While most countries have switched to digital broadcasting, and most broadcasts themselves have programming on 24/7 now, it’s hard to remember the ancient times of analog broadcasts that would eventually stop sometime late at night, displaying a test pattern instead of infomercials or reruns of an old sitcom. They were useful for various technical reasons including calibrating the analog signals. Some test patterns were simply camera feeds of physical cards, but if you wanted the most accurate and reliable test patterns you’d need a Philips pattern generator which created the pattern with hardware instead, and you can build your own now because the designs for these devices were recently open-sourced.
[Matt] from [Matt’s TV Barn], as the name implies, has an interest in various television technologies, and this is such an iconic piece of machinery that can’t easily be purchased, so he set about recreating the signal generator on his own. All of the source for these cards can be found at this GitHub page for anyone interested, and most of the parts can still be found today. The main exception being the adjustable inductors, which [Matt] needed to build from scratch. Soldering everything to the board was a bit nerve-wracking but with the help of a robotic lifter (and a lot of patience) the board was soldered without any damage.
The final step of the build is to get everything up and running by following the original testing and commissioning procedures that were developed and released by the original company that built these devices. This was a feat in its own right, as there are a large number of compl ..
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