My Analog TV Project

Updated July 14, 2026.

Background

For the past few years, I have had an interest in playing around with analog television. Ultimately, my plan was to have an extremely-low-power (i.e., only a few feet of range) TV station broadcasting whatever crap I had sitting on my hard drive. Of course, such a thing would still be legally dubious; my use case would definitely not be permitted under Part 15 of the FCC Rules, which is very strict on what devices can operate unlicensed in the television bands. But due to the complaint-driven nature of the FCC, and the fact that most people don't re-scan their TVs that often, I could probably get away with it.

About that video I made...

If you watched my recent video where I simulated an analog-era sign-off (complete with "High Flight" and the national anthem, woot), you may have noticed that I had stated that I would make more information avalable about how the video was made (and in turn, details about my setup). This page is where it's at!

How it was done

At the heart of the station is, well, an RF modulator (pictured below). This takes either a composite or S-Video signal (in fact, the modulator will not turn on at all without a video signal present), and modulates it, along with audio, into a signal like that which would be broadcast by an actual television station. The front of the modulator is on the left, the rear is on the right.

This is the modulator all hooked up:

The coaxial cable feeds into your friendly neighborhood cable splitter (taken from one of those cable company hook-up kits that every modem/cable box comes with):

...which splits the signal off to the two TVs: a 5-inch CRT TV (which has serious hum problems), and an Emerson (actually Funai) LCD TV. The fronts of these TVs is pictured on the left, and to the right are the backs of them with the coax cables attached (the 5-inch TV has an F-3.5mm adapter inserted).

I use a Dell OptiPlex 755 Mini-Tower PC to generate the programming for the station. The S-Video cable is connected to its ATI Radeon HD 2400 PRO graphics card (I also have a DVI monitor connected for managing the station) to the Emerson TV (as pictured below). I had previously shown it being connected to the modulator, but the graphics card does not properly detect the modulator, preventing it from outputting video. Thus, I have to plug it into the TV first, then, once it's up and running, plug it into the modulator.

There is also a 3.5mm-to-RCA cable connected to the line-out jack on the Dell, which is routed through a switchbox (also pictured below) so I can pipe in audio from other devices, the output of which is then connected to the modulator.

With everything hooked up, I turn on the TVs! The black-and-white set shows snow (though in the photo it is not vry visible due to the exposure), while the Emerson shows nothing. The modulator is plugged into its own power strip so I can switch it on and off easily.

After booting into Windows 7 and switching the S-Video cable over to the modulator, we get a nice wallpaper!

OBS Studio takes a few seconds to start, but after that, it's smooth sailing! Just make sure you're in Studio Mode, right click the Program window on the right, and select the option to open a full-screen projector on the second display.

The making of the video

Filming

I used a JVC GR-D347U MiniDV camcorder to film the aforementioned video, but, like all of JVC's MiniDV cameras, it suffers from broken gears in the tape mechanism, making it impossible to record or play back tapes. So, I used a MacBook running iMovie HD 6 to record the footage.

Editing

Since iMovie is, of course, a video editor, I figured I'd use it to edit the video together. I made an error when doing one of the titles (specifically the one where I confirmed the fact that I made cuts while editing), though, which is why there is a random title in the final video. I was able to render it to a raw DV video file, which I then ran through JES Deinterlacer ('cause it's old-school), producing an Apple Intermediate Codec file. I transferred this to my main computer, where I used FFmpeg to do a hardware-accelerated transcode to H.264, while also upscaling the video to 1080p.

Sources

Sign-Off Message

The sign-off message was done by me using Audacity and Kdenlive on my main machine

"High Flight"

I used this 1970s reading (featuring a T-38) of "High Flight", obtained from the Internet Archive from the FedFlix collection (and thus is in the public domain, being a U.S. government work), as it was the one that KDKA-TV ended their analog programming with.

National anthem montage

I also used Kdenlive to produce the national anthem segment, which was compiled from media taken from Wikimedia Commons.

I used this recording of "The Star-Spangled Banner" by the U.S. Navy Band.

And here's the images/GIFs/videos, in order of appearance:

1. "The reflecting pool with Washington Monument" by dave_7 from Lethbridge, Canada (CC BY-SA 2.0)
2. This image of 5 F-15s in formation by the U.S. Air Force (Public Domain)
3. This image of Mount Rushmore by Thomas Wolf/www.foto-tw.de (CC BY-SA 3.0)
4. This image of the Golden Gate Bridge by Frank Schulenburg (CC BY-SA 4.0)
5. This image of an AC-130, also by the U.S. Air Force (Public Domain)
6. This GIF of the Castle Bravo nuclear weapons test by the U.S. Department of Energy (Public Domain)
7. I took a clip out of this video attributed to the U.S. government where George W. Bush had shoes thrown at him.
8. This image of the U.S. Capitol Building by Noclip from the English Wikipedia (Public Domain)
9. This image of a bald eagle by Andy Morffew from Itchen Habbas, Hampshire, the United Kingdom (CC BY 2.0)
10. This image of Astronaut Buzz Aldrin saluting the U.S. flag on the Moon during Apollo 11 by NASA (Public Domain)

The "5 Years of All Digital" card

As with the sign-off message, this was also made by me, this time in Inkscape.

Copyright © Harley Travis (Yoshi128k).

This page was retrieved on September 16, 2026 at 07:07:26 CDT.