Watch out, Gen X-ers — there’s a nostalgia overload heading your way, courtesy of this over-the-air TV simulator. And it has us feeling a little Saturday morning cartoon-ish, or maybe even a bit Afterschool Special.
[Shane C Mason]’s “FieldStation42” build centers around a period-correct color TV, and rightly so — a modern TV would be jarring here, and replacing the CRT in this irreplaceable TV would be unthinkable. Programming comes via painstakingly collected sitcoms, dramas, news broadcasts, and specials, all digitized and stored on disk and organized by the original networks the programs came from. Python running on a Raspberry Pi does the heavy lifting here, developing a schedule of programs for the week that makes sense for the time of day — morning news and talk, afternoon soaps, the usual family hour and prime time offerings, and finally [Carson] rounding out the day, because that’s all we had for late night.
As for switching between stations, rather than risk damaging the old TV, [Shane] really upped his nostalgia game and found an old antenna rotator control box. These were used to steer the directional antenna toward different transmitters back in the day, especially in fringe areas like the one he grew up in. He added a set of contacts to the knob and a Pi Pico, which talks to the main Pi and controls which “channel” is being viewed. He also added an effect of fading and noise in the video and audio between channels, simulating the antenna moving. The video below shows it in action.
For those who missed the Golden Age of TV, relax; as [Shane] correctly surmises after going through this whole project, Golden Ages only exist in your mind. Things were certainly different with 70s mass media, a fact which this build captures neatly, but that doesn’t mean they were better. Other than Saturday mornings, of course — those were objectively better in every way.
Saturday morning cartoons on every channel, all day, everyday.
Except Captain Planet, propaganda for developing minds.
I used to watch Saturday morning cartoons sitting in front of the tv, in my underware eating cereal, they don’t let me do that no more.
Food for boomers nostalgic for the decerebrating instrument that is television. Nothing interesting, not even a VHF or UHF modulator recovery. A Youtube tutorial for making your own e-waste.
But it delays sending a working CRT to e-waste!
“TV has changed alot since the first broadcast in 1935…”
The BBC was experimenting with midnight television programming on receivers fitted with Nipkow disks as far back as the mid 20’s. No bearing on the project, just sayin’.
“No bearing on the project”
So that’s why they didn’t last?
You think they would have had a spin-off.
Now I went and learned about ‘Nipkow disks’ – but what were they experimenting with midnight TV programming?
I wonder if something like this would be good in nursing homes with dementia patients to help them feel more at home and less anxious.
It might be good in my home to make me feel less anxious!
That’s a wonderful idea. There are even archives of old commercials that could be included.
Over the air. I think that’s a real American thing. I’m from the 80’s and never seen over the air TV. As a kid, I didn’t know better than that the TV signal came from the round plug in the wall. Later found out it’s coax and I hated it because the port often had problems (probably due to oxidation) so I had to wiggle it. But if I touched it, I felt the electricity going through it. But I needed my cartoons!
Where are you from?
Over the air TV was and remains a thing in the UK. Cable television was only in big towns and cities. If there was a subscription service it would have been over the vacuum and then a little bit of air (satellite).
Cable and fibre internet are still being rolled out so maybe over the air television might disappear one day, but for now it’s here to stay.
I’ve never heard the term “Over the vacuum”. I like it, I’m going to start using it.
Of course that applied to the US to, and indeed still does. There are plenty of rural areas where cable (CATV) isn’t available for economic reasons, and OTA broadcasts are still a thing, though they’re digital now. I’m sure many readers here remember the kerfuffle over converters for old NTSC US sets to receive digital (ATSC) broadcasts.
My parents moved from the Boston area, where we had cable, to rural Vermont in 1986, and for the next nine years had only OTA TV, with a roof-mounted rotatable antenna — so they had an antenna controller similar to the one used in this build.
Where I live now in rural New Mexico there’s no cable TV available. There is fiber-to-the-home, though, so we just stream Internet TV. We did briefly try a cheap digital antenna just to see what we could pick up, but could only get a couple of stations. One of these days I might set up something better just as a curiosity.
Digital TV pretty much killed OTA for me. It works, oh now it doesn’t… now it works… now it doesn’t. Every program gets at least a few moments of stuck pixels or rainbow colored junk and people moving in inverted color smears for a few seconds because a bird flew by the antenna.
I could replicate the errors simply by clicking on a piezo lighter near the tuner box. Absolute garbage.
The picture would also stop for two or three seconds whenever someone in the house flicked a light switch on an energy saving/fluorescent tube. The system has some error correction and redundancy, but when you don’t have a perfect signal you’re pretty much on the cliff of where it simply stops working altogether from the slightest disturbance – no graceful degradation.
Were you already using an optimal antenna, well-shielded coax, and maybe a filtered low noise amplifier? I found that some TV’s have crappy tuners, and the purpose-built tuners that are supposed to stream over the network aren’t much better, although their trouble was buffering constantly for me.
“it’s coax and I hated it because the port often had problems (probably due to oxidation) so I had to wiggle it. But if I touched it, I felt the electricity going through it.”
Must have been how they powered the larger TVs… power on the coax ;-)
The competing standard to POE, POC: Power Over Coax.
In an ideal world we’d have archives of all our old programs so detailed we could run rolling rebroadcasts via the internet.
So we start a stream running from the beginning of broadcast TV and playing in realtime continuously. Then every decade a new stream is added starting from the beginning again.
How cool would it be to set your device up for a specific decade stream and it has all the channels and shows airing exactly as the same day decades ago for you to follow.
It’d make for a really interesting TimeCapsule if nothing else.
It should have a second dial where you can dial in the decade: 50’s, 60’s, 70’s 80’s….
Why tf did he ruin it with gamer LEDs? 😭
Any project that uses WKRP and Barney Miller as source material is a win in my book.
As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.
I almost forgot, fellow babies: BOOGER!
“Chy Chy Rodregwes”
“Monster lizzard ravages east coast. Mayors in five New England cities have issued emergency requests for federal disaster relief as a result of the giant lizzard that descended on the east coast last night. Officials say this lizzard, the worst since ’78, has devastated transportation, disrupted communications, and left many hundreds homeless.”
“As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”
That’s the episode along with a concurrent broadcast time change that saved the show from cancellation and is based on an actual promotional event although in the actual case wild turkeys were released from a fixed wing aircraft. WILD turkeys CAN fly. Turkeys raised for human consumption have huge breasts that prevent flight, an added benefit when you’re raising thousands of them.
Still waiting for zinc to become more valuable than gold, alas.
“2 cents a pound? I’ll spring for a couple tons.” Harris and Dietrich FTW!
Having grown up mostly in the LA metro area, getting reception was just a matter of my dad getting on the roof and pointing the aerial at Mount Wilson. For me, antenna rotators were among the exotic offerings in the Radio Shack catalog without an apparent practical use.
we lived kind of out in the sticks, and it was a very handy thing to have around
I live dead center between Denver and Cheyenne, so having a rotator on sports days was essential.
Even though I lived within easy signal reach from New York City we had a rotor to expand selection to the Philadelphia stations.
Hope he found the classic commercials, they are a lot of the nostalgia 🤣.
Don’t forgot the mini-series. ABC would have some killer mini-series. Like Around the World in 80 Days woth Pierce Brosnan 🤣
Aerial rotors seem like they would be sort of rare, what about an old wired cable box, easier to get, nobody cares if you gut it and you don’t have to get up from your seat to change the channel, just don’t trip over the cord.
I wrote something similar (just one channel though) in Python a few years ago. It has been running on a dedicated Pi for over two years now. In the process of rewriting it on top of MPV after I saw this project.
https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/UHF
Just a suggestion in case you haven’t seen it, why not have your Pi play this video when it boots up?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUi926ses94