Albert's Attic Gallery

In 1958 the ITV transmitter network was due to extend to the Tyne-Tees and Anglia regions. For the first time in the UK horizontally polarised Band III transmissions would be used. It's an odd thing, but in the UK all the early TV transmissions were vertically polarised, whereas pretty well all the rest of the world seemed to favour horizontal polarisation from the start. In order to build a national network using only the five channels in Band I the BBC had eventually found it necessary to use both polarities. In 1958 ITV was about to do the same thing.

This article discusses the differences in performance that an aerial will exhibit if the polarity is changed, and looks at ways of converting channel 10 aerials to channel 8 and channel 9 aerials to channel 11. This is the equivalent of converting a UHF aerial from one channel group to another - in other words no-one would entertain the idea nowadays (apart from some cowboy installers who find themselves without the correct aerial in the van, but that's another story). The difference, of course, is that we are talking about 1958 here, when people were accustomed to 'make do and mend', and TV aerials were in real terms much more expensive than they are today. Having said that, I must confess to spending an hour recently cutting an old channel 10 aerial down so that I could use it for DAB. But I am a skinflint.

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