France Proposes Agenda Items at IARU for WRC-23 Items May Impact 144 MHz and 1240 MHz Amateur Bands

Two proposals under discussion in Europe as possible World Radiocommunication Conference 2023 agenda items could impact important Amateur Radio frequencies, IARU reported this week. Included is a proposal from France to consider the 144 to 146 MHz band as a primary allocation to the Aeronautical Mobile service, as part of a broader consideration of spectrum allocated to that service. IARU also cautioned the amateur community against overreacting to the news.

France will submit a paper containing a proposal for an agenda item for new non-safety Aeronautical Mobile applications at the June 17th to the 21st Conference Preparatory Group meeting of the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations, or CEPT, in Prague.

The 144 to 146 MHz segment is a primary global Amateur and Amateur Satellite allocation. IARU said it views with grave concern any proposal to include this band in the proposed study, and pledged to energetically promote this viewpoint in the appropriate forums to seek to obtain assurances that the spectrum will remain a primary allocation for the amateur services.

The band 144 to 146 MHz is allocated globally to the amateur and amateur satellite services on a primary basis. This is one of the few primary allocations to the amateur service above 29.7 MHz and as such is an important and widely used part of the amateur spectrum with a vast installed base of users and operational satellite stations.

IARU views with grave concern any proposal to include this band in the proposed study. It will be representing this view energetically in Regional Telecommunications Organisations and in ITU to seek to obtain assurances that the spectrum will remain a primary allocation for the amateur services.

One European Amateur Radio organization already has called for radio amateurs to occupy 2 meters on June 15th for one hour in protest of the French proposal.

Another proposal has been raised to study the 23-centimeter amateur allocation, 1240 to 1300 MHz, following reports of interference to the Galileo navigation system -- Europe's GPS system.

IARU said it's aware of  a handful of cases of reported interference to the Galileo E6 signal on 1278.750 MHz. According to IARU, joint studies have been carried out to assess the vulnerability of the system and, based on these, it considers the proposal to initiate an Agenda item for WRC-23 premature.

IARU does not want the amateur service to affect the operation of the Galileo system in any way. Joint studies have been carried out to assess the true vulnerability of the system and, based on these, IARU regards the proposal to initiate an Agenda item for WRC-23 as premature.

The IARU position is that proper technical assessment of the issues involved should be made in the relevant CEPT study group. Proper account needs to be taken of the operational characteristics of the amateur service in order to develop sensible and proportionate measures that will facilitate the continued utility of the band for amateur experimentation whilst respecting the primary status of the GNSS service.

IARU is ready to cooperate fully in any studies and shares the objective of reaching a secure and permanent solution to the issues of sharing in this band.

IARU asks its Member Societies to draw this information to the attention of their members, and to refrain at this time from making speculative public comments about the situation until further progress has been made in regulatory discussions. IARU is also ready to discuss this issue with other societies not in IARU membership.

IARU Region One President Don Beattie, G3BJ, reported this week on the IARU Region 1 website.

Included is a proposal from France to consider the 144 to 146 MHz band as a primary allocation to the Aeronautical Mobile service, as part of a broader consideration of spectrum allocated to that service.

France will submit a paper containing a proposal for an agenda item for new non-safety Aeronautical Mobile applications at the June 17th to the 21st Conference Preparatory Group meeting of the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations, or CEPT, in Prague.

Beattie pointed out in his account that 144 to 146 MHz is a primary global Amateur and Amateur Satellite allocation.

This is one of the few primary allocations to the Amateur Service above 29.7 MHz and, as such, is an important and widely used part of the amateur spectrum with a vast installed base of users and operational satellite stations, Beattie commented. IARU views with grave concern any proposal to include this band in the proposed study.

Beattie said IARU will energetically promote this viewpoint in Regional Telecommunications Organizations and the International Telecommunication Union, to seek to obtain assurances that the spectrum will remain a primary allocation for the amateur services.

Another proposal has been raised to study the 23-centimeter amateur allocation, 1240 to 1300 MHz, following reports of interference to the Galileo navigation system, which is Europe’s GPS system.

On this topic Beattie said IARU is aware of a handful of cases” of reported interference to the Galileo E6 signal on 1278.750 MHz. In all cases, these have been resolved by local action with the full cooperation of the amateur stations concerned, Beattie said. IARU does not want the Amateur Service to affect the operation of the Galileo system in any way. Joint studies have been carried out to assess the true vulnerability of the system and, based on these, IARU regards the proposal to initiate an Agenda item for WRC-23 as premature.

Beattie said it’s IARU’s position that proper technical assessment of the issues involved should be made in the relevant CEPT study group. Proper account needs to be taken of the operational characteristics of the Amateur Service in order to develop sensible and proportionate measures that will facilitate the continued utility of the band for amateur experimentation whilst respecting the primary status of the Galileo GPS service, Beattie said, adding that IARU is prepared to cooperate fully in any studies and shares the objective of reaching a secure and permanent solution to the issues of sharing in this band.

IARU is asking its member-societies to “refrain at this time from making speculative public comments about the situation until further progress has been made in regulatory discussions,” and said it’s ready to discuss the issue with other non-IARU societies.

How to find hidden cameras in your Airbnb, and anywhere else

In recent months there’s been a number of alarming reports of Airbnb hosts installing hidden cameras in their properties but not disclosing them to the guests staying there.

Back in January Fast Company reported on a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University who discovered two hidden cameras recording him and his family in an Airbnb. And just last month The Atlantic reported on a New Zealand family who was renting an Airbnb in Ireland and found they were being live-streamed from a hidden security camera.
Unfortunately, these aren’t isolated incidents and in response to increasing reports of guests finding hidden cameras in their Airbnb rentals, Airbnb says they are cracking down on hosts who don’t disclose hidden cameras in their property listings.

Yet just because Airbnb has a policy forbidding hosts from hiding cameras in their property without informing their guests, that’s no guarantee all hosts are complying. So if you don’t like the idea that you could possibly be being spied on in the comfort of your Airbnb or wherever else you’re staying is there anything you can do besides taking the host at his word that there are no cameras on the property? Thankfully, yes.

Keep an eye out for any odd-looking gadgets Let’s start with the most basic deterrent: keep your eyes open for any odd-looking gadgets in your Airbnb. Gadgets that look bulky or out of place in their surroundings may contain a hidden camera.

A camera disguised as a USB plug. Admittedly, it’s not the easiest thing to spot a gadget containing a hidden camera that looks out of place, because cameras have become so small, they can be hidden in virtually any device and ones anyone can buy on Amazon. Here’s just a small sample of the types of devices you can buy on Amazon with cameras hidden in them: alarm clocks, wall clocks, smoke detectors, plants, mirrors, light bulbs, speakers, and even USB wall plugs.
Still, if you see an alarm clock in a bathroom or some other place you wouldn’t expect one to be, that could be a tip-off that something is amiss. Similarly, if you see any devices, such as a USB wall plug pointed directly at a bed or shower, something could be up.

When trying to visually spot gadgets with hidden cameras, keep an eye out for devices that have a clean, unobstructed line of sight.
Use a flashlight to check for camera
lenses Another trick to use to visually spot hidden cameras is the flashlight trick. A hidden camera necessitates that its lens is embedded in a regular object. Usually, that lens is made of glass and the object it’s hidden in is made of plastic or other non-glass materials.
Glass is generally more reflective than other materials, so the lenses of hidden cameras can be rather easy to spot if you shine a light around a room. The small camera lens should be more reflective than the surface of the surrounding object.

So it’s worth giving your Airbnb a once over with your smartphone’s flashlight. Turn out all the lights in the Airbnb and activate your flashlight. Slowly do a few sweeps of every room looking for any small, bright flashes of light relative to the surrounding area. If you spot any coming from an object, examine it more closely. You may have just found a hidden camera.

Use Wi-Fi-sniffing apps to check for smart devices. Unfortunately, the above visual checks of an Airbnb aren’t always enough to spot hidden cameras, even for the keen-eyed person. The good news is there’s an even better way to identify hidden cameras.

Virtually all modern hidden cameras, especially the types like the ones listed above, use wireless technology to connect to the router in the Airbnb so they can stream the footage over the internet where the host can view it remotely. But the very fact that these devices are covertly using a wireless signal to stream footage online makes them vulnerable to detection.

Smartphone users can use apps like Fing (available for both iOS and Android) that can display all the wireless devices connected to a Wi-Fi network. So after arriving at your Airbnb and connecting to the host’s wireless network, whip out Fing and give that network a scan. It’ll show your device and any other connected to that same network.

While Fing and similar apps can’t always identify what types of devices are connected (is it a hidden camera or just a wireless printer?) the app can display the MAC address of the connected device, which can give you a hint as to what the connected device is. Simply enter the MAC address of any identified gadget at MacVendorLookup.com to see who the manufacturer is and white type of device the MAC belongs to.

Morse Code Is 175 Years Old and Still as Useful as Ever

The first message sent by Morse code’s dots and dashes across a long distance traveled from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore on Friday, May 24, 1844-175 years ago. It signaled the first time in human history that complex thoughts could be communicated at long distances almost instantaneously. Until then, people had to have face-to-face conversations; send coded messages through drums, smoke signals and semaphore systems; or read printed words.
Thanks to Samuel F.B. Morse, communication changed rapidly, and has been changing ever faster since. He invented the electric telegraph in 1832. It took six more years for him to standardize a code for communicating over telegraph wires. In 1843, Congress gave him $30,000 to string wires between the nation’s capital and nearby Baltimore. When the line was completed, he conducted a public demonstration of long-distance communication.
Morse wasn’t the only one working to develop a means of communicating over the telegraph, but his is the one that has survived. The wires, magnets and keys used in the initial demonstration have given way to smartphones’ on-screen keyboards, but Morse code has remained fundamentally the same, and is still—perhaps surprisingly—relevant in the 21st century. Although I have learned, and relearned, it many times as a Boy Scout, an amateur radio operator and a pilot, I continue to admire it and strive to master it.

Easy sending

Morse’s key insight in constructing the code was considering how frequently each letter is used in English. The most commonly used letters have shorter symbols: “E,” which appears most often, is signified by a single “dot.” By contrast, “Z,” the least used letter in English, was signified by the much longer and more complex “dot-dot-dot (pause) dot.”
In 1865, the International Telecommunications Union changed the code to account for different character frequencies in other languages. There have been other tweaks since, but “E” is still “dot,” though “Z” is now “dash-dash-dot-dot.”
The reference to letter frequency makes for extremely efficient communications: Simple words with common letters can be transmitted very quickly. Longer words can still be sent, but they take more time.

 

Going wireless

The communications system that Morse code was designed for—analog connections over metal wires that carried a lot of interference and needed a clear on-off type signal to be heard—has evolved significantly.
The first big change came just a few decades after Morse’s demonstration. In the late 19th century, Guglielmo Marconi invented radio-telegraph equipment, which could send Morse code over radio waves, rather than wires.
The shipping industry loved this new way to communicate with ships at sea, either from ship to ship or to shore-based stations. By 1910, U.S. law required many passenger ships in U.S. waters to carry wireless sets for sending and receiving messages.
After the Titanic sank in 1912, an international agreement required some ships to assign a person to listen for radio distress signals at all times. That same agreement designated “SOS”—“dot-dot-dot dash-dash-dash dot-dot-dot”—as the international distress signal, not as an abbreviation for anything but because it was a simple pattern that was easy to remember and transmit. The Coast Guard discontinued monitoring in 1995. The requirement that ships monitor for distress signals was removed in 1999, though the U.S. Navy still teaches at least some sailors to read, send and receive Morse code.

Aviators also use Morse code to identify automated navigational aids. These are radio beacons that help pilots follow routes, traveling from one transmitter to the next on aeronautical charts. They transmit their identifiers—such as “BAL” for Baltimore—in Morse code. Pilots often learn to recognize familiar-sounding patterns of beacons in areas they fly frequently.
There is a thriving community of amateur radio operators who treasure Morse code, too. Among amateur radio operators, Morse code is a cherished tradition tracing back to the earliest days of radio. Some of them may have begun in the Boy Scouts, which has made learning Morse variably optional or required over the years. The Federal Communications Commission used to require all licensed amateur radio operators to demonstrate proficiency in Morse code, but that ended in 2007. The FCC does still issue commercial licenses that require Morse proficiency, but no jobs require it anymore.
A Morse code device, which is used to sends dots and dashes. Getty Images

Blinking Morse

Because its signals are so simple—on or off, long or short—Morse code can also be used by flashing lights. Many navies around the world use blinker lights to communicate from ship to ship when they don’t want to use radios or when radio equipment breaks down. The U.S. Navy is actually testing a system that would let a user type words and convert it to blinker light. A receiver would read the flashes and convert it back to text.
Skills learned in the military helped an injured man communicate with his wife across a rocky beach using only his flashlight in 2017.

Other Morse messages

Perhaps the most notable modern use of Morse code was by Navy pilot Jeremiah Denton, while he was a prisoner of war in Vietnam. In 1966, about one year into a nearly eight-year imprisonment, Denton was forced by his North Vietnamese captors to participate in a video interview about his treatment. While the camera focused on his face, he blinked the Morse code symbols for “torture,” confirming for the first time U.S. fears about the treatment of service members held captive in North Vietnam.
Blinking Morse code is slow, but has also helped people with medical conditions that prevent them from speaking or communicating in other ways. A number of devices—including iPhones and Android smartphones—can be set up to accept Morse code input from people with limited motor skills.
There are still many ways people can learn Morse code, and practice using it, even online. In emergency situations, it can be the only mode of communications that will get through. Beyond that, there is an art to Morse code, a rhythmic, musical fluidity to the sound. Sending and receiving it can have a soothing or meditative feeling, too, as the person focuses on the flow of individual characters, words and sentences. Overall, sometimes the simplest tool is all that’s needed to accomplish the task.

Article Courtesy Newsweek Tech News

NASA Invites Public To Submit Names To Fly Aboard Next Mars Rover

Although it will be years before the first humans set foot on Mars, NASA is giving the public an opportunity to send their names, etched on microchips, to the Red Planet with NASA's Mars 2020 rover, which represents the initial leg of humanity’s first round trip to another planet.

The rover is scheduled to launch as early as July 2020, with the spacecraft expected to touch down on Mars in February 2021.

The rover, a robotic scientist weighing more than 2,300 pounds, will search for signs of past microbial life, characterize the planet's climate and geology, collect samples for future return to Earth, and pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet.

As we get ready to launch this historic Mars mission, we want everyone to share in this journey of exploration, said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate  in Washington. It’s an exciting time for NASA, as we embark on this voyage to answer profound questions about our neighboring planet, and even the origins of life itself.

The opportunity to send your name to Mars comes with a souvenir boarding pass and frequent flyer points. This is part of a public engagement campaign to highlight missions involved with NASA's journey from the Moon to Mars. Miles are awarded for each flight, with corresponding digital mission patches available for download. More than 2 million names flew on NASA's InSight mission to Mars, giving each flyer about 300 million frequent flyer miles.

From now until Sept. 30th, you can add your name to the list and obtain a souvenir boarding pass to Mars. Point your web browser to:

https://go.nasa.gov/Mars2020Pass

The Microdevices Laboratory at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, will use an electron beam to etch the submitted names onto a silicon chip with lines of text smaller than one-thousandth the width of a human hair. At that size, more than a million names can be inscribed on a single dime-size microchip. The chip will ride on the rover under a glass cover.

NASA will use Mars 2020 and other missions to prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet. As another step toward that goal, NASA is returning American astronauts to the Moon in 2024. Government, industry and international partners will join NASA in a global effort to build and test the systems needed for human missions to Mars and beyond.

The Mars 2020 Project at JPL manages rover development for SMD. NASA's Launch Services Program, based at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is responsible for launch management. Mars 2020 will launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

For more information on Mars 2020, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/mars2020

Hi everybody. My name is Giz, and I am the Chief Engineer of W2XBSradio. My human started this
blog and one of his friends that lives far away in a place called Arizona, suggested that I put up a
picture of myself. As you know I post regularly on my humans Facebook page, so now that I know he
has a blog, you will see more of me in future posts here too. More Later! giz

Passive WiFi On Microwatts

• by:
Elliot Williams - Courtesy Hackaday.com

A lot of you use WiFi for your Internet of Things devices, but that pretty much rules out a battery-powered deployment because WiFi devices use a lot of juice. Until now. Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a passive WiFi implementation that uses only microwatts per device.
Working essentially like backscatter RFID tags do, each node has a WiFi antenna that can be switched to either reflect or absorb 2.4 GHz radiation. Your cell phone, or any other WiFi device, responds to this backscattered signal. All that’s missing is a nice steady signal to reflect.
A single, plugged-in unit provides this carrier wave for multiple WiFi sensor nodes. And here’s the very clever part of the research: to keep the carrier from overwhelming the tiny modulated signal that’s coming from the devices, the plugged-in unit transmits off the desired frequency and the battery-powered units modulate that at just the right difference frequency so that the resulting (mixed) frequency is in the desired WiFi band.
If you’re a radio freak, you’ll recognize the WiFi node’s action being just like a frequency mixer. That’s what the researchers (slightly mysteriously) refer to as the splitting of the analog transmission stage from the digital. The plugged-in unit transmits the carrier, and the low-power nodes do the mixing. It’s like a traditional radio transmitter, but distributed. Very cool.
There’s a bunch more details to making this system work with consumer WiFi, as you’d imagine. The powered stations are responsible for insuring that there’s no collision, for instance. All of these details are very nicely explained in this paper (PDF). If you’re interested in doing something similar, you absolutely need to give it a read. This idea will surely work at lower frequencies, and we’re trying to think of a reason to use this distributed transmitter idea for our own purposes.
And in case you think that all of this RFID stuff is “not a hack”, we’ll remind you that (near-field) RFID tags have been made with just an ATtiny or with discrete logic chips. The remotely-powered backscatter idea expands the universe of applications.

Video Link: Video

Listen to my rock radio show The Sanforized Hour. Heard every Friday Evening at 9pM Eastern (2am UTC) for the U.S. and repeated Saturdays at 5pM Eastern 21:00 UTC for the U.K and the continent. The Sanforized Hour Every Friday and Saturday on X1 - Albany N.Y.'s Home For Online Rock.

Netflix’s new high-quality audio adjusts to match your internet speeds

Netflix is rolling out an upgrade to its audio streaming technology that increases the maximum bitrate of its audio and allows it to adjust based on the speed of your internet connection. The streaming service’s new high-quality audio increases the maximum bitrate of a 5.1 audio mix to 640 kbps, and a Dolby Atmos mix to 768 kbps. The bitrate will also scale based on your internet speed, and can drop as low as 192 kbps in order to stop the video from having to buffer. The streaming service has used this adaptive approach before for its video feeds, which adjust dynamically to prevent them from cutting out. However, until now, the bitrate of a show’s audio has been determined at the beginning of a stream, with no option to adjust it once it has started. That could mean you’re stuck with lower-quality audio when your internet connection has more capacity, or a show has to buffer because it’s stuck on a higher bitrate. Even at Netflix’s maximum 5.1 audio bitrate of 640 kbps, it’s still compressing the audio a lot compared to the 24-bit / 48 kHz mastering sample frequency. But Netflix chose this bitrate because it believes it’s indistinguishable from the lossless master track, and hence you’d see no benefit from a higher bitrate. It adds that, over time, it expects these bitrates to change based on how efficient its encoders become. Netflix’s new high-quality audio is launching today. Courtesy The Verge News

Worlds Largest Wooded Radio Tower

Worlds Largest Wooded Radio Tower

The radio tower located in Gliwice, Poland (pronounced Glee Veet Say) is believed to be the tallest wooden structure in the world at 387 feet.  Constructed in 1935 by the German company Lorenz,  with help from Siemens, Telefunken, and others, it went into service on December 23, 1935 to replace a smaller transmitter located on Raudener Street in Gliwice.

The tower is a masterpiece of wood engineering,  constructed with impregnated Larch wood with a fascinating lattice structure of  beams. All connections were made with bolts made of ore,  because bolts of iron would have absorbed the transmitter signals. The larch wood was chosen for it's resistance to vermin and atmospheric conditions.   There is not a single iron nail in the tower.

Most radio towers built in Germany before 1945 were built of wood and the Gliwice tower is the only still standing.  The rest  were demolished between 1945 and 1983.  Today the tower supports multiple transmission antennas for mobile phone services and a low power FM transmitter.

The tower is diligently maintained, preserved and repaired every year. To reach the top, workers must climb a ladder with 365 steps.   Scientists from the Silesian University of Technology expect the tower to last another 20 years. The tower looks especially attractive after dusk, illuminated with eight massive spotlights and is visible for many miles  creating a lasting impression with visitors.

On August 31, 1939, the Germans staged a fake "Polish" attack on the station which was later used as justification for the Invasion of Poland.  During the cold war the Gliwice tower was used for jamming western medium wave transmitters broadcasting in Polish.

History Of W2XBS

History Of W2XBS

I recently received a very nice letter from K1AAG, George Dupee of Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, regarding an article he came across on the history behind my call sign, W2XBS.

George's article is taken from a Boston Red Sox e-mail newsletter.

"On this day in 1939, the first televised Major League baseball game was televised on station W2XBS, the station that was to become WNBC-TV. Announcer Red Barber called the game between the Cincinnati Reds and the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, New York. At that time, television was still in its infancy.

Regular programming did not yet exist, and very few people owned television receiving equipment. As a matter of fact, there were only about 400 in the New York City area. Not until 1946 did regular network broadcasting catch on in the United States, and only in the mid 1950's did television sets become common in the American household.

In 1939, the Worlds Fair -- which was being held in New York -- became the catalyst for the historic broadcast. The television was one of the fair's prize exhibits, and organizers (and RCA) believed that the Dodgers-Reds doubleheader on August 26th was the perfect event to showcase Americas grasp on the new technology."

This was not the first letter regarding the history behind my call sign that I have received over the years. I did a little more research, and here is a little more history behind W2XBS.

What is now WNBC-TV traces its history to experimental station W2XBS, founded by the Radio Corporation of America (a co-founder of the National Broadcasting Company), in 1928. Originally a test bed for RCA's Photophone theater television, it used the low-definition mechanical scanning system, and later was used mostly for reception and interference tests. W2XBS left the air sometime in 1933 as RCA turned its attention to cathode ray tube (CRT) television research at its Camden, New Jersey facility, under the leadership of Dr. Vladimir Zworykin. The station originally broadcast on the frequencies of 2.0 to 2.1 megahertz. In 1929, W2XBS upgraded their
transmitter and broadcast facilities to handle transmissions of 60 vertical lines at 20 frames per second, on the frequencies of 2.75 to2.85 megahertz.

It was 1935 before the CRT system was authorized as a "field test" project and NBC converted a radio studio in the RCA Building (now the GE Building) in New York City's Rockefeller Center for television use. In mid-1936, small-scale programming began to air to an audience of some 75 receivers in the homes of high-level RCA staff, and a dozen or so sets in a closed circuit viewing room in 52nd-floor offices of the RCA Building. The viewing room often hosted visiting organizations or corporate guests, who saw a live program produced in the studios many floors below.

RCA began transmission in 1928 W2XBS on 2.0 to 2.1 megahertz from a location at Van Cortlandt Park. In 1929, W2XBS moved their transmitter and broadcast facilities to to the New Amsterdam Theatre Building in New York, and began broadcasting 60-line pictures on thefrequencies of 2.75 to 2.85 megahertz.

NBC, on June 29, 1936, began field-testing television transmissions from W2XBS, using Zworykin's all-electronic television system. These transmissions were received on experimental receivers scattered throughout the New York area. In 1937, scanning had reached 441 lines, and television programming was extended to include pickups remote from the studio.

The National Broadcasting Company, as a service of RCA, has been in the vanguard of television pioneering and since the earliest days of experimentation, when about the best that could be produced were barely recognizable pictures of Felix the Cat on screens the size of a playing card, or smaller. NBC'S first experimental, on-the-air broadcast was on July 7, 1930.

In June 1931, an RCA-NBC television transmitter was installed on the top of the Empire State Building and W2XBS began regular television and facsimile operations in December of that year. Experimental broadcasts continued and in the next few years, during the course of extensive development field tests, the transmitted picture was increased from 120, to 240, and then 343 lines, respectively.

In the course of extensive field tests, NBC and RCA engineers succeeded in increasing the quality of transmitted pictures to 120 lines, to 240 lines, and then 343 lines.

It was 1935 before the CRT system was authorized as a "field test" project and NBC converted a radio studio in the RCA Building (now the GE Building) in New York City' Rockefeller Center for television use. On June 29, 1936, NBC began field-test television transmissions from W2XBS to an audience of some 75 receivers in the homes of high-level RCA staff, and a dozen or so sets in a closed circuit viewing room in 52nd-floor offices of the RCA Building. The viewing room often hosted visiting organizations or corporate guests, who saw a live program produced in the studios many floors below. Eventually these transmissions were received on about 200 experimental RR-359 receivers scattered throughout the New York area.

Shortly after NBC began a semi-regular transmission schedule in 1938, DuMont Laboratories announced TV sets for sale to the public, a move RCA was not yet contemplating. In response, NBC ceased all TV broadcasting for several months.

As a result of the continued tests, scanning was stepped up to 441 lines, and television programming was extended to include pickups remote from the studio. NBC's mobile television vans, then a great curiosity, appeared on the streets of New York for the first time on December 12, 1937.

In 1939, RCA introduced television to the American public at the World's Fair. At the same time, the station began regularly scheduled broadcasting, with both studio and remote programming.

The station began commercial television operations on July 1, 1941, the first fully-licensed commercial television station in the United States. The call letters were changed to WNBT and it originally broadcast on channel 1. Soon after signing on that day, WNBT aired the first television commercial. The Bulova Watch Company paid $9 for a commercial aired during a baseball game of the Philadelphia Phillies at the Brooklyn Dodgers.

As W2XBS, the station scored numerous "firsts", including the first televised Broadway drama (June 1938), live news event covered by mobile unit (a fire in an abandoned building in November 1938), live telecast of a Presidential speech (Franklin D. Roosevelt opening the1939 New York World's Fair), the first live telecasts of college and Major League Baseball (both in 1939), the first telecast of a National Football League game (also in 1939), the first telecast of a National Hockey League game (early 1940) and the first network telecast of a political convention (the 1940 Republican National Convention).

During World War II, RCA diverted key technical TV staff to the U.S. Navy, who were interested in developing a TV-guided bomb. WNBT's studio and program staff were placed at the disposal of the New York Police Department and used for Civil Defense training. Public programming resumed on a small scale during 1944.

The station began commercial television operations on July 1, 1941, the first fully-licensed commercial television station in the United States. The call letters were changed to WNBT and it originally broadcast on channel 1. Soon after signing on that day, WNBT aired the first television commercial. The Bulova Watch Company paid $9 for a commercial aired during a baseball game of the Philadelphia Phillies at the Brooklyn Dodgers.

During World War II, RCA diverted key technical TV staff to the U.S. Navy, who were interested in developing a TV-guided bomb. WNBT's studio and program staff were placed at the disposal of the New York Police Department and used for Civil Defense training. Public programming resumed on a small scale during 1944.
In 1946, the station changed its frequency from channel 1 to channel 4 after VHF channel 1 was removed from use for television broadcasting. (Channel 4 was previously occupied by WABD before moving to channel 5.) The station changed its call letters on October 18, 1954 to WRCA-TV (for NBC's then-parent company, RCA) and on May 22, 1960, Channel 4 became WNBC-TV New York.

I've Been Working On A New Callsign Logo

I've Been Working On A New Callsign Logo