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Old 1st Jun 2020, 9:25 pm   #1
cmjones01
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Default Pye export to Poland: VE 1000 P

I've just come across a fascinating book here in Poland, "Odbiorniki Radiowe Telewizyjne i Magnetofony, Opisy i Dane Techniczne", or "Radio and Television Receivers and Tape Recorders, descriptions and technical data". It's a second edition dated 1974 and claims to cover all the radios and TVs obtainable in Poland between the years 1946 and 1967. The fact that they all fit in to one 500-page volume says a lot about the choices available to consumers in the planned economy. Of note also is that there are no companies or brands: just the names of a few factories.

Oddly, it's very consistent about providing the IF pass and characteristic of every single receiver, which I've never seen any other servicing publication see as terribly important.

There is a section on foreign TV sets imported in to Poland. They are all from the Eastern bloc, as you would expect: the USSR, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and East Germany, except one solitary model. The Pye VE 1000 P was imported from the UK.

The text states that it was imported in 1957 and can receive 11 channels on the OIRT system, so it must have been 625-line. Vision IF is 38.4MHz, sound offset 6.5MHz. The valve lineup looks pretty conventional for UK practice of the time, but it has a balanced 240-ohm aerial input.

Anyone know any more about Pye export sets of the 1950s? It strikes me as pretty unusual for a British TV to have been exported to a communist country in sufficient numbers to make it in to a service guidebook.

Chris
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Old 1st Jun 2020, 10:44 pm   #2
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Default Re: Pye export to Poland: VE 1000 P

I was informed about existence of this set some twenty years ago. I'd interesting to learn about how the FM sound was processed in this receiver. Parallel vision and sound IF amplifiers or the 6.5Mhz intercarrier sound derived from the vision demodulator or video amplifier.
Hand wired or printed circuits?

DFWB.
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Old 1st Jun 2020, 10:58 pm   #3
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Default Re: Pye export to Poland: VE 1000 P

Britain does have a longstanding relationship with Poland, and there were lots of Poles in the UK after WW2. Maybe this TV was an attempt to improve the relationship between the governments, and to lure the Poles away from the Soviet sphere of influence.
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Old 2nd Jun 2020, 12:46 am   #4
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Default Re: Pye export to Poland: VE 1000 P

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Originally Posted by paulsherwin View Post
Britain does have a longstanding relationship with Poland, and there were lots of Poles in the UK after WW2. Maybe this TV was an attempt to improve the relationship between the governments, and to lure the Poles away from the Soviet sphere of influence.
Nah. Just normal international trade really. Eastern bloc countries always had department stores selling western made goods, it just got a little bit strange trying to connect the two economic systems.

It varied from country to country but most went on a kind of two tier distribution of imports. You could buy it for local currency, at a high price because of exchange rates being what they were.

But more common was you'd go to a "hard currency shop", a kind of duty-free which would take capitalist money (or vouchers you'd been given in exchange for capitalist money), and then the ex-vat prices in dollars, pounds etc would only be a bit higher than they would be in the shops in America or Britain.

The point of the hard currency shop was that lots of people were still going abroad and coming back with a few dollars in their pocket, like sailors, lorry drivers etc. Or just as common you might have someone working abroad who'd send so many pounds or dollars back to his mum and dad once a month.

To people making decisions that weren't about where to put the missiles, the iron curtain was really more of a awkwardly placed garden fence.

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Old 2nd Jun 2020, 8:06 am   #5
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Default Re: Pye export to Poland: VE 1000 P

So called " hard currency shops" never was duty free and was opened in late 60s
Ex-vat? VAT was introduced in Poland in 90s
It was standard trade .Television was important channel of propaganda .
Of course TV sets was expensive around 3.5 average monthly wage.
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Old 2nd Jun 2020, 8:45 am   #6
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Default Re: Pye export to Poland: VE 1000 P

Bentwood chairs were a major Polish export to Britain.
Perhaps the TV sets were simply the 'return load'?
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Old 2nd Jun 2020, 10:53 am   #7
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Default Re: Pye export to Poland: VE 1000 P

Quote:
Originally Posted by FERNSEH View Post
Parallel vision and sound IF amplifiers or the 6.5Mhz intercarrier sound derived from the vision demodulator or video amplifier.
I've managed to dig up a circuit diagram - attached here as both JPEG and PDF. It looks like intercarrier sound to me. The article it came from, in "Radioamator" magazine 1958 issue 2, doesn't say anything about the construction as far as I can see.

Chris
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Old 2nd Jun 2020, 10:59 am   #8
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Default Re: Pye export to Poland: VE 1000 P

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Originally Posted by Brigham View Post
Bentwood chairs were a major Polish export to Britain.
Perhaps the TV sets were simply the 'return load'?
The article in Radioamator magazine says that the receivers were imported under the "premium import for mining-related foreign exchange" and that they were destined for Silesia, a region rich in mining industry. Whether they were for the miners themselves (which wouldn't surprise me, given that miners in Poland were rewarded more than in other industries) or just a coincidence, I don't know. It does say that the region can receive two stations, from Wrocław and Katowice, so perhaps the multi-channel nature of the set was significant there.

Chris
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Old 2nd Jun 2020, 12:43 pm   #9
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Default Re: Pye export to Poland: VE 1000 P

The circuit diagram confirms that the receiver has intercarrier sound. The 6.5Mhz FM signal is picked up from the vision detector.
Four stage vision IF amplifier means it was a sensitive receiver.
Did the Eastern Bloc countries use a 7MHZ channel bandwidth for VHF channels? With 6.5Mhz vision - sound spacing it would be difficult.

DFWB.
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Old 2nd Jun 2020, 12:53 pm   #10
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Default Re: Pye export to Poland: VE 1000 P

It uses delayed AGC to the Tuner.

V21 a and b are interesting, V21a is the sync separator but what exactly is V21b doing. It appears to charge up the 16uf in proportion to the video signal, is it some kind of noise cancelling required for VHF -ve mod systems?
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Old 2nd Jun 2020, 1:16 pm   #11
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Default Re: Pye export to Poland: VE 1000 P

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It uses delayed AGC to the Tuner.

V21 a and b are interesting, V21a is the sync separator but what exactly is V21b doing. It appears to charge up the 16uf in proportion to the video signal, is it some kind of noise cancelling required for VHF -ve mod systems?
Hi Frank,
I'm sure you are correct, V21b is a noise canceller. The noise "spikes" are inverted by V21b to effect the cancellation. Some Continental sets used the EH90 as the noise cancelled sync separator.

DFWB.
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Old 2nd Jun 2020, 1:22 pm   #12
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Default Re: Pye export to Poland: VE 1000 P

Second thoughts about the noise canceller. The anode of V21b is effectively grounded by the 16microfarad capacitor. Perhaps the grid and cathode of the V21b functions as a diode and simply dumps the positive going noise pulses to ground.

DFWB.
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Old 2nd Jun 2020, 1:24 pm   #13
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Default Re: Pye export to Poland: VE 1000 P

Quote:
Originally Posted by FERNSEH View Post
Did the Eastern Bloc countries use a 7MHZ channel bandwidth for VHF channels? With 6.5Mhz vision - sound spacing it would be difficult.

DFWB.
Hi David,
According to this it was 8Mhz, the 7Mhz was Western Europe, it is from Wikipedia so not really complete confirmation. The 7Mhz uses 5.5Mhz sound spacing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadc...vision_systems
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Old 2nd Jun 2020, 1:34 pm   #14
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Default Re: Pye export to Poland: VE 1000 P

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Originally Posted by FERNSEH View Post
Second thoughts about the noise canceller. The anode of V21b is effectively grounded by the 16microfarad capacitor. Perhaps the grid and cathode of the V21b functions as a diode and simply dumps the positive going noise pulses to ground.

DFWB.
It was the 16uf that confused me, lots confuse me these days.
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Old 2nd Jun 2020, 3:33 pm   #15
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Default Re: Pye export to Poland: VE 1000 P

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Originally Posted by k_yller View Post
So called " hard currency shops" never was duty free and was opened in late 60s
Ex-vat? VAT was introduced in Poland in 90s
It was standard trade .Television was important channel of propaganda .
Of course TV sets was expensive around 3.5 average monthly wage.
"VAT" shorthand for purchase tax, you know this. I wasn't talking of poland's specific implementation of hard currency shops (never been there) but the general idea of them from what I saw on my holidays

I quite liked the ones in germany. Couldn't say the same for local air quality
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Old 2nd Jun 2020, 4:37 pm   #16
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Default Re: Pye export to Poland: VE 1000 P

I had one in the early 90s but parted it out for several reasons.
---- Shouldn`t do it again! ----
The set was given by british comunist workers to the pre-owner of my set -
so it was told.
There are still a few of these around in Poland.

Regards,
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Old 2nd Jun 2020, 4:56 pm   #17
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There are still a few of these around in Poland.
I notice that one appears to have changed hands on allegro.pl (the local equivalent of eBay) in 2018 and the listing includes photos of it working, though with frame collapse.

Glancing just now, I can see three for sale on the same site, in various conditions. I must resist the temptation to go shopping - though I wonder if the Pye museum in Cambridge ought to have one?

Chris
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Old 2nd Jun 2020, 5:05 pm   #18
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Default Re: Pye export to Poland: VE 1000 P

It looks like it is based on the 'PYE Continental' series of 1957. The line timebase would work easily at 625 lines just by adjusting the preset line frequency trimmer.

I converted one to receive BBC2 in April 1964. [I was 16 at the time] I used a modified FM strip out of a scrap TV for the sound. Quite a lot of juggling as you can imagine especially with the video amp, reversing detector diode and reducing cathode bias resistor etc but it did work very well in Wimbledon. The signal level was very high requiring only a modest loft aerial to produce grain free pictures with the valve UHF tuner.

I think the 'Continental' formed the basis of many export receivers that PYE produced. We had a very good export market back then and PYE enjoyed a large proportion of it.
Regards, John.
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Old 4th Jun 2020, 8:57 am   #19
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There were far more Pye "Continentals" exported than ever sold here. It's styling (by Robin Day) plagiarised the typical German designs of that time and went down well, but not so much here. These come from Pye's heyday.
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Old 4th Jun 2020, 12:04 pm   #20
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Default Re: Pye export to Poland: VE 1000 P

I imagine it wouldn't take too much effort to modify a System B set to receive a System D signal, the sound circuits would need to be modified to handle the 6.5MHz offset.

There were a few East-West good will gestures in the mid 1950s, between the death of Stalin and the ramping up of tensions towards the end of the decade.

I've heard there were some schemes for exiles to send money home to their families to buy Western goods for hard currency.
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