@UnexpectedBooks]

Great video! It brings back memories for this lifelong space nut. Boy, do I remember when that camera burned out at the start of the Apollo 12 EVA. I was 13 years old and I was pissed.

[@cdl0]

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

[@chrissavage5966]

First met Ikegami ENG cameras in the early 80's Lovely bits of kit. My first was the HL77. I kid you not, the HL stands for Handy Looky :) Those NASA guys certainly did manage to squeeze remarkable results from hardly any bandwidth.

[@richardgelber2740]

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.

[@richardgelber2740]

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.

[@Zadster]

Chrominance bandwidth is only usually a fraction of the luminance's. You can probably safely get away with 1/10th or less. It would be a bit of work, but you could split off the NTSC colo(u)r, filter the luma with a low pass filter, and remodulate the chroma within the available bandwidth. Obviously the receiver monitor would need a chroma decoder based at the correct new offset. It sounds like they were trying to copy PAL/SECAM colour encoding towards the later missions.

[@numlockkilla]

We appreciate what your doing to teach us folk how it works because no one has. Best channel 100

[@bazoo513]

Boy, you managed to work with *actual* original Apollo hardware! Now, _those_ are holy relics!

[@Spookieham]

Great and interesting video with tons of research - thank you to all of the team.

[@mike94560]

There is a great movie about Parkes and the Moon mission. It's called "The Dish". I remember seeing Apollo 17 launch in December.

[@richardgelber2740]

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.

[@ptonpc]

Fascinating as always

[@KeritechElectronics]

Great insights on Apollo history, and damn cool revival again :) I'm impressed by how NASA pulled it off so early. I wouldn't expect them to have any color even in 11, let alone 10. Oh, and singing astronauts, always a nice one!

[@LakhwinderSinghTeona]

I was waiting for new episode sir. Thanks so much for it.

[@tbp-channel8870]

Greeting from earthling Andre (Germany). I was really waiting for this next episode... great work and video Marc and team, as always.

[@dalewilson8159]

Fascinating stuff! I can't believe how intelligent they guys and girls were back then, inventing this stuff and sending it to the moon. Thanks for the video - always love watching

[@yorgle]

Spectacular! Thank you!

[@qzorn4440]

another early low light level camera was the isocon tube with an image intensifier used in military projects and x-ray cameras. fun stuff back then. 😎 thanks great info Apollo video.

[@benjaminhanke79]

12:23 I have a hard time understanding Stan Lebar. He basically says we're not to blame Alan Bean because he wasn't properly trained to work with the camera.

[@ReneKnuvers74rk]

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

[@SoddingaboutSi]

Thank you for this Marc and gang. Very interesting.

[@dupontct]

Fascinating topic

[@prillewitz]

As always, very entertaining! 😊

[@EcBaPr]

amazing video thanks Marc.

[@markgreco1962]

Thanks you guys

[@petersmith5199]

Excellent. Thank you.

[@PsRohrbaugh]

The details on the camera are super interesting...

[@bfx8185]

Great recap !!! Thx.

[@rubiconnn]

Does anyone know why the link module thing is built so rugged? I don't know much about spacecraft engineering but I thought they spent a lot of time shaving off as much weight as possible. The casing of the thing looks like it could fall from orbit onto concrete and be perfectly fine. You would think they would build the housing out of something like plastic or fiberglass to save weight.

[@flyingpapaye]

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.

[@michaelmiller641]

Wonderful!

[@ThomasMather]

7:30 ran at 10 rotations per second*

[@gripp9k]

Really cool, I didn't know any of this at all.

[@AlainHubert]

Ce qui m'étonnera toujours, c'est que tout cela a été réalisé dans les années 70, il y a près de 50 ans de cela! Avec une technologie relativement primitive, un disque de filtres de couleurs qui tourne mécaniquement devant un capteur monochrome inspiré du CBS field-sequential system développé dans les années 40, et une bande passante vraiment limitée! Les ingénieurs de l'époque devaient accomplir des miracles avec pratiquement rien! Mais ce qui me désole par contre, c'est de voir qu'aujourd'hui, en 2022, l'Homme peine a retourner sur la lune, et encore moins aller sur mars, malgré l'évolution spectaculaire de la technologie depuis Apollo. Les ingénieurs d'aujourd'hui, avec tous leur ordis super-puissants et plus de 50 ans de progrès techniques, semblent n'êtres que des amateurs en comparaison avec leurs prédécesseurs. À l'exception de Mike Stewart, et toute la bande de la chaîne CuriousMarc, bien-sûr! Merci du partage!

[@kerbalwww2]

Fun thing is that we have in 1969 (years before my birth) the world wow over a slow scan TV transmit with the first human on the moon. In 2022 we expect nasa transmit 4K from moons orbit and live stream over the internet.

[@elanman608]

If you take the r g and b outputs of the Ikegami and lash up a switch driven by the field sync output of an spg genlocked to the cameras composite video output you can recreate the sequential colour system. But decoding would be more of a task requiring 3 framestores😁

[@RetroRawit]

Fantastic work. Nice Rickroll as well :D

[@johnpickens448]

I've watched every second of this fascinating series. Thank you for doing this. I was wonderingif you found any details of the Lunar Rover mounted transmission system, as Rover video was not routed through the LEM. It would be interesting to know any difference or improvements in the Rover transmitter.

[@ropersonline]

7:30: "The filter wheel (...) ran at 10 rpm..."

[@izzzzzz6]

perfect

[@MarcelHuguenin]

Great episode, so much to learn about the effort put into getting us these pictures back then. At the time we only had black and white television and were unfamiliar with color tv as such. Amazing how you and your team are putting in the effort to share all of this with us.

[@amykathleen2]

I have a question that’s not specifically relevant to this video but I’ve just finished catching up and I’m putting it on the most recent video in hopes it will be more likely to get a response. I know nothing about vintage electronics or computers and only the basics about modern ones, so I haven’t been able to follow the details of the AGC project or this one as I’ve watched all the videos over the past few weeks, but I can definitely admire both this team’s work and NASA’s. There is a lot I don’t understand, but one question I think I might actually understand the answer to is this: when I watched the AGC videos, I saw the team meticulously test everything step by step in ways I never imagined would be possible. In this series there seems to be much more “turn it on and find out if it works,” which although it’s what I as a normal person would do, seems very different from the approach to the AGC project. Can anyone explain why the difference?

[@afrocampossjc3904]

Hello Marc: Why not make some agreement with the National Museum and try to power up all inside Apollo 11 CM?!

[@dalewilson8159]

Thanks!

[@chubbyadler3276]

Imagine that. They used the original CBS Color transmission scheme from the 1950s before NTSC color became standardized. ...though the same method is still used on DLP projectors, only faster.

[@docnele]

My favourite nerd show! :)

[@FUNKLABOR_DL1LEP]

and again 👍 just before watching 😎 73

[@johndododoe1411]

Adapting NTSC for 700kHz bandwidth would involve a lower color subcarrier frequency chosen to match the lower sync frequencies yet with different integral ratios to keep the frame rate at 10 fps instead of 4 .

[@JoeDurnavich]

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.

[@ezquimal]

That Sony Trinitron are the badass of the cart monitor. I remember ikegami a

[@av_kovko]

Thanks to the Apollo color broadcasting system, the foundation for digital television standards such as ATSC, DVB and IDBS was laid.

[@EdwinNoorlander]

can’t wait for Artimis 3

[@Allan_aka_RocKITEman]

@CuriousMarc >>> 👍👍

[@slobdog21]

The astronaut hammering on the moon is somewhat scary but I assume it was thoroughly researched for any chance of shrapnel damage.

[@RodHartzell]

Fantastic video! Amazing content.

[@bazoo513]

Is that HP 1000 E (or perhaps HP 2100) with HP 7970 in the background? Be still, my heart!

[@batterymakermarkii2654]

Ahhh, the old CBS Field Sequential Color System..

[@janne-mans8295]

look at chinese Chang on dark side, the surface of moon is dark brown however on the sunlit side the reflection is so intense, that due to lack of atmosphere, it depending on soil type, it appears to eye as whitish or light yellow grey or slightly darker At close distance it should have looked camel, beige creamy.

[@stevemar7952]

The next moon landing will probably have 50 GoPro's live streaming HD day and night.

[@JoeDurnavich]

Marc, I can't tell from the spectrum display but were you getting 4+ MHz transmitted through the Apollo hardware with the color camera? Was there a lot of roll off of the higher frequencies?

[@CuriousMarc]

Yes and yes!

[@Israelischer_Bobfahrer]

isnt that the Ruby Sea daytime theme at the outro? :D

[@ericwazhung]

I had no idea we landed on the moon so many times!

[@johndododoe1411]

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

[@allwaizeright9705]

Slow Scan was about 15 fps or lower..

[@bruceadler-9410]

at +7:32, minor error: 60 HZ field rate, 2 fields per frame, and 10 frames per second = 600 RPM, not 10 RPM.

[@CuriousMarc]

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

[@zero0ryn]

Are you going to get the biomed part working?

[@oliverharris7366]

I watched a KZbin video that said the reason the picture was so crappie was because the guy was pointing the camera at the monitor and sending it out on the air ways.

[@johndododoe1411]

Nope, that was the signal conversion machine in Australia.

[@horacezontalbeam]

5:40 If I understand correctly, from Apollo 15 onwards the camera on the lunar buggy used full NTSC 525 lines 30ish frames per second black and white, but each frame was passed through an RGB filter, so if that were to be played back on a slowed-down TV you would see individual frames of R-G-B-R-G-B-R ... etc, which isn't apparent on live TV at the correct speed? So there was no need for any kind of conversion EXCEPT you wouldn't be able to watch on a normal TV cos the frame reset was different?

[@JoeDurnavich]

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.

[@horacezontalbeam]

@@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.

[@JoeDurnavich]

@@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.

[@horacezontalbeam]

​@@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.?

[@JoeDurnavich]

@@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.

[@orbitingeyes2540]

Interesting! NASA basically invented carrier cancelation to free up link bandwidth for color TV from the moon! This technology has recently made a comeback for carrier-in-carrier and RFI removal on commercial satellite links.

[@milesprower6641]

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?

[@68hoffman]

kool :)

[@daicekube]

And NTSC never understood the need of the PAL colour burst signal! Not until video players came along...

[@richardgelber2740]

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.

[@daicekube]

@@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.

[@richardgelber2740]

@@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.

[@richardgelber2740]

@@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.)

[@tomstamford6837]

I hate to bring this up in case the trolls lift their heads up out of puddles of drool and take notice, but I feel this is an important point to make. Those certain people, you know, the, "They couldn't do that with 60s technology..." bunch love to point that out without thinking. Though they have little understanding of what remarkable technologies existed back then. Electric cars were first built in the 1880s! Let's see now... technology, hmmmm... we want a device to do something, but it doesn't exist. I know, I'm going to invent it! We don't have rockets to go to the moon - let's invent one. We don't have the ability to maneuver in space - let's learn how to. We don't have vehicles to drive on the moon - let's make one, able to fold up for storage too. We don't have great TV cameras or able to transmit adequately - let's figure out how to. These dummies can't grasp the simple concept of need driving technology forward and the ability to either adapt existing technology to newer uses and/or greater efficiency or to develop new, as yet, non-existent technology as required by new challenges.

[@papalegba6796]

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

[@tomstamford6837]

@@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.

[@paulbyerlee2529]

Just had the weirdest glitch. I started watching when you had posted 35 seconds ago but there was no sound. I had to close and reopen the video before the sound was there. Wonder what happened 🤷

[@FrankGevaerts]

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

[@Damien.D]

Subcarrier signal was missing ^^

[@DrBovdin]

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.

[@DAVIDGREGORYKERR]

Would a French SECAM Video Camera work better for your experiment.

[@richardgelber2740]

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.

[@jamess1787]

Rick Astley approves of this video.

[@kaitlyn__L]

Hey Marc, I’m sure you have as good a chance of knowing this as anyone. Is it true that Armstrong was scripted to say “small step for _a_ man” (given “man” as a mass noun is equivalent to “mankind”) or is that just an urban legend based on expected grammar?

[@prillewitz]

Did you ever hear of the Rick Astley paradox?

[@johnrickard8512]

Saywhat? Megabit-class uplinks in the 1960s?!

[@zounds010]

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

[@johndodson8464]

3:40 Someone would have to explain to me why it looks like that guy is on a wire.

[@nordic24]

It doesnt

[@Sashazur]

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.

[@TheErador]

Fourth i guess. Cool

[@benjaminhanke79]

And May the fourth be with you!

[@yoskarokuto3553]

in 60s' they can analog (LIVE BROADCAST) from the moon too😅

[@LakshmananLM]

Cool. First and a first

[@CuriousMarc]

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

[@LakshmananLM]

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

[@LakshmananLM]

@@JESUSCHRYSLER5512 umm, a name?

[@LakshmananLM]

@@JESUSCHRYSLER5512 🤣

[@LakshmananLM]

@@JESUSCHRYSLER5512 my initials.

[@gower1973]

Considering space is black, the moon is grey and the spacesuits and space modules where mostly white it was a complete waste of time to develop colour tv, would of been better to just improve the resolution and quality of the BW pictures

[@richardgelber2740]

Among other things, it was important for political reasons to see the American flag in color on the moon. Congressional (and public) support for the space program was important for continued funding.

[@DAVIDGREGORYKERR]

Too much like SECAM

[@CNCmachiningisfun]

21 dimwits disliked this video. Why?

[@BlondieSL]

Oh oh! I clicked like and the number, when I clicked was *666*.... dannnnggggg! 😁😅😂