Hey, i have 5 cheap walkie-talkies from places like walmart and target that are all on the same frequency. And I'm wonderin' if it is possible to turn them into video transmitters and receivers. Ive tried to hook video straight into the mic input, but all i get on the receiving end are lines across the tv screen.
I would greatly appreciate any help that u can give.
Thanks, ok. so is there any way to cheaply build a video transmitter? And please don refer me to searching the old posts. Ive sped-read through the stuff lots of times, but if it aint gibberish its that i cant do it, or it wont work.
But thanks for takin the time to answer my questions!
The original Baird TV system was very low resolution, and only used fairly low frequencies for transmission - although they weren't that low for the time of course!.
A small but important point is that those devices are legal if used as directed by the manufacturer. Modification or use for another purpose is likely to be illegal. My warning has less to do with points of law and more to do with interfering with other services - some of these could be critical. Stuffing a video signal into your W-T could generate a lot of RF garbage. It certainly won't be powerful but even a few milliwatts in the wrong spot can create a problem.
It wouldn't really do any harm, unless you're overdriving it, as the audio and modulation circuits will limit it to the speech bandwidth it's designed for. It won't work at all, but it shouldn't cause any problems.
The experimenter already tried cramming a line-level video signal into a microphone input (without the proper attenuation?). If he wants good resolution then his video bandwidth most likely will exceed the carrier frequency (27MHz) of his cheap walkie talkies.
In the '90's I was doing audio teleconferencing and video teleconferencing. Some video systems used only two phone lines to transmit and receive highly compressed "jerky vision". The companies who could afford wide bandwidth had pretty good video.
I suppose that if you had all day you could send enough information and put it together to make a nice picture - one at a time. That's probably what they did and still do with spacecraft. You really couldn't send live video - that's the bottom line.
It wouldn't really do any harm, unless you're overdriving it, as the audio and modulation circuits will limit it to the speech bandwidth it's designed for. It won't work at all, but it shouldn't cause any problems.
As these transmitters are built to a cost they generally don't have input ALC, but rely on the microphone chacteristics. Stuffing 1V of video will almost certainly overdrive them. This can be a serious problem as in the USA these radios operate on frequencies between commercial two-way radio channels. Overdriving them can disrupt repeaters causing lots of problems!
It is illegal to modify them in any way.
You can buy 2.4GHz video senders cheaply, I'd go that way.
I live in a large apartment complex and I made the mistake of buying one of those 2.4 GHZ wireless video cameras. Needless to say, the interference is horrible, and a clear picture is nowhere to be found.
"Was it colour and HD?
The original Baird TV system was very low resolution, and only used fairly low frequencies for transmission - although they weren't that low for the time of course!."
For ref only: Baird:
His 1928 trans-atlantic transmission of the image of a human face was a
broadcasting milestone.
Color television (1928), stereoscopic television and television
by infra-red light were all demonstrated by Baird before 1930.