Narrow-Bandwidth Television Association

This link takes you to a site with which is a repository of pdf's for the US magazine publication Radio News / Radio & Television News / Radio & TV News...

http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Rad ... _Guide.htm

There is a search button on the left, I entered 'television' and up came thousands of hits. 'Mechanical Television' yielded over 2000.

Quote from the web-site:-

Hugo Gernsback's Radio News was the most succesful radio and technology magazine in broadcastings first decades. It was published from 1919 to 1959 under several variations of the title. 574 issues were published.

It is naturally US-centric but good bedtime reading material, I love the ads, how 'twee' or 'innocent' they seem to todays.

The files are quite large, I attach a sample one from the year and month I was born. (yea, 58 on the 17th).

Don't bother with the images that pop up on the left after a search as they have some form of 'background' that makes them impossible to read, download the whole issue of interest.

Steve A.

There are also links across the top of the home-page that take you to other publications, hi-fi, tape-recording and quite a few others.

Hi Steve good site for sure i have been here before but they didn't have radio news issues at the time .

Yes the search tool is good to check which issues to download ,its really great to see those issues from the 20s to the 30s which are of most interest to me .

Thanks for posting

Wow, this is great! Thanks for posting the link. Just the other day I was looking for this exact information on American mechanical television, and thought I might have to go into collecting these magazines just to be able to read them. Is there such a site for some of the British magazines of the day? All I have seen were some articles posted by Chris Long a while back. I’m particularly interested in the Portland Place era, after the BBC took over Baird’s transmissions.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to find a similar site for UK publications, in my case I'm looking hard for Wireless World, but it it is still protected (apparently) under UK copywrong laws.

Others would include 'Practical Wireless', 'Electronics Australia' and quite a few others. I wouldn't mind putting aside a TerraByte or two for them.

Steve A.

I know it's not quite the same thing, but if you are after specific articles from known issues of Practical Wireless, Practical Television* or Practical Electronics, I have a fairly extensive collection of these magazines and am happy to scan the articles in question for forum members.

*In the case of PT, I have a complete set from the restart as a supplement to PW after WWII right through to the magazine's eventual demise in 2008.

Dave Moll wrote:*In the case of PT, I have a complete set from the restart as a supplement to PW after WWII right through to the magazine's eventual demise in 2008.

Do you mran you have the physical printed versions or a scan? Pdf's whatever?

Without infringing any copyleft issues they would be a great source of data for us...hint, hint,...but scanning is a lot of work and time...that I DO understand!!

Steve A,

What I have is physical paper magazines.

I am not willing to scan them en masse - hence my comment about specific articles in identified issues of the magazines. I am also unwilling to plough through the magazines to find a given article - I simply do not have the time. One day I might find time to make indexes of the magazines, but don't hold your breath!

I have gone into this in more depth here, though I notice that, since I made the post, the attached lists have been removed by the moderators of that forum.

So I was looking for an article from a 1934 edition of Practical Wireless, (unfortunately Dave didn't have it) and came across this:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Practical-Wir ... 1381045908
If the quality is good it seems like its totally worth it. And he offers international shipping!

£4.99 (plus postage) for a year's worth of scans doesn't seem an unreasonable outlay, though how legal it is to sell these is something of a moot point.

He appears to have the whole of the first three years worth of PW on sale in this form, so I am sorely tempted.

Further to the above post, I have yielded to temptation!

When they arrive, I'll let you know whether I consider it's worth spending the price plus international postage. Being in the UK, my outlay on postage is fairly minimal.

Having received these and had a quick look through, I would make the following observations:

They are a useful resource, and at £5 per year's worth, reasonable value for money.

My biggest grumble is that year 1 and year 2 are each presented as a single enormous PDF file, with year 3 split into three files, thus making it quite cumbersome to search for a specific item.

As warned by the seller on the eBay pages, these are scans from magazines that have been bound up into volumes with not all pages retained.

The quality of the scanning is a bit variable, but is generably useable.

Oddly, what I received were two CDs containing respectively years one and two, plus a DVD containing years one to three.

Thanks for the review, Dave. I will purchase a copy myself. My only question is this- are the articles themselves complete? I can understand if the adverts were removed but its kind of frustrating if only parts of articles remain. Oh well, partial info is better than no info...

I cannot give a definitive answer to this, but the best I can do is quote the seller:

This CD has been scanned from bound copies of the magazine,
Unfortunately it was common practice at the time to cut out adverts and remove the front covers and other bits deemed as unimportant at the time.

Because of this there are some pages missing from the magazines as far as I know my bound copies are complete so there shouldn’t be too much actual information missing

It is also stated that there are also "a few adds and front covers".

I hope this helps.

I noticed in this section of this site the Television magazine there have been a fair few issues found and scanned the early 30's one's are great on mechanical television then there's a fair bit on the start of CRT technology
http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Tel ... r_Page.htm