About Us

• .ATV Research was originally founded in 1964 by Mel Shadbolt and Richard Wright, both of whom were engineers for a local NBC affiliated TV station, KTIV-TV Ch. 4. It later became incorporated in the early '80s. The original product line for the company was a focus-deflection coil kit which allowed home hobbiests to build their own vidicon TV cameras. Prior to this point, only a few extremely serious constructors had ever successfully attempted to build their own camera from the ground up. Focus coils typically contained over 5000 turns of copper wire and the deflection coils between 250 to over 600 turns. In addition, the precision in winding the coils was great enough to discourage most builders before they ever started. Assembled focus/deflection systems were cost prohibitive for most hobby applications in those days. With the advent of an economical set of coils in "kit-form" the picture quickly changed. The coils were sold with a complete set of do-it-yourself TV camera plans for building a 5-tube system. Of course, other product items quickly followed including lenses, lens mounts, video peaking coils, power transformers and other hard-to-find camera parts.