I am looking forward to the next episode of this series! I was a broadcast engineer at WDAF-TV in Kansas City when the Satellite news Network was started early in the era of geosynchronous sattelites. It was a complicated system that had a main studio that broadcast continuously with local programming "insert windows" in which local TV station uplinks would insert a 5-minute local newscast every half hour. A centrally-located computer would command the earth stations across the country - like the one at WDAF-TV - on and off at precise times allowing the satellite-receiving customer to view a "continuous" news broadcast feed of both national and local news. As one would imagine, the service - while technologically amazing, was very expensive and eventually was discontinued..

@StringerNews1

9 ай бұрын

What did it use for sync? Before my station got frame buffers, we had to tape everything, and play back on genlocked machines to get a broadcast quality picture.

@jimcambron1328

9 ай бұрын

@@StringerNews1 Ah, frame buffers... I remember how those critters changed the way we interfaced with non-synced video sources like satellite feeds! I think that we were one of the first to adopt the use of frame buffers as we were first to have our own C-Band up- and down-link system in the market (Kansas City ADI) if not the Midwest.. We even had a semi-prototype Satellite truck built on an IVECO box truck chassis from a ENG truck manufacturer in Ohio someplace. Damn, it was heavy diesel-sucking beast!

@Hungary_0987

9 ай бұрын

Ok

Scott Manley manages to maximize the amount of fascinating information relayed in the shortest amount of time. Aways amazing!!🙂

@p1zd3c

9 ай бұрын

IMHO he's 2nd best at that, but I'm not saying this to promote someone else.

@STS-Dreamer

9 ай бұрын

@@p1zd3cis curious droid also your number 1? edit: because I love scott but curious droid definitely has slightly tighter scripts and less umms and tangents on pretty similar subject areas.

@vladimirarnost8020

8 ай бұрын

Scott has an extremely high S/N (signal to noise) ratio.

@TimPerfetto

8 ай бұрын

Who tf is Scott Mamlrlt

I can remember seeing parts of the 1964 Winter Olympics that were broadcast live. The ABC announcers would get very excited and kept reminding us that we were seeing it live via satellite.

@filanfyretracker

9 ай бұрын

oddly I remember things still being labeled during big news events "live via satellite" up to the first Gulf War. So it was a big deal to be live for awhile.

I remember the BBC transmission of the live tests - The American one had the Bell logo - The British one had the Crest of the GPO - the General Post Office !

As a kid in the moutains of Maine, I visited the Andover Ground Station in, oh, it must have been '62 or '63. Very impressive - I recall the air locks to the pressurized antenna dome, and the massive horn antenna slewing and rotating to track the satellite as it passed from horizon to horizon. One of the reasons that Andover was chosen was that it's pretty much a Radio Desert. The topography and the locations any radio / television transmitters made for a low background noise level, allowing the low-power signals from the early Sats to be picked up. In that region, being able to receive broadcast TV (VHF) was a rarity. The Regional High School. in nearby Bethel, ME, is named Telstar High School - many of my cousins graduated from there.

@JeffreyBue_imtxsmoke

9 ай бұрын

Cool story... thanks for sharing.

@ChemEDan

9 ай бұрын

**keys mic** And what? Over.

@peterstickney7608

9 ай бұрын

@@ChemEDan Did the usual things that we do. Ski racing, ski jumping, wilderness camping, (summer and winter), built nuclear reactors, wrote music, taught school, built many of the technologies of the 21st Century, became newspaper editors - We may not have had TV, but we had plenty of books.

@RCAvhstape

9 ай бұрын

@@peterstickney7608 Ah yes, the good old days, when boys would build their own nuclear reactors, usually from a kit your dad bought at Radio Shack. Good times.

@Sherwoody

9 ай бұрын

@@RCAvhstapeor chemistry sets where we would do experiments with chemicals from little jars that had sculls and bones on them, ….. then wash them down the drain afterwards.

Dang it Scott! The first thing that immediately popped in my mind was the then BIG Telstar hit by The Tornados.... It's still locked in my brains after all these years.

Absolutely amazing that Telstar is still up there, circling the globe!

"It was the beginning of the internet." Oh, wrong channel. Thought tis was Map Men for a second there.

It makes sense that people would know about Telstar. It demonstrated that a satellite could be seen as something more than a military or science experiment

@beenaplumber8379

Күн бұрын

It also had a very popular video game named after it in the 70s. It was just a pong game, but those were exciting at the time! Ads for the Telstar and the Odyssey (which I think came first) were all over the TV, and kids who had one had lots of friends!

Interestingly the drawings show KMC for the frequency designations, which was the a abbreviation for Kilo Mega Cycles (per second), which we now call Giga Hertz, GHz. Also at that time, small value capacitors used at radio and TV frequencies were labeled mmF, which stood for micro micro Farad, AKA Picofarad, PF. I was just starting to really get into Electronics at the time and just "mastered" the various Radio technologies, all using tubes aka valves to you "feriners".

I was in high school during that period and still remember seeing those broadcasts live. The "Live via Telstar" left an impression on me of the way science was advancing. I also listened to the beacons on Sputnik using my Hallicrafters S-38 radio. The other kids in the neighborhood and I would go outside to see if we could see the satellites as they passed over.

One of the reasons for the Telstar to be so well known is probably the instrumental Telstar (by the Brirish band Tornados) that went to number one in the lists at least in Europe and USA. And I guess many people still recognize the main riff from various renditions still regularly used in advertisements, sport events etc.

@filanfyretracker

9 ай бұрын

odd fun tidbit, If the tune "Knights of Cydonia" by Muse sounds like this. its because it was inspired by it and the lead of Muse is the son of the rhythm guitarist from the Tornados.

@Forest_Fifer

8 ай бұрын

My local football team still run out every week to Telstar.

What a great presentation, Scott! Loved the history lesson and reminders, having lived through it in high school. Hearing about the ground stations running on an IBM1620 was cool. Around '69, I created an accounting program in RPG (Report Program Generator) for the 1620 that mostly sat idle amongst a room full of unit-record machines. That "app" quickly replaced the existing pegboard programmed clunker.

@zakelwe

9 ай бұрын

Not seen this yet but will judge it against Curious Droids very similar video with very similar title... Battle of the boffins ..

I remember watching that first Telstar broadcast never knowing at the time it was historic.

Great video, Amy. Fun fact: a local soccerteam was named after the satellite as the name got traction and buzz (no small feat in 1963 Holland). They still exist in their pro-league, and this last week.of september in 2023 managed to avoid ending last at the end of the season.

Yeah i remember my uncle (huge pc guy taught me command promt b4 win3.1) getting 1st satillote dishes and hbo. Blew us away. Im so glad i grew up then. I have such a better understanding of how hardware/software wprks

@beenaplumber8379

Күн бұрын

There was a time when anyone could get a 3-4 meter satellite dish (I think they cost like $10k) and have every cable channel possible with no fees or subscription necessary. I had a friend from a wealthy family who had one. It was a marvel! At some point they all started encrypting their broadcasts. Dangittt!

I remember the first public broadcast from Telstar which was a big event at the time, and rightly so. I worked as a Post Office engineering apprentice at the time, but not at the satellite ground station at Goonhilly. The next one I remember was Early Bird, which was at the time a quantum leap, and I guess is going to feature in the next episode. Thanks for the video Scott.

The microwave horns on Telstar were machined magnesium, but had to be plated with copper for conductivity; Bell Labs had to develop a plating process for magnesium as part of the Telstar program.

5:16. That is the fist time i have seen multiple metric prefixes at the same time. "KMC". I assume it means "Kilo mega cycles per second".

My granddad was in charge of Aerial One at Goonhilly earth station when they sent live video to America for the first time via satellite (Telstar) 61 years ago. Telstar was incredible.

I was abut 7 when the first transition was made. I was at Butlins Holiday Camp, Skegness, in the TV Room with hundreds (it seemed) of other people.

The use of so-called ‘bent pipe’ transponders that have limited power budgets and simply transpose the incoming signal to the output frequency continues to this day for the vast majority of communications satellites.

I really enjoy these videos. Perfect content - better than any TV channel. Thank you for that !

My brother had a model of the Telstar satellite. I thought it was the coolest looking thing I'd ever seen.

I have become so invested in this series, on finding out I have to wait a week for the next instalment I was genuinely sad and now I am just so exited! I know I could go and do the research for this myself but Scott is so talented in presenting the information in an engaging and informative way. I know I would not enjoy the knowledge as much even though most of the time I’m the other way and will watch a documentary/video about a topic I’m very interested in and end up pausing half way through so I can go look things up for myself so I can get all the information. I think it is probably that I know and trust that Scott’s videos give a full detailed description and explanation on the topic.

Very well done. It's amazing the capabilities that existed back then.

@beenaplumber8379

Күн бұрын

People have always been quite clever. It's our thing. NASA in the 60s did remarkable things in public so everyone could see, marvel, and even improve on them. Nowadays our cleverest accomplishments are more likely to be kept as corporate secrets in the interest of profits. NASA data has always been public domain. The more we rely on the private sector for our greatest scientific and engineering feats, the less the public will be able to learn from them, or even know they happened. No other company can build on the advances SpaceX have made in rocketry. The space program is no longer about the benefit of all mankind.

I could listen to you say "balloon" and "moon" forever. ❤ Really diggin' on these historical comms satellite videos! Telstar is probably my favourite. Was half expecting a reference to "Project Diana" in the first video, which was a "moon bounce", but I guess it wasn't a meaningful bit of audio (pretty sure it was just a sine tone, probably to allow a range of measurements), so not really "comms". But it was the first proof that the atmosphere was penetrable, which is kinda wild to consider. The conclusions of the military researchers (from wherever) was that this meant spacecraft could be controlled from the earth to enormous distances. I find that pretty interesting given that so many breakthroughs in electronics and signal processing and theory, etc. until then, were almost always considered for applications in "human-to-human" comms before anything else, yet the findings of "Project Diana" inspired robotic space exploration through radio control and telemetric transmission across previously inconceivable distances. Though, William Pickering was _the_ Godfather of telemetry. EDIT: "Project Diana" didn't transmit from one point to another; the transmitter also acted as receiver. Probably an important distinction as well ... Haha.

Going on to 8th grade, I remember the release of the hit record of "Telstar, Aug 17, 1962" as well as the news of on TV about the Telstar satellite.

Old enough to remember them still using the phrase "Live! Via Satellite" of a Miss Universe pageant held in Australia.

In The Netherlands we have a football club named Telstar! The club was named in 1963 after the then recently launched communications satellite. Different days, when space was all-inspiring to everyone, and not just us nerds! 😅

It’s quite stunning how much Telstar - and everything since - shrunk the world.

Wouldn't it be great if one day we could go and round up some of these important parts of history, and return them to Earth? I believe Snoopy is still out there, would be very interesting to bring things like this back to earth.

The first time I saw R2D2, I got a real Telstar vibe.

So a French relay station was part of the experiment? That explains why we can see a replica of Telstar in the Arts et Métiers Museum in Paris. (and a small one in a display in the nearby copper decorated metro station).

@renambot

8 ай бұрын

Yes Pleumeur-Bodou got well-known in Brittany for the telecom center

I remember the day Telstar came in service; previously (hard to believe today) images used to travel between the oceans only in film reels delivered by daily jets; TV images by Telstar were actually poor quality, but the recordings we see now are even worse, they are old Ampex recordings reversed in digital

Forgot to connect mic, forgot lights, etc. Mr. pilot and potential astronaut it might just be time to make a checklist to run down before recording. It works for NASA!

My parents watched the initial broadcasts from the UK, they recalled there was much mirth about how it didn't work perfectly the first time as you noted. Sometimes jealous that they got to live through the 60s and all these amazing firsts in space.

@Sherwoody

9 ай бұрын

There was a song, written by Joe Meek, an instrumental called Telstar by and performed by an English band called the Tornadoes. Words were added and the song was renamed “Magic Star” ( Magic star above send a message to my love). This was in 1963 or 64. Damn I’m old.👴

@paulhaynes8045

9 ай бұрын

@@Sherwoody Initially, there was no such band as the Tornados - they were invented when it became a hit and they had to show someone playing it on TV. If memory serves, Meek recorded it in his experimental home studio (aka his bedroom).

@Sherwoody

9 ай бұрын

@@paulhaynes8045 thanks for the info.

@David_K_Booth

9 ай бұрын

@@paulhaynes8045 You and @Sherwoody are both right. I remember both the original version, and the cover with terrible cheesy lyrics, being played on radio in the mid 1960s. I'm old too, and I hope we all continue to get older. 😉

For anyone curious about the baseball game, it was the Philadelphia Phillies vs the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field here in Chicago. And as a Cubs fan, any time there's a mention of that game, it just makes me smile.

I loved the "Telstar" song. As a kid in the early 1960s I used to lay awake at night in bed listening to my AM radio waiting for the top-40 radio station to play it.

Loving this series! Can't wait for the next installment

thanks Scott. Incredible detail on this fascinating subject. I remember Telstar being a big deal when I was a elementary schooler. wow. Those early satellites were so light and small. Even the Electron Rocket today would be overkill to launch them. It really tells you how far we've come. And now we can do so much more with cubesats because of miniaturization. I am also constantly in wonder at how fast we all attempted to do things after having only launched the first satellites a few years before. Americas first satellite launched in 1958, but we were sending Mariner to VENUS by 1962. We had our first spy satellites by 1960. And Echo also launched in 1960. Now Telstar in 1962. 62 was really a big year for American space. I think we had made the decision for LOR for Apollo by that time. So incredible. Oh wow. Just listened to the end. So Telstar was the first satellite to fall victim to an atomic blast? I guess it wasn't EMP, but increased electron radiation in space.

Grea episode. I can't wait for Ep.3

We watched the first transmission broadcast from Telstar. I thought it odd France would put a French language singer in a broadcast to the US. He was likely famous over there.

@renambot

8 ай бұрын

Yes Yves Montand, very famous

I did my school work experience at Goonhilly & it was interesting as aerial 1 (Arthur) had to be different to have the speed to track Telstar. Also the café near the station was called Telstar which I have been in but now sadly gone.

@paulmcneil9971

9 ай бұрын

Because the satellite had to be tracked so quickly, Goonhilly 1 used a cruiser’s gun turret for horizontal rotation. The receiver was initially a maser which had to be cooled by liquid helium (If I recall correctly) the reservoir of which had to be filled every so often. I worked there occasionally in the early 70s for the Post Office (from HQ but upgrading the systems to match the latest plans). By then the satellites were geo-stationary and the receiving amplifier was Peltier cooled. The biggest reliability issue was the electronic control systems for the tracking used early PCBs which warped creating intermittent connections. Also the downconverters were single stage designs (2,4 GHz to 70 MHz) which required the tuning of a very narrowband multistage microwave filter, an art not a science, which some of the techs were excellent at.

You are definitly the BEST! => No adds, relevant information, always try to be accurate as much as possible! You are the best!

Great job Scott! So cool and thorough.

brilliant can't wait for the next episode!

You did an absolutely brilliant job on this Scott

From the size of these satellites, I kind of wonder why some of these early electronics and transmitters aren't still used for things like CubeSats which are SWaP limited but would greatly benefit from extremely simple and robust components. A lot of the stuff we use in them today just fails after like a few months due to radiation whereas these cracked engineers in the 60s built satellites which refused to die.

@somebody_on_the_internetz

9 ай бұрын

I guess a lot is just down to miniaturization what's making todays electronics more susceptible to radiation in comparison to the giant electronics of the 60s

@SimonBauer7

9 ай бұрын

i guess it is also because getting the old stuff is more expensive than using a more modern off the shelf system.

@MarcoTedaldi

9 ай бұрын

Cube sats are much smaller that Telstar is. Building a pressurized box into a cube sat would limit the options further...

The local village newspaper in the town where my parents live in the Netherlands is called Telstar and I always thought it was a cool coincidence. Last year I looked it up and it was actually called after it, because they figured that the name stood symbol for communication and a sense of togetherness.

@Yggdrasil42

8 ай бұрын

Same with the Dutch soccer team Telstar.

I had no idea Telstar was still up there. Almost 60 years in an elliptical orbit.... wow.

Fascinating! Thanks, Scott! 😊 Stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊

Me, Mike A. Christensen: Oh wow, how cool that the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square (the Church of Jesus Christ) was in that early demo! And now, as of this year (2023 as I write this), my sister Gina Bench is in it and has been singing in most episodes of Music and the Spoken Word since April 23, and we just watched her sing in her first General Conference of the church as a member of the choir on the weekend with the first Sunday in October, just a week before her birthday! And now we look forward to watching her sing for her first Christmas devotional and then Christmas concert in the choir! So exciting! Just before Tabernacle Choir she was in the Utah branch of the Millennial Choirs and Orchestras for a few years.

This is so well put together! The archival footage makes the storytelling come to life. Bravo 👏

Bell labs really was the cutting edge back then.

I remember our 15 foot sat dish and picking telstar for HBO.

love this series !!!

I work in sports television, tomorrow I'm going to go into work and my show is going to be carried back to the network hub by Telstar's great-grandchild. Would be happy to share my own experiences with this technology.

amazing. thanks Scott

Love the constant content on these early comms sats. Hope you do videos of the comsats of the 70s where thigs started to mature. It is a rather forgotten era.

Excellent video!! I always look forward to your shows. I learned so new things today!

Even when i was young in the early 1980, live satellite tv broadcasts from another country were still a big thing which t he whole family would come together and watch. The tv announcer would say something along the lines of "we are now switching to live television from Germany via satellite", the "Eurovision" logo would show up with "Te Deum" playing very much in the foreground, the gameshow or news/sports broadcast would come on and the whole continent would come a little closer together. Live broadcasts over the atlantic were a somewhat rare event, at least for anything longer than a short news segment. Here in Austria, many people were very interested in watching things like long broadcasts of the U.S. presidental election vote counting results. Not so much because anyone was really interested in the results pre se, but because it was a window into what was happening, in real time, on the other side of a hunking big ocean. This was pretty much at a time before the internet as we know it today. Yes, a few people had access to things like email. and you had the option of very expensive cross-atlantic phone calls. But social media wasn't even invented, there were no livestreaming plattforms (or mobile phones with cameras). Live satellite broadcasts were, for most of us, the only glimpse into the happenings in other countries in real time. And it was absolutely mesmerizing.

This was a wonderful topic! ♥

Andover, Maine, wow. Maine used to have massive air bases, massive radar stations, and was super important for NASA and space development... now it's fallen by the wayside. The lumber industry collapsed, bases are gone, nobody wants to move up here. Such a beautiful state, but with some of the highest taxes and cost of living, yet no jobs.

Nice amount of information in this one. Thanks.

😀the clock people

@thesteelrodent1796

9 ай бұрын

not to be mistaken for the Tik Tok people

@davisdf3064

9 ай бұрын

The Clock People 😄😃 The Cock People 🍷🗿

The only satellite that had a chart topping pop tune named after it performed by 'The Tornados'! The tune was once described as sounding like a very seedy and run down ice skating rink!

@Sherwoody

9 ай бұрын

The song was produced on an instrument called a Clavioline. It was an early analog synthesizer. I thought it was a rather cool tune at the time.

@ronald3836

9 ай бұрын

Dutch 2nd tier football club Telstar still plays Telstar as the entrance tune for home games.

@Sherwoody

9 ай бұрын

@@ronald3836 Do the fans understand the reference?

@ronald3836

9 ай бұрын

@@Sherwoody I suppose the real fans do, but I'm sure most people who see Telstar mentioned in the list of football results have no idea about the satellite. Just like people don't think of nuclear explosions when they see someone in a bikini 😄

Amazing what our “ancient” scientists and space pioneers accomplished. Excellent!!!!

I was young, but remember the TV broadcasts from Telstar. We considered this an amazing thing. As a child they would sit us down in the school gym and we'd watch any and every space event, Ranger's moon landing, Mercury and Gemini launches, any event. The science was fascinating, the future predictions coming at us, all very true now. As a planet we have launches to space weekly or multiple times a week, when I was young they were far more infrequent. Thanks for this episode Scott.

Fascinating.

Cool bit of history right there.

Scott, how about an entry level series on AMSAT, SDRs, and all the ways everyone can experience satellite communications, first-hand?

Thank you for the details Scott. Love the song even more now.😂

Great video Scott.

Brilliant History Lesson! Thanks @ScottManley

My father gave me a share of Tellstar stock for my birthday that year. So cool to learn about the details of the launch and mission.

Great video, Scott...👍

Awesome Vlog I was born in uk in 1953 so I remember all of what you talked about so very Interesting thank you Scott Loved it

I remember the thrill of the 'LIVE VIA SATELLITE' caption on a newscast! As well as when each satellite launch was a news item.

I remember the "miraculous" B&W TV split screen image with the Golden Gate Bridge on one side and the Statue of Liberty on the other. The announcer had to emphasize that both were LIVE via Telstar. At that time, video tape was still being physically flown cross-country for national news coverage.

Hi Scott Manley nice video 📹 and workmanship!!! They should build a few more of the old Satalight 's and older stuff it might do the trick !!!

Wonderful informative stream. Thank you

I was 8 YO, when Telstar was launched and remember watching the first transmissions from Europe. I also remember the song. 🙂

Very interesting! Thanks.

Fascinating

I always thought it would be cool to have a spacecraft retrieve Telstar one and bring it home. It would be interesting to see what had happened to it and the electronics on board after all this time. What would really be cool would be to have a group like AMSAT install an upgraded electronics package and send it back up and use it as one of the amateur satellites. It would basically be just the housing, I doubt even the solar cells would be Worth keeping, as even if they still worked, modern ones are much more efficient.

@enisra_bowman

9 ай бұрын

ye, other historic Spacesite on other Planets should be left mostly undisturbed, (with the exception if you're accidently marooned) but a Satellite? In the Worst Case they are Spacejunk and got hit by other Junk and produce MORE Spacejunk or they deorbit in a "few" decades. And when we are finally be willingly to clean up our mess up there, why not go a bit the extra mile and encapsule it in a heatshield like the Sampereturn Capsules

@Sherwoody

9 ай бұрын

I think a couple of the Vanguard satellites are still up there, but the one I’d like to hunt down would be the LM Eagle from Apollo 11. There’s a chance it’s still in orbit around the moon.

@starman2337

7 ай бұрын

I'd like to see a Starship mission retrieve that Tesla Roadster.

My father was a outside broadcast radio engineer for the BBC and worked on the 1st Telstar. He always told me that the reason why the French picture and sound was so good while the English was not was due to the radio frequency. He said that the Americans had given the French the carrier wavelength to the French and asked them to pass it on. The wavelength passed on was not quite correct resulting in a "messy" picture thus requiring it too be cleaned up. I still have a first transmitted test picture of his. It shows a very block image of a 'Red Indian'. Not very politically correct now but something very identifiable as American in the Sixties!

@MyViewsOfCornwall

8 ай бұрын

Historically the official reason at Goonhilly was an incorrectly fitted polarizer that was reoriented for the following pass.

@marcuswardle3180

8 ай бұрын

@@MyViewsOfCornwall Dad would’ve had a good laugh at that!

Thank you Scott

😎👍 cool series!

Great presentation of large and even the small not so much known facts about telstar

I remember Telstar. Also in 1962 NASA launched RCA's Relay 1 communication satellite. My uncle Harald, who survived his service in the U-boats, worked for RCA at that time and was part of the design team. When I last saw him, he told me that Relay 1 was many times better than Telstar and was really the first true communications satellite.

Episodes like this is great ,well done,awesome content in all your work. Scott question when u mean end of life span, do these satellites burn up or are the in limbo?

@scottmanley

9 ай бұрын

Telstar and Relay are in high orbits so they're still in space.

So cool

Thank you.

When in rural Alberta Canada a couple of years ago we stayed at the Telstar motel. Both the interior decor and exterior design had not changed since the early 1960s. Perfect 😂😂😂

I was such a nerd as a child. I followed Telstar like crazy when I launched. I remember watching Kennedy’s speech!

Great series. Maybe talk about how regulations work in an episode as well - who did they have to check with when they launched these early satellites?

10:02 it's kinda incredible just how distinctive Wrigley Field is

It’s nice to see a video about one of my ancestors 🎉

Telstar was part of the Cherry Hill - Boonton electronics culture. You can easily find, collect, and use old telecom- aerospace gear today