#15 - Philips PM5534 pattern generator - repair, history, fun and teardown

hello in the past I have talked about the many distractions which get in the way of making some of my more informative videos well we have just such an example here but what a distraction it is of course the venerable PM 5534 now I know what you're thinking oh not another one not another Philips patent generator now bear with me here this one is going to be quite a lot more interesting than what have seen before because unlike the previous models we've looked at this one is mostly analog and I think it's going to be quite a bit more interesting to look at and I think we'll also be able to learn quite a lot more about test cards in the process before we talk about the wat let's quickly talk about the when and the who the PM 5534 is somewhat of a sleeper product I wasn't able to find many mentions of it in historic magazines and what have you in terms of the when it is the second generation and we think it was sold between 1980 and 1989 we already know who wasn't behind it but contrary to popular belief the original 5544 was the work of a team not just one man and anecdotally most of that team stuck around for the development of the successor product previously we talked about gunar who joined the company the year after this picture was taken and gravitated towards these products becoming the lead at some point presumably he was also involved so another thing I thought I would do to put it into context here is get out this old Pi unicam price list uh this is uh published 1985 I think this fell out of the manual of something that I bought at some point I can't even remember what but it's pretty interesting because it has um it actually has the 5534 inside it so let's um open this up and get to the relevance section there it is there uh a question that I've received by email a couple of times now is I've got this PM 5515 or something on my on my workbench and I'm interested to know how it compares to the the sort of equipment that I demonstrated on this channel well that's a a really good interesting question and you noticed on this uh on this pricelist here we've got two different sections for uh TV test equipment the radio and television service instruments and tele test instruments it's a bit odd what we're looking at here is products from two different divisions of Phillips so this is a German German division that made TV test equipment and this Stu down here is the Danish TV test equipment division these sorts of instruments were sold typically around about this sort of price point sort of just just below £1,000 Sterling and what you got depended on when you purchased it they started out very simple and towards the end of the the '90s the these sorts of instruments became very very Advanced they had a huge huge amount of functionality and that was made possible because of advances in integrated circuit technology but the the typical sort of market for this was the the TV servicemen and sold in huge numbers and made to a competitive price point rather than the highest possible specification build quality Etc the this stuff down here is just looking at the prices you can see this is really just a completely different League uh the Danish Phillips they they targeted different markets so they would been mostly interested in companies who were manufacturing TV equipment whether it be studio um transmission or even TVs themselves if you want to if you want the ultimate reference of something you would buy buy one of these items so if you were making broadcast modulators um for maybe a 2,000 price point you might buy a PM 5580 for 6 and half ,000 to compare your product against and uh it wasn't just that sort of Industry as well they did sell a bit of equipment to the the television broadcasting industry so things like pm55 34s the that's the test pattern generator in question today something they would have sold sold a bit of to that sort of industry and looking at the prices here you know we can see that it's pretty pretty expensive 125,000 uh this is in 1985 I just had a quick quick look to see what what this would have bought you so this would have been about a 60% down payment on the average UK family home uh at that time so that really gives you a sense of how sort of Out Of Reach This sort of equipment was for for a TV serviceman for example now this thing was sold to me as PM 5534 not working for parts as if I'm going to be scrapping it for parts unless half of it is missing this thing is going to work again the seller didn't even say which version of it it was for example is it pal is it ccam is it ntsc so looking at the identification plate on the back it is a PM 5534 G which is this is the just the ordinary pal version and I suppose that's good because we are mostly a pal channel here but in some ways it's also unfortunate because to find an NTC or system I version for example would be absolutely fabulous because those are just so incredibly rare but uh yeah unfortunately this is just the most ordinary most common model here so opening up this thing uh is actually rather easy so we've got a couple of holes on the side here which uh may or may not have screws in them if they do you just whip them out and once uh once you've done that you can just grab these two tabs at the bottom here rotate them out and Slide the inner generator out just like that uh it's just absolutely magnificent and so if this were bolted into a rack you wouldn't even have to remove it to service it and just looking just looking at what we can see here there's all these adjustments so even having only pulled this out about 4 in we've got so much so much available to us so yeah really I think these these things must have been just an absolute pleasure to to service so we have the uh inner generator on the bench here and we can now see all of the insides of it I noticed uh just looking at the pictures of it for sale the rakman tabs were missing and this would indicate to me that it's come from a lab application it's some kind of benchtop unit now uh when whenever I get these things the biggest source of Intrigue is whether or not they will contain the text generation options like the station ID and the clock and my finding generally is that they never do and that is because they've come from a lab or TV Factory application where these options just wouldn't really be needed and it would just be ludicrous to spend an extra $2,000 buying them I've heard that uh the broadcast units which usually do contain these options they they generally always get scrapped because when analog Studios and transmitters are decommissioned they will pay a quote unquote recycling company to come in and clear out all the equipment and their company will just scrap all of it they don't even attempt to sell it because uh realistically who wants a bunch of old analog TV equipment at the switch off of analog TV nobody really this is all just weird obscure stuff that nobody would ever be looking for so unfortunately it just goes straight in the trash whereas these these uh lab and TV Factory units often do survive and the reason for that is because they are bundled in with other equipment like oscilloscopes and Spectrum analyzers that people might actually want to buy and there are established sales channels for this kind of equipment and items like this can occasionally sneak into those sales channels and they do manage to survive now this one here when I first opened it I I could not believe my eyes because we can see here we have time clock and a text generator so this one is effectively in a broadcast configuration even though it probably isn't a broadcast unit I don't actually know for sure at the moment it might be a broadcast unit we will find out because whatever text was programmed into this card will still be there the obvious question here is why does there need to be a pm55 34 when there was the pm5544 was perfectly fine well if you've ever looked inside a pm5544 you will notice that it uh it looks rather rather primitive and there there was a lot of opportunities to refine it the the implementation of it is very large it has a whole lot of cards big cards in it and it only contains the the generator whereas there's this thing has a bunch of other new options which there wasn't really space for inside of the original and uh there's about four or five of them so starting down this end here the this one's the oven controlled Crystal OC later which I don't have um and I don't really care that I don't have it either the sub carrier generator this was a separate piece of equipment in the original sync generator once again that's a separate piece of equipment in the original but now it's uh fits on fits on just the one card and also the clock this is a this is a new thing for this generator uh the pm5544 you'll often see recordings on YouTube labeled pm5544 within Pat and clocks actually this is going to be coming from newer equipment the First with an inpa and clock was this piece of equipment and it's just a clock as well there's no date capability Chrome in is modulator this is a new Option this is the color encoder so for the pm5544 that had to be a separate piece of equipment the slot here now for a long time it's been a bit of a mystery as to what actually goes in there but we in the making of this video we have learned that uh in the ccam version of this piece of equipment the color incoder is actually split across two different pcbs so there'll be this one and this one so that's why that's why we never see this one populated because it is only the ccam version which has it now the first thing I want to do is pull out the options of particular interest here the clock there it is so pretty simple looking device really just a bunch of uh L logic chips by counters by the looks of it and we've got uh some kind of battery here maybe a nikad or something from the 1980s I don't think that's going to be very exciting so uh as a part of this video I'd like to replace that uh so we'll put that one back in and pull out the text generator card because this is just this is just really really exciting option to see there it is right there and once again just a whole bunch of primitive logic tips there and uh the these two bipolar problems you'll notice I've got new labels on them and that's because prior to filming this video I took the I took took The Originals out and made copies of them and that's because um the these options are just so ridiculously rare I don't want to have a situation where there's some kind of disaster and these chips are damaged because finding that c another copy of that code that's just not not going to happen so I really want to be very very cautious there so we'll put that one back in um and have a look at the Circle generator this is another one I've already had out before filming this so there there it is the circle eom there I've already uh made a copy of that I noticed the type of eom there it's a 1702a and when I first saw this I was like w that is a seriously old eprom and uh making a copy of this uh is actually rather difficult you'll find that no commercial programmer whatsoever no matter how expensive we'll we'll be able to program one of these and even finding a piece of vintage equipment which will program it uh that's pretty unlikely as well I've uh I mean I've I've never seen one come up for sale on eBay if you want to program one of these you actually will have to build your own so we'll pop that uh back in there so I think the next thing to do is uh we're going to take out the uh text generator and clock because uh when powering this thing on if there's any kind of problem I do not want these to be damaged because they are just so incredibly scarce and we don't actually need them for the initial debugging the other thing which I did uh prior to filming this video was uh check all the power supply voltages and they're okay so I'm feeling confident enough to at least switch it on all right so let's uh switch it on and uh see what happens o oh gosh my TV is making a nasty sound that does not not like that so I'm just going to just going to switch that off again uh so not really sure what uh what to make of that um I think probably maybe we get out the oscilloscope and have a look what's have a look what's coming out of it uh also just noticed that the uh the power light is not working as well that's probably going to be an incandescent bulb so another another thing which is going to need to be sorted out okay so silis scope hooked up to the I put on the front panel here and uh let's just switch it on oo well uh it kind of looks like the output of a FIS pattern generator but it's not uh blocking oh gosh the uh timings seem to be changing look at that the the the sink is like yeah that's uh this is interesting I I have no idea what to make of it so I guess I guess it's kind of working um I think what we might do is uh maybe hook the counter up to some of these outputs the the sub carrier and sync output on the front panel and see what the actual uh frequencies are there all right so I've hooked up the sub carrier output to the uh counter here and let's switch it back on 4 43358 uh pretty well bang on so I think the the sub carrier oscillator is okay let's try the syn output oh yeah that's uh that's not good that's uh far too low probably should be more like 15 uh I think it's nearly 16 khz it's more like 15.1 there but uh yeah it's kind of jumping around all over the place but interestingly it's actually steadily increasing I wonder if we just leave it whether or not it'll uh eventually get to the correct number huh I think I might actually just plug it back into the TV and see if it'll eventually eventually uh see if we eventually get a picture out of it all right so we're going to give it another go plugged into the TV but we'll be a little bit more patient this time now I just had a quick look online and the correct number that we should see for the syn output is 15734 khz so yeah that number we were seeing before is definitely way too low so uh let's uh let's switch it back on oh God that just sounds so nasty but I think the signal output is okay so it shouldn't blow my TV up like there there that sink uput is just steadily increasing there now I think there we should eventually get to a point where the thing oh he oh we got a picture uh looking pretty messy there but uh the TV is definitely satisfied there something coming out of it and it's looking like a a Phillips pattern so I guess I don't know if it's ever going to stabilize or not but uh in theory as this gets closer if it gets closer to 15.7 it should start looking better I don't know let's just sit here and watch well well well we have a we have a Phillips circle pattern on the screen here and the counter is showing 16 khz which I don't think is correct so it's possible that I don't have the trigger set up correctly but uh nonetheless I'm fairly confident that the my original diagnosis is correct and that there's something wrong with the the sync generator so um I I think what I want to do right now is switch it off and plug those text generator modules back in because I'm really excited to see what's going to come out of them okay so we have the uh text generator modules back in so let's uh switch it on and who there's some actual text and hey look there it is well uh that's uh that's really cool so we've got some text and we've got the clock and I've seen countless um captures and recordings of the pm5544 on the internet that clock is just so distinctive the six digits without the colons between the two but to actually see it come to life in front of me right here this is just absolutely fantastic it's really really exciting and the text here is interesting so I I speculated whether or not this would be a broadcast or TV Factory unit well off the top of my head I would guess this is the initials of some TV Factory and this this probably is going to be the location of it I would guess um but yeah really interesting that they uh they forked out for those options and just absolutely absolutely brilliant to see them working right here in front of me but as we've as we've seen there's something wrong with this unit that SN generator it's it's quite of interesting and it was interesting how quickly it came to life the second time around so the fault is uh possibly thermal in nature or possibly it's that something is some kind of phase locked Loop or something is charging up very slowly and it it came to life quicker than next time around because it's still had a bit of charge in it from when we ran it previously so I guess we got to we got to have a look at that sync module and try and work out what's wrong with it now I do actually have another piece of equipment which I think can probably help us out here the Magnificent PM 5570 so what business do we have with it well look what we have down the back here it is that same sink generator yoink so what I'm going to do is go and take out the sink module that it came with and put in the one from the PM 5570 so let's uh switch it on well look at that it just works first go well this is good because uh we now know exactly where the fault is but I'm not about to go sacrificing one Masterpiece in order to to save another so we need to figure out what is wrong with the sync module that it came with well here's our two sync modules and both looking pretty similar here and I think this should be pretty straightforward to figure out what's going on here uh not least because there's been a rather extraordinary development the actual manual for the pm5544 has been located uh it came from Stan who many will be familiar with he he was the one who restored the only surviving testard G generat now for those unawares tesar G is a modified Philips pattern that was concocted by the BBC and it it was it realized by modifying physical pm55 44s the the B BBC basically went in there and made a whole bunch of electrical changes to it which changed the appearance of the test card it's uh it's pretty interesting because the Fage pattern was not not not very successful in the UK in terms of the actual repair here um I've actually just received an email from Sten and saying that uh gee I hope your um highly obscure oq 5506 and 5502 chips are okay because they're looking pretty hard to find so I'm now like super anxious about these things and I noticed that they're actually both socketed um I think probably one of the first things I'm going to do is is uh try and swap them over um this is a pretty pretty crude form of debugging but I'm just so worried about these chips being faulty that uh I'm actually going to start with this so let's um let's whip out the 5506 here now normally I would use a little pair of extractor an extractor like that but uh that capacitor is kind of blocking me so we'll just go with the screwdriver and prize this one out be very careful because yeah I don't want to damage this pull that one out put that there and preserve the orientation cuz I don't want to push it in backwards uh that one out pop that one in there and pop that one in there just for now so all right so I've waited a couple more hours for everything to cool down again and let's just switch it on oh look at that I can't believe that so the first thing I try and that fixes it and of course it's the most annoying and most disappointing fault possible so what are we going to do about this faulty oq 5506 well first let's talk a little bit about what it is now a chip that has an oq prefix on it is a Philips chip but you will only ever find them inside of a Phillips product and typically you won't you won't find a data sheet for it it's some kind of um internal part one thing I did come across is uh in the manual for the pm5 5519 uh which is one of these cheape uh German generators I say cheape it's certainly still pretty expensive but a heck of a lot cheaper than this thing uh now normally these German generators have absolutely nothing in common with the Danish generators at all but the PM 5519 has both of these chips inside it and there's a note in the manual uh which is online that the 556 is a replacement of the 5501 which is obtainable um so I'm going to buy a 5501 uh and and put it in there and see if that works there is also some 5506 for sale on Ellie Express I've I've actually tried to buy some oq type chips off that seller before they never never shipped anything I got my money back but I I'll give them another try just on the on the off chance that uh something might actually show up so while I was impatiently waiting for my replacement oq 5501 to arrive in the post I was doing a little bit of of experimentation so what I did was touched my oscilloscope Probe on the input of the oq 5506 the chip which I'm suspecting might be faulty and what I found is that the unit instantly burst into life as soon as I did that which is pretty interesting uh touching the probo oscope on something adds a little bit of capacitance so that would indicate to me that the chip is not outright faulty it's just a little bit touchy so what I've done here is I've just put a 10 picofarad capacitor across its input so between the input and ground which might approximately simulate the touching of this Hillis scope Probe on it so if I switch it on now well from cold it just works straight away so what the heck is going on here well another observation I made is that if I move this supposedly faulty chip into the pm55 70s sink board this one exhibits the fault which I'm seeing with this so I'm pretty pretty comfortable to say that the fault is definitely with the chip and not some other components on the board so what to do about it then well I've I've deployed a little workaround so if we look on the back here uh I just put this little 18 picofarad capacitor across the clock input and ground and what this is going to do is snub out any ringing which may be occurring on the clock input of this chip as for why we're seeing any ringing on there not really sure I'm not even able to measure it because as I said when I put the oscilloscope on that input it fixes the problem so it must be very very faint and I had to check on the oscilloscope to see what this looks like it looks pretty clean so I think this is uh a reasonable workaround for the time being so now it's time to try and sort out that battery the one that it came with is the same type as that new green one there but it's wrapped in that gray plastic tube with some caps with lugs stuck to the end of it so the plan was to try and rip those lugs off and spot weld them to the new battery but uh yeah I had uh quite a bit of trouble getting them off got them off eventually um then once those were removed I had to take the solder tabs off the new battery um because I I couldn't find any with that sort of termination on it and once I got those off I then took it downstairs and attempted to Spot while the tabs onto the new battery but my little battery weld there just rejected them CU they're far too big so plan B was to just spot weld some Thin nickel strips to the new battery and then solder the lugs to the new battery which is not ideal but uh yeah so then I had to put some heat shink on because it's um quite a bit thinner than the old battery so after that just a case of screwing it back on and uh then job done time for the all important Rebrand so what we're going to be doing is changing the text in the top and bottom boxes in the top box we're going to go from 3 to six characters and in the bottom box we're going to go from 5 to seven characters so this one will be quite simple I'll just be adding one character either side of what's there and changing the five in the middle but for the top box it's a bit more complicated because we're going from an odd number of characters to an even number of characters and when you do that it creates problems with the horizontal alignment so what we have to do is Center the adjustment in here which is this little pot down here it's presently at an extreme end of the adjustment so we'll bring it round to the center of the adjustment which is that point there so when I do that I can see that the text appears over to the right so one of the things I had to decide is where I'm going to add two characters so I'm going to add two characters to that side and one character to that side and that gets me from an odd to an even number and that should allow me to Center the text once I've changed it how much we go about changing the text in this card well the particular focal point on here is these two bipolar problems these are character problems so they contain the entire character set for the 5534 and if we look here we've got a little small prom and this is going to be the one that decides what actually appears on screen so what we're going to do is take this out and dump the code out of it and modify it and uh in theory just by changing that one we should be able to change what it says here is the contents of that little prom just 302 bytes in size the first 16 set the top text and the second 16 set the bottom text the hex code 20 is a space or blank character we can see the actual three characters in the top box there and the five in the bottom box this is the hex codes for the character set so pretty straightforward to make the change once that's done I have to buy a new bipolar prom and write it because the old one cannot be changed and at the present time it's about € 10 ago to change the text so here we are with the new text and uh already looking pretty good but the horizontal alignment of that top text a little bit off a lot of broadcasters didn't really bother with this and you see all sorts of crazy positioning but uh we do like to do things properly around here so let's just give that a little bit of a tweak so I'm just going by the two T's which are in the center and we'll just line those up with the grid lines there we go very nice I thought it might be quite interesting to have a look at the controls inside the front panel here and see what they do let's start off with the clock so to set the clock we push that to set which stops it from there we can then set the minutes and hour so to set the minutes we click that one to start and the minutes start incrementing 1 per second so we'd get to the appropriate minute that we want and stop it and then we would do the same with ours Press Start count it up to where we want it and then presumably you would set it 1 minute ahead of what you were trying to achieve and then wait for the real time to roll around to that and when you get to it you press the Run button and then the seconds start counting up like that so quite a nice experience I think and uh in the newer generators there are various means of precisely setting the time but uh in this one the the time is only as accurate as the finger of he who is setting it so next up let's have a look at these four switches here this one which says in sync if I depress it that no EXT LED turns on and this is saying that there's no external sync input but if I connected one that would turn off and the unit would gen lock to that input this one here which is color diff Norm uh if I press that the color sidebars or color different signals switch off many May recognize this sort of Philips pattern there were a couple of well-known Transmissions of it one from tdf France and another from wnyw the only uh North American Transmission of the Phillips pattern that I'm aware of in both cases they have their sidebars Switched Off the sidebars are these colors here my understanding is these only are significant in pal so those two Transmissions I just talked about are ccam and ntsc so I guess it's fair to turn them off I don't necessarily agree with the practice myself the if these are Switched Off and this test card is being used as a reference for color conversions from ccam or ntsc to Pal well then that's that rather useful reference has just been eliminated from the pattern and there certainly are plenty of examples of ccam and ntsc patterns where they are present next up we have the the alternating different signals and if you look down the the sides here you should be able to see these this flickering here this is the uh sometimes known as the antip pal it's a that deliberate phase error in the pH Phillips pattern that I've talked about before so you can switch that off so you can see that flickering disappears and the last one is grid only so if I press that one then we lose the central portion of the pattern and we can even turn off the sidebars as well and just have a grid so really waste that money but uh yeah anyway that's what all of the controls do quite fun to play with and quite surprised that nobody's really ever done a demo of that before given how many of these generators are in Enthusiast hands now we're going to talk about The Lochness Monster of test pattern generators some claim to have seen it lowquality photographs exist we are of course talking about the PM 5538 I've seen a number of mentions of this thing on the web and the odd recording on YouTube and when I first came across it I was quite intrigued so I went and grabbed my full form catalog here and found that uh PM 5538 oh it's a teletext generator H well uh it's all nicely explained here and I'm not really seeing any mentions of this Square looking Phillips pattern whatsoever so H I'm feeling a little bit suspicious here so what are we looking at here then well I've looked through the cataloges of the '70s and ' 80s from cover to cover and I can't find any mention whatsoever of some kind of mythical Square Philips patn generator what I think we're looking at here is the pm5544 and the the thing that would indicate that it is is the the text in here appears to be that of the PM 5543 text generator which is demonstrated quite clearly in here the font is a little bit different to our 55 34 I don't have this Hardware on me so I can't do a demonstration of it in terms of the actual test card although I'm suspicious about the name of it the recordings of it are quite interesting what I think we're looking at here is a couple of faulty pm5544 both of these recordings were made in the Middle East and if they are transmitter based recordings then they are possibly running in a very very hot environment and have developed some kind of fault and the JTV one is interesting because it looks like there is more than one fault I think both of them have a failure in the circle generator but the jtv1 also appears to have a failure in the vertical divider that's the circuitry which decides what happens when when the frame is progressing vertically and I think we might be able to recreate the fault of the circle generator at the very least it should just be a matter of removing the circle eom like this and inserting a blank and the reason we're doing this is because these are peos eoms when they're blank they read out all zeros which would instruct the generator to start the frame at the beginning of the Central Area every time which I think will recreate so-called PM 5538 quite easily well there we have it that was easy now straight away we can see that quote unquote PM 5538 has a slight problem where the central portion of the pattern overlaps with the sidebars and internally these two signals are being summed together and creating a very high voltage which would be above the white level and it's quite visible in uh in in my display of it here but when you look at the actual recordings of it you don't really see this quite so prominently you can see it just not as exaggerated as this and the reason for this is something which I talked about back in video number one in that broadcast modulators typically have a Clipper circuit in them which will limit the the maximum input voltage which would uh quite nicely fix this problem and actually make quite a nice test card but uh yeah anyway I think uh I think that's a a reasonable reconstruction of this mysterious test card and uh what we could do to improve it is we could actually modify the circle eom to cut off the the central portions of the pattern around here so that they don't overlap with the sidebars but I don't really think that's worth bothering with because we would be recreating something that never existed if we're going to have a play around with the circle eom I can think of something more interesting that we can do with it two things I'm going to say about this number one I'm going to pretend that you didn't see this number two if others are allowed to make up then so am I let's pop it in there and give it a try There It Is Well I'm not sure if it's particularly technically useful but I tried to make it at least geometrically interesting these lines here should be exactly 45° and they also exactly intersect with the grid and really shows what you can do with the circle eom and that you can use it to instruct the generator to basically make any kind of shape that you want in the center section here so we're going to wrap up this video with a quick tear down of this unit and in a minute we will also have a quick look at that PM 5570 as well for comparison so I'm just going to take out the modules which we haven't already looked at starting off with the subcarrier generator here so this is the oscillator for the color subcarrier looks quite complicated and that's cuz it also has to be able to lock onto an external input if one is present so pop that one back in sync generator we've already seen that a few times that's generating the sync portion of the sync signal uh up here rectifier unit this is not going to be very interesting just uh bunch of capacitors and some Bridge rectifiers there some people might say well why am I not recapping this well I have quite a lot of vintage equipment and and realistically I don't have time to go recapping all of it I wouldn't bother unless I specifically thought there was a problem with it voltage regulator not much going on there just some op amps and trimers and transistors by the looks of it the actual voltage regulation will be done by those big transistors on the back sink interface this one uh I believe is various amplification and buffering for the syn signals and uh the black and burst signal is generated inside of here well not generated but uh the combination of these two come together into here and go to the rear panel from this card text generator we've already looked at that horizontal divider some logic chips in here so this is going to be creating control signals uh which decide what what happens as the the scan line progresses horizontally uh I think there's also a voltage controlled oscillator in there which uh drives the circle generator which we'll have a look at in the minute vertical divider a whole bunch more logic chips so this is just going to be creating control signals which determine various things that happen as the frame progresses vertically this big one here these ones are quite a bit harder to get out black and white generator plus control it says whole lot of logic tips on there this one generates all of the monochrome portions of the pattern so the grids the Border installations and various other monochrome bits and pieces which appear throughout it and we've got a whole bunch of adjustments on there so they will be setting all the levels the these strips here this is just uh grounding because it's a double-sided PCB and they've jammed a hell of a lot on there so there was no room left for any actual grounding color difference generator another big one which I'm going to be struggling to get out so this one generates all of the color in the pattern except for the color bars so the color side bars the antip pal and the yellow red yellow I believe bunch of adjustments on there of course Circle generator we already looked at but that is used for cropping the central area of the pattern to a circle Gray scale generator this generates the gray scale which appears in the central circle you might be wondering why there's 10 trimmers on here well that's because there is a 10 step mode so you can adjust each and every level individually oh there a little bit just fell off there um anyway let's pop that back in multiburst generator quite a lot going on there the this one's generating the multiburst which appears in the central circle of the pattern um bunch of adjustments there I'm not sure what they all do but some of them are adjusting the various frequencies uh which appear in the multiburst one interesting point about this card is that it is one of the heaviest modified in the original realizing of test cards G so in that the BBC added a bunch of extra components this one is actually able to generate testard G without any modifications to the PCB but uh it's not able to do it in its present state so notice here that there is a missing trimmer on here this one sets the frequency for the sixth frequency grating so you could actually populate these components and equip this for testard G and I think it might be an interesting thing to do I'm not sure whether or not that would be a the right thing to do given that this is a vintage piece of equipment modifying it but it would be interesting uh there's another trimmer there that's also unpopulated no mention of what that's for in the manual but it almost looks like it might be for a seventh grating we'll pop that one back in color bar generator up next some these are really stiff so that generates the Ebu color bars loads of adjustments on there I haven't uh looked what they all do but uh at least some of them will be setting the levels of the colors which come out of this make sure we put that back in the right slot cuz remember slot 17 don't want to put anything in there chrominance modulator so that's a color encoder not really a lot to say about that but I'm sure the design of it is absolutely beautiful next up the output amplifier so this board here brings together all of the various signals inside of the unit and combines them into the outputs of which there are three I believe all individually buffered I heard that uh quite a lot of work went into this and doesn't really surprise me this this piece of equipment had was really world- class in terms of the quality of its output so they would have spent a lot of time getting that one right so we'll put that one back in and last up was the clock which we're not going to look at again but one of the things I forgot to mention about it is you'll notice that it has no character generator on it and that is because what it does is sends control signals to the text generator instructing it to put characters on the screen at the appropriate point in time so I've just flipped the unit over here and we're having a look at the back Blan which to me is one of the most interesting Parts about it the whole thing as you can see is completely point to point it's just absolutely extraordinary how much work would have gone into this and it really just tells you the sort of League that the Danish Phillips was in the fact that it was actually economical to construct something like this and to me it's just such a shame when these things get scrapped because all that effort that went into putting that together is just lost and I think probably quite a few people would like to have one of these just even just as an ornament and just for comparison I've got the PM 5570 out here this is another really beautiful 1980s piece I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time talking about it today because it's off topic for this video and actually I just found another video on YouTube about it so I'll link to that in the description but just look at the just look at the construction of this thing all of these modules in here all these adjustments it's just absolutely crazy now interestingly this thing was actually sold for less than the PM 5534 it doesn't look to me like it would would have cost less to make so if we look at the unders sign here just another completely ridiculous manual construction pointto point back plane there all of these wires all nicely wrapped and tied just think of the number of hours it would have taken to put this thing together my gosh and a whole lot more graft at the front here with the termination of the wiring loom to those switches anyway that's about it for the PM 5570 I just as I said I just don't have time to cover this thing today but I'll try and cover it better in future well I hope you found that interesting and for me I've really enjoyed looking at these beautiful pieces from the 1980s they're just so interesting to look at I apologize for the length of this video I tried my best to keep it under that magic 30 minutes which everybody says you shouldn't exceed but there are just so many things I wanted to include in this that unfortunately I just ended up going over it and I didn't want to split the video in two because nobody would have watched the second half of it anyway that is all for this video so thanks for watching

Channel: Matt's TV Barn

Views: 34,263

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Id: 4XWZ4RnHk4g

Length: 45min 52sec (2752 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 01 2024