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This is pretty impressive and all, and I'm glad this was actually archived and didn't just end up in a landfill, but at the risk of being that weird nerd... Why

This is pretty impressive and all, and I'm glad this was actually archived and didn't just end up in a landfill, but at the risk of being that weird nerd... Why did she get one TV per recorder? I know very early models didn't have a tuner but it sounds she got them over time, so just hook them all up to one or two TVs, tune them to the appropriate channel and start recording!?

rob74 2y ago
I guess she also wanted to be able to conveniently see what all the VCRs were recording, at any time? Ok, several TV sets were expensive, but compared to the cost of all the tapes (not to mention the apartments she bought to store the tapes) I guess it was just a rounding error...
ralferoo 2y ago
Most VCRs were preset to output to UHF channel 36 (at least that's the UK numbering, it may be slightly different in the US), and so while recording different channels would be fine with multiple VCRs without a TV, watching the output from multiple VCRs wouldn't have been as easy. Maybe she wanted to be easily able to check what a particular VCR was recording without having to swap wires at the back of the TV. You could probably have made a giant coax switch box too, but it's unlikely they'd have been available commercially with more than just an A/B switch. There also used to be tuning screw accessible via a very small hole on most models in the UK, and you could re-tune it to output on a different channel that way, but sometimes you had to open up the VCR to get to that. Or maybe she just didn't know that was even possible. In any case, there would only have been so many spare channels for her to use before she started interfering with the broadcasts she was trying to capture. Maybe she just liked having a bank of screens that all had a different channel. I know my younger self would have thought that was pretty cool!
- ghaff 2y ago
  In the US, as I recall, you typically chose whether to output to VHF 3 or 4.
  - ta1243 2y ago
    UK stopped using VHF for TV in the early 1980s, at 405 lines. In the late 1960s the 625 standard started, and went from UHF channel 21 to about 69. TVs didn't support VHF frequencies. Ch 36 was (is) about 590-600MHz, and wasn't used by any transmitters (neither was 35 or 37, at least until the 1990s when Channel 5 came out)
gfccggc 2y ago
By the 90s she was probably buying tv/vcr combo sets. Saves on setup, space, gives her monitoring and they weren't that much more expensive

rob74 2y ago

I guess she also wanted to be able to conveniently see what all the VCRs were recording, at any time? Ok, several TV sets were expensive, but compared to the cost of all the tapes (not to mention the apartments she bought to store the tapes) I guess it was just a rounding error...

ralferoo 2y ago

Most VCRs were preset to output to UHF channel 36 (at least that's the UK numbering, it may be slightly different in the US), and so while recording different channels would be fine with multiple VCRs without a TV, watching the output from multiple VCRs wouldn't have been as easy. Maybe she wanted to be easily able to check what a particular VCR was recording without having to swap wires at the back of the TV. You could probably have made a giant coax switch box too, but it's unlikely they'd have been available commercially with more than just an A/B switch. There also used to be tuning screw accessible via a very small hole on most models in the UK, and you could re-tune it to output on a different channel that way, but sometimes you had to open up the VCR to get to that. Or maybe she just didn't know that was even possible. In any case, there would only have been so many spare channels for her to use before she started interfering with the broadcasts she was trying to capture. Maybe she just liked having a bank of screens that all had a different channel. I know my younger self would have thought that was pretty cool!

ghaff 2y ago
In the US, as I recall, you typically chose whether to output to VHF 3 or 4.
- ta1243 2y ago
  UK stopped using VHF for TV in the early 1980s, at 405 lines. In the late 1960s the 625 standard started, and went from UHF channel 21 to about 69. TVs didn't support VHF frequencies. Ch 36 was (is) about 590-600MHz, and wasn't used by any transmitters (neither was 35 or 37, at least until the 1990s when Channel 5 came out)

gfccggc 2y ago

By the 90s she was probably buying tv/vcr combo sets. Saves on setup, space, gives her monitoring and they weren't that much more expensive