The museum has three Grass Valley Group products on display. The Grass Valley Group was started by Dr. Hare and initially produced audio equipment which was a follow-on to his previous D. G. C. Hare Company. Dr. Hare was looking for growth and the television industry seemed like an emerging opportunity. They designed the 700 Distribution Amplifier and took it to New York to demonstrate it to CBS and ABC and displayed it at the Chicago NAB show in their hotel room. Within a few months they had received about 50 orders for the 700 and a follow-on 705 Distribution Amplifier. The museum has two Model 700 Distribution Amplifiers on display. The smaller Model 700 above the rack mount unit is installed into a rack frame.
The quality of the sync pulse is a critical feature for distribution amplifiers so that timing could be maintained with long cable runs. The "Ajax" control as seen in this picture was to "clean the sync".
Early Grass Valley Group products were constructed on Vero board. Vero board was developed in the early 1960s by the Vero Precision Engineering Ltd. company and was a copper strip circuit board where cutting the copper strips would create the individual traces for the circuit. When printed circuit boards were eventually designed for the products they often simply copied the Vero board layout. This image shows the top side of the PCB. The two over-sized electrolytic capacitors are not original.
A view of the bottom side of the PCB shows the Vero board style layout.
The only "cross-over" Tek-GVG product that we are aware of is this GVG TDA 501 TV non-linear distortion analyzer that fits into a Tektronix TM500 mainframe. The TDA 501 was built in-house at GVG to measure very low levels of differential gain and phase with better accuracy than the 520A vectorscope could provide. Internal ICs date this TDA 501 to 1978.
The museum also has a Model 1200 Production Switcher on display. This Model 1200 is a digital video format and we have no digital sources at the museum to demonstrate this switcher.
This product has the famous GVG "T" handle which was used as a prop in the first Star Wars movie. When the Death Star fires on the planet you see an operator moving the GVG "T" handle on a model 1600 switcher to fire the weapon. This was highly amusing to everybody in the switcher group.