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Looks very cool, but it’s been almost a decade since I’ve last had an analog TV. Do people still have them around?


Even new systems have them, probably because the radio on the chip is something SDR-ish; also, there is equipment that still transmits analog signal, just not over the air (think CCTV et al.).

So yeah, the receivers are still shipped, just ~nobody tunes into their ranges anymore.


They don’t come with antennas though (and houses don’t have them anymore), so the majority of devices are unable to tune to anything. In my country everything has moved to digital and the spectrum sold for mobile use.


I'm receiving DVB-T2 off the same wiring and antenna that was used for DVB-T, and analog before that. shrug Different part of the world, perhaps?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belling-Lee_connector


If you have something that generates the signal, and something that receives it, the antenna is just a wire between those two (of course, you better power them off the same source).


Indoor antennas can be bought for like $15 here in the US


The US is sparse. In Europe you are like in a tin of sardines and most people live in flats. I can't get dvbt over the air where I live because of:

1) Everyone got fiber tv so the old communitary antenna has been taken down from the roof

2) My building is surrounded by taller ones blocking the signal for a tiny 40DB indoors antenna


Analog TVs have been indispensable for the marginalised, under-represented children living in remote areas to receive education during this pandemic lockdown.

As the availability of Internet, Devices capable of receiving online courses has been taken for granted, many who are not privileged not only missed education for several months now but also lost communication with their schools.

I've been thinking about inexpensive compute capable device capable of receiving analog TV via SDR and also communication through LoRAWAN[1] to address this. Now I'll also explore ESP8266's ability to receive analog TV signals.

[1]https://needgap.com/problems/149-remote-education-for-underp... (Disclaimer: it's my problem validation platform).


New TVs still have analog tv decoding from what I've seen. It's the same frequencies as digital tv, and if they have a composite video input, it's the same process, so not very much extra to support it.

There may only be a few OTA broadcasters left on analog in the US, but I don't know how far the digital transition went in developing markets. I'd bet there's some rural cable systems still running analog as well.



The navigation in the in-laws car has an analog TV tuner (along with a minidisc player), I could actually use this




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