Electronic Services - the shop and related hobbies

At our first house, on the south side of Coventry, a chap a few doors up the road was an amateur radio enthusiast. He had a huge eyesore of a horizontal aerial array on a big mast, and it was rotatable. Our next door neighbour was annoyed when he was trying to watch some important football match, and his TV was suffering breakthrough from the chap up the road. He said "I'm just going to have a word with XXXX about his interference". Our first TV was an early Pye hybrid, the 697 chassis, which I had renovated. I had occasion to go up the road and speak to XXXX. He said "are you sure it's me? There's another ham over the estate. It might be him." I said "is your callsign G4xxx?" He was flabbergasted. "How do you know that?" "Because your test chart with its colour bars (ROYGMRBB) and your calls sign are breaking through on channel 4!". By now he was dabbling with amateur TV. I ended up purchasing some RBFs (radar blip filters) for the stereo, I think, and making some filters out of a bit old scraper board, pF caps, and small inductors which I wound myself, then installing these behind every TV aerial outlet in the house. I remember having to change the value of a cap in the frame timebase oscillator, to speed up the field flyback, in order to prevent teletext lines appearing at the top of the picture. When Pye designed and built the 693/697, teletext wasn't about!

And there's more. When I first mentioned the problem of interference to colleagues, one down-to-earth chap said "the antisocial so and so shouldn't be talking on the radio; that's what the phone is for. I'd go round at night and take a hacksaw to his mast". Another colleague, an academic electronics boffin, suggested "presumably an alum mast? - plenty of sodium hydroxide crystals applied to the base should do it". I did not take up either of these suggested solutions, your worships.

From an earlier post from my, I couldn't recall the CB shop that was either on the outskirts of Bedworth or Exhall. It was Skips CB Centre on Wheelwright Lane, Exhall. From a historical perspective, I was going to mention a booklet that was produced with the aim to help with identifying radio and/or television interference, particularly whether it was manmade or natural causes. However, I couldn't recall the title or which official dept was originally responsible. It was the Radio Investigation Service part of the Dept of Trade and Industry (dti). The natural causes were predominantly weather/climatic conditions, the biggest natural cause was often very high pressure (anticyclone) areas which could often enable transmissions from very far away to be received. I still have a copy of that book, and with a little help managed to locate it. Time has taken its toll on the book (printed circa 1988), no less the staples, now rusty, here are three photos showing some of the content. Things have moved on somewhat from those days.......