"I shouldn't have said that the VIR signal didn't have a reference for
luminance adjustment. "

It did. As I said there was a line of the NTSC color baar standard, stairstep and multiburst.

Though the VIR equipped sets only used two bars of the NTSC color bars, it could have done alot more. There was just no money in it. I don't recall exactly how it worked but it only adjusted the phase to make two of the bars the same, or at a specified differential level. And there were settings fo it, it is just they were referenced to those levels.

Rewalistically, had they wanted to they could have compensated for bandwidth problems, maybe even multipath using the stairstep and/or the mutiburst. But again, there was no money in it.

Broadcasters may well have made adjustments manually, it doesn't matter. The thing is it was adjusted to that test signal. The video is the video, if it looks ****ty it is not our fault, that is how it is. Our equipment is fine.

the real problem is that this has become much ado about nothing. when I was young we only had a few TV stations. I mean some people had UHF convertors.. On Friday night we had to look at the TV guide that came with the local newspaper and decide what to watch. Choosing from a whopping five channels in the days of the new UHF band.

Now there are 300 channels and the best button is "power off".