Amateur television (ATV) is the transmission of Broadcast quality video and audio over the wide range of frequencies of (radio waves) allocated for Radio amateur (Ham) use. ATV is used for non-commercial experimentation, pleasure and public service events. Ham TV stations were on the air in many cities before commercial television stations came on the air. Various transmission standards are used, these include the broadcast transmission standards of NTSC in North America and Japan, and PAL or SECAM elsewhere, utilising the full refresh rates of those standards. ATV includes the study of building of such transmitters and receivers, and the study of radio propagation of signals travelling between transmitting and receiving stations.
ATV is an extension of amateur radio. It is also called HAM TV or Fast Scan TV (FSTV) (as opposed to slow-scan television (SSTV), which can be transmitted on shortwave ham bands due to its narrowband structure, but is not decodable by a commercially available television receiver).
Read more about Amateur Television: North American Context, European Context, Transmission Characteristics, Content
Famous quotes containing the words amateur and/or television:
“The true gardener then brushes over the ground with slow and gentle hand, to liberate a space for breath round some favourite; but he is not thinking about destruction except incidentally. It is only the amateur like myself who becomes obsessed and rejoices with a sadistic pleasure in weeds that are big and bad enough to pull, and at last, almost forgetting the flowers altogether, turns into a Reformer.”
—Freya Stark (1893–1993)
“It is marvelous indeed to watch on television the rings of Saturn close; and to speculate on what we may yet find at galaxy’s edge. But in the process, we have lost the human element; not to mention the high hope of those quaint days when flight would create “one world.” Instead of one world, we have “star wars,” and a future in which dumb dented human toys will drift mindlessly about the cosmos long after our small planet’s dead.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)