Sixty years ago this month, the cover story of the June 1959 issue of Popular Electronics was all about the small but growing number of amateur radio operators on television. The 70 cm band had been allocated for TV, and pockets of hams were putting it to use.

Cameras were very expensive, and required a lot of studio lighting. So some hams were content to get on the air with a flying spot projector and slides, similar to the test device we featured earlier. An existing TV receiver was used to illuminate the slide, with a photocell picking up the image as each line was illuminated.