@@OddityArchive My family and I live in Bowling Green, KY. I can confirm it wasn’t here. They are somewhat close. Just a few hundred miles. Just an error! You have great videos!
There's an oft-repeated story of UHF station WICC-TV in Bridgeport, CT offering to give a $100 bill to the first person to call into the station in 1953 -- and no one called. The station went dark in 1960, claiming that they still had no viewers. The station was revived in 1987 as WBCT-TV, with home shopping and ethnic programming.
A mail campaign with a deal on UHF converters might have made sense to drum up viewers. I'm a bit surprised at the claims of unstable UHF tuning. All TVs with dedicated UHF tuners and UHF converters I have seen would easily tune in, even if on a continuous mechanism, to a local UHF station. They didn't drift. Not even bad enough to affect color reception. Perhaps a UHF slug position in an otherwise VHF tuner might drift with temperature.
Man, I love these prehistoric episodes. Having another installment of UHF sounds great! It was quite the struggle to get TV up and running in the early days. You briefly mentioned ABC - I know the ABC network isn't exactly an archivism but it had some pretty interesting history if you ever want to delve into it. In particular, former ABC affiliate XETV was beamed toward San Diego but was based in Tijuana Mexico. Apparently one of the reasons for that was that UHF wasn't considered practical for the area at the time and the VHF band was pretty much filled up by Los Angeles stations, so the owner of XETV decided to service San Diego since more people had television sets there. But it still had to adhere to Mexican law, including playing the Mexican national anthem every morning. The reason I bring that up is that several years ago I went on TH-cam looking for clips of XETV's signon, along with other signons, and TH-cam kept suggesting this signon video by something called the Oddity Archive. I finally broke down and clicked on it, and my Archive odyssey began. :)
This brings up an interesting idea for Oddity Archive to do an episode on border blasters, especially since the last English-language border blaster, XHRIO-TDT, signed off the air earlier this year.
The Really ODD and most Fascinating thing about ABC is that they spun off from NBC and didn't launch until 1948(1 year after the advent of Television coming into Home Consumers), Had multiple problems trying to get a UHF license(They were FINALLY able to in 1954) and went through most of the 1950s until 1962 or so going through Different Parent Companies including the United Paramount Theater,Inc who ALSO ironically bankrolled Dumont, when Dumont went belly up in 1956, UPT now Paramount Pictures Incorporated, FINALLY started Expanding ABC Affiliates, and in 1962, ABC followed suit after NBC to adopt Color Broadcasting. ABC's Glory Days and Success FINALLY hit in the 1970s, with Monday Night Football, Schoolhouse Rock and successful shows like Love Boat, Fantasy Island, Charlie's Angels, Three's Company and Laverne and Shirley. Even the BARREN and horrible Nonexistant Saturday Morning Wasteland of the Dark Ages of Animation in the 1970s, ABC was king and had almost ALL the biggest IPs from Hanna Barbera,Filmation and Ruby Spears. And of course, ABC's long association with D***y, first in 1955 when they hosted "The Wonderful World of D****" Culminating all the way to July 31,1995 when Michael Eisner and The Mouse Factory Acquired ABC for $19 Billion.
The first CBS station in the St. Louis market started its life as a UHF station on channel 51. WTVI (call sign now held by a Charlotte NC station) hit the air in 1953 as the primary CBS affiliate, with secondary affiliation with ABC and DuMont. The CBS affiliation lasted about a year when channel 4 became available, with WTVI becoming a primary ABC affiliate. The original city of license was Belleville, IL (a suburb about 10 miles east of STL). From there it moved to St Louis, became KTVI, and went up the dial a bit to channel 36. When channel 2 was reassigned to St Louis in 1957, KTVI snatched it up, where it remains to this day. There would be no more UHF stations in St Louis until 1969 when channel 30 KDNL launched. (Ironically through a series of station acquisitions, ABC ended back on the UHF band in St. Louis, switching frequencies with FOX.)
I've got a little Blondertongue UHF tuner box from the 50s. Attaches into the antenna input and puts the higher channels onto older TVs. It's like a Roku for early TVs.
I Repaired a lot of those for the local school system, in SW Ohio. They had over 100 metal cased VHF only TVs that were bought just prior to the mandatory UHF tuners, so they bought the converters. Later, they put up roof mounted antennas and a fixed tuned down converter, and fed the signal to all classrooms. I also repaired those systems. They were later replaced by Cable TV.
Anyone near Toronto would remember CITY-TV channel 79. They had concerts and performances of now-classic Canadian bands. I remember their "Great Movies" or "Baby Blue" (after midnight/anything goes) movies. Interference to us across Lake Ontario gave various fading vertical lines (if the VHS's aren't shedding yet, I have footage). Channel 79 wasn't forced a change to channel 57 until mid-1983. Now "CITY" is a cross-Canada corporate network but 57 still exists. Old TV's could still pick up cell signals in earliest 90s (when I tried 79 on one).
I used to pick up CITY-TV very occasionally over the air on channel 31 if I remember correctly. Maybe it was a repeater transmitter. Even when our local cable finally added CITY to their system the picture was often weak and fuzzy which was unusual for a cable channel. I remember watching Star Trek TNG like that. It was finally cleared up and I'm assuming it was because the cable CITY feed started being supplied by satellite.
@@Nathan-jq1uw The station itself was amazing to see. Got a tour of the building while in high school (early 1990s). Their wild shooting style was what most remember, later seen nationwide by Muchmusic from the same building. LONG before extremely portable digital equipment, the whole building was wired to its production room in the basement through "hydrants"; capped metal tubes that turned any building location into an "instant studio". This was how they were able to work cheap without studios and shoot as Mark Dailey always announced, "EVERYWHERRRE". For the longest time, they only had two rooms that resembled real "studios"...one with seating for talk shows, and the one everyone saw on Muchmusic...both with huge windows toward Queen St. W. Moses Znaimer owned CITY-TV/Muchmusic, but shifted to radio. He now owns AM-740 "Zoomer Radio Toronto" as 'MZ Media', and he went the extra innovative kilometers again for his listeners. Because of metropolitain AM signal interference, Zoomer simulcasts on a weak FM band in stereo just for Toronto itself.
@@djhrecordhound4391 Thanks for your comment! I remember well Muchmusic's debut in 1984(?) playing the same handful of videos over and over. Their personable VJs. Steve Anthony was my favourite. I can still hear Mark Dailey's voice in my head. People ask me "What are you doing here? I just saw you over there!" I respond "I'm like CITY-TV, I'm everywhere!"
The story of channel 37 and the twist at the end of the UHF movie make me now wish the station in the film had been U37! That would have been an ultra deep nerd Easter egg!
Oh yes. Higher frequency broadcasts. I remember getting like 4 clean looking-ish channels for the most part if it wasn't too cloudy or not cloudy enough, and a bunch of fuzzy, snowy off channels that only came in once in a blue moon if any. And then most of the ones not bought out by major entertainment congloms turned into either Spanish language channels and 24 hour infomercial stations. Once even got MTV 2 for a few months in 2003 or so on actual broadcast UHF station that eventually went through the cycle of home shopping channel, infomercial channel, AND Spanish channel.
We had our first station here in 1954 as wAYS-tv. It lasted until 1955 and then moved to channel 18 from 36. It is now known as WCCB-tv, a CW affiliate. It was an ABC affiliate until it switched with another station and became independent. It became one of the last affiliates of FOx before losing it in 2013. this one helped out a lot. Funny that most channels now use UHF as their real frequency.
This is my favorite episode of Oddity Archive so far. KLAK notwithstanding, amazing detail and so educational. It's obvious that a tremendous amount of research went into this video. Thank you!
My local CBS station is WRGB and was an experimental station beginning in 1928 as W2XCW, it broadcasted 24 lines of picture at around 20 frames per second. They got a license from the FCC in 1938 and were assigned the callsign W2XB, operating as a General Electric tv station. It officially began broadcasting under NBC in 1942 as WRGB, but GE owned the station until 1983. It became CBS in 1981. It had secondary affiliations with the others in the big 3, and also the DuMont Network.
WPAG 20 was the Detroit area’s first UHF station. Very little is known about it. It is believed they carried some ABC and DuMont programming. On air from 1953-1957.
I remember watching Channel 20 as a kid in the early-mid 80’s when you could still pick up that channel in a decent part of the state depending on the weather that day. WKBD 50 is another interesting story just like 47 out of Lansing.
Channel 56 was the first UHF I remember in the Detroit area. They had a lot of programming in the early days intended for classroom use... or maybe it was something else that used UHF. I remember the teacher asking me to disconnect the antenna and hook up the rabbit ears so we could watch coverage of the JFK assassination on the network. Channel 50 came later, and I remember it best as home of "The Ghoul" horror movie host, and Star Trek reruns just after NBC canned it.
@@jimsteele9261 Was waiting for someone to mention “The Ghoul”. I have vague memories of him from my older uncles scaring me as a toddler 😂. I also remember his or someone else’s Horror Movie Marathons during October on of those local Detroit Channels from mid-late 80’s era before FOX became a thing, which we were one of the 1st places to get after it launched. I also remember having HBO 2 & 3 in ????-1992. Getting early PPV. So much info that becomes more lost every day because we didn’t save it properly. 😞 #LostMedia
@@jimsteele9261 WTVS took to the air in 1955. So, they were Detroit's first UHF station to survive. WPAG still holds the title for first UHF station in the area, though, by 2 years.
The most fascinating thing to me is that Ben said the first R in "Aurora" this time! Impressive. Seriously though, I love the history lessons. The older the better.
My area was actually kind of right on par with everybody else in getting their first UHF station, the Tri-Cities got channel 19 in 1969, and Channel 20 was started here in Knoxville in the early 70s. Of course the history of Knoxville Television does have a weird bit of history where a regional PBS Member Network was created by a sheer fluke. In the Late 1969s, Tennessee had four NET/PBS (this was in the middle of their big transition) stations built across the state, Channel 11 in Jackson serving West Tennessee outside of Memphis, Channel 45 in Chattanooga, Channel 22 serving the Cumberland Mountains that didn't really identify with Nashville or Knoxville, and Channel 2 which was meant to serve both Knoxville and The Tri-Cities...This set-up looked fine on paper, considering Knoxville and the Tri-Cities are basically sister cities (Technically Quadruplets!), but the biggest problem was the channel the FCC assigned the Non-Commercial status to, because if they placed the Channel 2 transmitter anywhere South, West or East of Sneedville, it would've interfered with Channel 2 stations in Atlanta, Nashville, or Roanoke badly, and they couldn't put it North of Sneedville to help the Tri-Cities get better coverage because then Knoxville would've been left cold. As such, the transmitter was basically frozen in place. There were plans to get both a Channel 15 satellite station in Knoxville and a Channel 41 satellite station in the Tri-Cities and Southwestern Virginia, but funding dried up due to the recessions of the 70s, and Knoxville adopted cable in 1975 (the first market in the south outside of Atlanta to get Cable, to the best of my knowledge.) which theoretically rendered the plans moot, while Channel 15 did eventually happen in 1990, Channel 41 never did happen due to a lack of funding from the state, and Blue Ridge PBS getting there in 1971 with one of their satellites, which has since shut down in 2017, although I'd like to see it come back since I'd like to see places like Blacksberg (Home of Virginia Tech) get PBS again.
In Nashville, the PBS and ABC towers were (and are still) right next to each other. In the early 80’s, the ABC affiliate paid the PBS station to switch channels and facilities. The lowest channel on the dial was a big deal back then!
I grew up in the Lincoln park area of Knoxville and remember only having channels ABC 6 (WATE), CBS 10 (WBIR),& NBC 26 (WTVK). Sometime in the early 80s we got a new RCA tv with rabbit ear antenna and eventually I discovered PBS 2 (WSJK) and began watching this old house, home time, motor week. It was a snowy picture but watchable. I was somehow also able to pickup a snowy CBS 12 (WDEF) out of Chattanooga using only the rabbit ears. Channel 10 and 12 we're both CBS but would play different programs a during primetime. At some point in the late 80s NBC 26 (WTVK) was hit by lightning and went off air then came back as NBC 8 (WKXT). I think also around this time their affiliates had swapped NBC is now on 10 & CBS is now on 8. I also remember watching FOX 43 (WKCH) tower being built and began watching star trek when they came on air. I vaguely remember what else popped up OTA back then but it was fun while it lasted.
In 1974 I lived in Somerset, Kentucky, where we had 12-channel cable. We got stations from Knoxville and Lexington, Kentucky, plus channel 13 from Bowling Green, Kentucky (weak signal) and channel 2 (PBS) from Sneedville, Tennessee. Lucky for me, the cable TV operator was interested in DX’ing. Sneedville channel 2 started at 9 AM. Before 9 AM we got channel 2s from other cities. Some mornings it was Dayton, Ohio, other mornings it was Nashville. One morning I saw a test pattern from Havana, Cuba! Channel 13 would also change on occasion. Usually it was WBKO from Bowling Green, Ky, to the west, but on rare occasions depending on a change in the weather (or perhaps the cable operator was experimenting), we would get WLOS from Asheville, North Carolina, instead.
Not sure I would want to go back to the days of static and drift on TV and radio, but I miss the randomness of analog signals. Yes, your favorite shows could actually be interrupted when a storm came in and you lost your signal, but on the other hand, the storm might also blow in stations that you had never been able to get before with interesting programming. Nowadays, with thousands of crystal clear channels operating literally 24 hours a day, it is interesting that most of the time, there is nothing worth watching on any of them.
I know exactly what you mean. When the atmospheric conditions would wreak havok on your local station, but you'd discover a new channel you'd never heard of from far, far away. It was like you were picking up transmissions from another planet! Analog had its charm.
I moved and rebuilt a RCA TTU25B transmitter in 1990. It started life as a TTU1, and was stamped 'August 05 1952' as the final test date at the factory. The TTU25B's exciter stages had caught fire, so the three cabinets that were damaged were replaced with the earlier transmitter. This was a simple task, since many TTU1 transmitters had been field upgraded to TTU 25. This was put on Ch58, in Destin Florida. I also remember those flying TV stations. Explicitly, because a science program that we were to watch faded in and out, but it had the wrong audio as someone drowned on about cows. The entire class was laughing, like crazy. In your opening I spotted the 'VD is for Everyone' PSAs that were produced by the Mormons. I was a Broadcast Engineer in the US Army in the early '70s. (Ch8, B&W, at Ft. Greely. No video tape, only 16mm or live.) We were required to run a few PSAs each day, and the Base Chaplain threw a hissy fit about them. Both for the subject, and the source so I ran them until the 16mm film was unusable. I worked at a 5MW EIRP UHF station on a 1700 foot tower in the Orlando market in 1988. We had a three Klystron Comark transmitter, and an early automation system with 12 Sony U-matic tape players, plus one recorder/striper to set the cues for the computer. Some brands of TVs let you pop out a single tuner strip on drum tuners to add a low UHF channel, but they had low sensitivity. I was reparing TVs after school, in 1966, when my dad bought one of the first production Motorola Quasar color TV sets. I still have it.
Very well done history lesson. I learned quite bit from this episode. Early TV was quite a time with the advent of color, things were really crazy, spinning wheels.. oh boy.
Very cool. Always wondered about some of this stuff. As a kid, we didn't have cable. And, as a curious child, I always wondered why we never used "the other dial" on our TV's. Come to think of it, and here's a question for the next episode.... Did Canada EVER have ANY UHF stations?? We got "cable" TV, more "Community Antenna" style in the 50's.... and it went mainstream in the 80's when we finally got a bunch of American stations on the system.
There was yet another factor against early UHF.....besides drift, which was indeed a problem, the UHF tuners generally had a higher level of internally generated noise than VHF tuners did. This meant that you were more likely to get a "snowy" picture. Of course, the fact that many UHF stations were underpowered made this even worse.
Early UHF tuners used a vacuum tube, typically 6AF4, or 2AF4 in series string sets, which had a relatively short lifespan at UHF frequencies. An inherent problem with the cathodes in vacuum tubes of that era was that the performance degraded at UHF frequencies while the tube still had strong emission and worked well at lower frequencies. The tube was not powered down when the TV was tuned to a VHF station, so the tube was wearing out all the time that the TV set was on. Drug store tube testers didn't pick up the problem. The degradation resulted in a snowy picture. Probably the first use of transistors in TV sets was in the UHF tuners. Before the all channel receiver act became law, manufacturers assumed that a buyer who was willing to pay extra for a UHF tuner was going to use it, so they provided a fairly decent tuner. Just after the law took effect, as I understand it, manufacturers typically provided the minimum tuner that would comply with the law.
This was fun. I love the history of television. I grew up in the coverage area of one of the original UHF islands (Youngstown OH). We were about 60 miles from either Pittsburgh PA or Cleveland OH, which had VHF channels from the late '40s, so everyone had a tall antenna on the roof to get the snowy signals. When WKBN-TV (channel 27) WYTV (channel 33) and WFMJ-TV (channel 73) went on the air in 1953 everyone was very excited for the clear signals (I was 5 then, so I rely on my parents' reports). Our 1954 Emerson TV had UHF built in, and I do not recall ever having to adjust it, so they must've solved the drift problem early. Those early UHF experiences affected me, since I became an electrical engineer specializing in TV equipment, and now own the world's largest collection of UHF converters and VHF signal boosters (tv-boxes.com). In retirement I write the Television column for the Antique Wireless Association's Journal, and just did a video presentation: th-cam.com/video/yyJCgkHPPeI/w-d-xo.html
When we got channels 17, 29 and 48 in Philadelphia, to supplement our 3, 6, 10 a,d 12, it was like getting cable! Three more channels, but mostly bullfights, low budget movies and local DJ dance shows. Amazing how that tiny loop antenna picked up those weak signals.
Meanwhile, in the UK, our TV started off on VHF with the black and white 405 line service that we used before switching over to 625 line PAL. Apparently we did use Channel 1 (we used Band I and Band III, I think the BBC had Band I and ITV had Band III) The 405 line picture standard never used colour, it was always black and white. The UK adopted 625 line PAL for colour TV which was only on UHF. The black and white 405 line service went on until 1985 and nothing was broadcast on VHF until the DAB digital radio service was launched, which uses Band III. Our digital TV is still UHF only and part of the UHF band has been taken out of service and handed over to 4G (and I think 5G) mobile phones. Also, I think the bother with UHF was part of what did DuMont in. They couldn't get enough of their stations on VHF, they had to go on UHF. Also, there was a limit on how many O&O stations any network had and KTLA was counted as one of DuMont's stations even though it wasn't part of the DuMont network. From what I remember, Paramount Pictures had stakes in DuMont and also owned KTLA. Also, we had kind of an MPATI service, but it wasn't a dedicated station, it was a Television for Schools and Colleges service that was carried by ITV and the BBC... and ITV launched their service before the BBC. ITV also moved their schols TV service to Channel 4 when that channel launched.
UHF went on the air in Western Massachusetts in March 1953 with WWLP TV and in April with WHYN TV. This was one of the few areas of the country where all channel VHF/UHF TV's were available.
One of the reasons that UHF had drifting problems back in the 50's was because trying to make vacuum tubes operate at such high frequencies was very difficult. The higher you go in frequency, the more stable the oscillator circuit had to be. And since vacuum tubes are inherently unstable devices. The only way to make tube stable at such high frequencies would have required a lot of support electronics which would have added significant complexity, cost, power consumption and heat to the device. It wasn't until the advent of the transistor that a stable(yet cheap) UHF tuner was possible. You may not know this, but of you were to take apart a TV set that had UHF tuning from the 1960's and even though it may look like it's a 100% tube TV. If you were to take apart the UHF tuner of that seemingly 100% tube TV. You will find a single transistor in there and it's because of that one transistor that made it possible to have a UHF tuner that doesn't drift.
I particularily like the info on the MPATI program. I got a snicker out of your "barely reached Louisville" reference. Back in the Fall of 1959, I was a 3rd grade student in Louisville and we had a Spanish language "class" via MPATI. It was frequently either cut short or cancelled due the reception issues and weather issues that grounded the plane. Many years later, I knew one of the pilots in the program and his daughter, who as a young student, had participated as an actor in some of the Spanish language instruction classes.
I'm gonna say it was '60 or '61, I remember when Fresno's CBS affiliate KFRE switched from VHF Channel 12 to UHF channel 30. The switch was a prime time special with celebrity switcher Bob Denver, who was a big star on 'The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis' as Dobie"s beatnik buddy Maynard G Krebs. Appearing in costume, Maynard stepped up to the ceremonial red button (sadly gray for us) and pushed it. The screen then turned to snowy static until Dad could figure out how to tune the UHF dial. As far as I know, channel 12 has remained vacant in the local area to this day. BTW, the Fresno market is still a UHF island (I hadn't heard that term before). The nearest VHF stations are in San Francisco, Sacramento, San Jose, and Monterey.
As a child of the 60s and 70s I can attest to the annoyance of drifting UHF and generally crappy signal quality. Even as a kid full of energy, it sure got old fast jumping up to tweak the tuning on the TV several times in a half hour. When we finally got a set with the clickety-click UHF knob with discrete channels, it was amazing and seldom took fine tuning adjustments. Even as a kid I also used to ponder the names "VHF" and "UHF" -- who determined that Ultra High is necessarily higher than Very High in the first place? (Not talking about recreational drug use here.) I used to wonder if we would evolve to super-duper, almighty, really, really high frequency broadcasting. Lo and behold, with 5G, it's here1
When television first came to my area in 1953, there were 2 UHF stations and only one VHF station. These stations were WKNX (57), WNEM (5) , and WTAC (16). WTAC was shut down after one year of broadcasting while WKNX (now WEYI 25) is still on the air, and still is even to this day. It's surprising that two of Flint, Michigan's first tv stations were UHF stations.
Schenectady, NY. had one VHF station, pioneering WRGB, originally assigned channel 4 and later moved to channel 6. Channels that were added later were given UHF assignments. Eventually, later in the 1950s, 2 of the channels received VHF assignments, 10 and 13, so all 3 major broadcast networks, NBC, CBS and ABC, were on VHF channels in that market. (Channel 13 in Utica was moved to channel 2 to avoid interference.) The local "Educational TV" station remained on UHF channel 17. ("Educational TV" was later designated as the Public Broadcast System.) My Dad had installed a fringe area VHF antenna with rotator to receive signals from distant VHF stations. We sometimes got 2 or more stations on the same VHF channel, by repositioning the antenna. However, most carried network programming, which meant we could receive the same programs on local channels. The exception was baseball games. My Dad was from New England and a die hard fan of the Boston Red Sox, and we were living in a sea of New York Yankees fans. His fringe area antenna would receive Red Sox games broadcast by WMTW, channel 8, transmitting from the top of Mount Washington, in NH. The picture was snowy but viewable, and sound was clear. He and my brother would watch those games. Even if the game were between the Red Sox and Yankees, broadcast on a local channel, they would watch a snowy WMTW to avoid having to hear Mel Allen, the Yankees announcer who was extremely favorable to the Yankees.
Greetiings from the still (hypothetical) UHF island of Fort Wayne, Indiana. During the actual UHF era, we had WANE (CBS) on channel 15, WPTA (ABC) on channel 21, and WKJG (NBC) on channel 33 when I first moved to town in the mid 70s. Channel 39 at that time repeated the also mentioned WBGU (PBS) from Ohio. Sometime in the 80s, the station became the local PBS member station WFWA. In the later 70s, WFFT debuted on channel 55 as an independent station showing lots of old reruns black and white movies, and early Looney Tunes. It picked up FOX prime time programing upon that network's debut in the late 80s, and continues as an affiliate today,.
A tangentialy related (to MPATI) fact: the Brasília (Brazil's capital city) inauguration in 1960 was relayed to broadcasters around the country by 3 airplanes flying in circles along the way from Brasília to São Paulo.
Nice documentary. Quite amazing the US was late to implement UHF television. My oldest TV set with factory installed UHF tuner is from 1959. This is a German television set. The reason the Germans where quick with starting UHF broadcasts is simple; After the war Germany was only allowed to use a limited frequency space. UHF frequencies excluded from this limitation, thinking a practical use of UHF was stil years away. How wrong was that thought :-) The majority of analog TV in Europa ended up broadcasting in UHF!
As far as I know, the US was the first country to implement UHF broadcast television, in 1952. European television transmitted on VHF frequencies, below about 220 MHz, until around 1965, though I can't find a specific reference to that yet.
Wow, that must've really been an ancient transmitter if it couldn't pass the color signal! Any TV transmitter made after about 1954 had to be able to handle color, though keeping it properly adjusted to FCC specs may have been beyond the capability ($) of the station owner.
I grew up in one of the first UHF islands (Youngstown Ohio). All of the three stations we watched as kids are still on the air. WKBN-TV still has its original call letters and channel assignment (27) from 1952.
@@k8zhd I actually am in that Youngstown, Ohio Market (Mercer county, Pa), so I know what you're taking about. At my age, it was a miracle getting TV 55 out of Akron to watch afternoon cartoons back in the day.
@@newstarcadefan I recall occasionally getting WAKR-TV, channel 49, out of Akron, but it was pretty rare, and we were on the west side of Youngstown (Canfield, actually) -- a distance of only about 45 miles. After I went to college in 1966 I understand there was some channel-swapping, and WAKR ended up with 23. That's a surprise, since I thought the FCC tried to keep 6 channels between adjacent assignments, since the "front ends" of UHF converters were not very good at separating close frequencies. Maybe WAKR had to have a directional antenna to protect Youngstown's channel 21, WFMJ-TV.
Growing up our tv only had vhf but there was a little blank plate on the front that said “provision for uhf tuner”. We didn’t have a uhf capable tv until the early 70’s and we didn’t have a color set until the late 70’s. I remember uhf always had old movies, re-runs of 1950’s-60’s tv shows and super low budget kiddie shows.
UHF took off in areas that had no VHF stations. Where they were VHF stations, UHF didn't get watched much until the FCC mandated that all new TV sets would have UHF, starting in 1964. Indeed, until the mid 1960's, there were very few UHF stations in cuties that had VHF stations.
Interesting. In our area, we had a short-lived UHF channel, KFAZ (on channel 43), which only lasted from August 1953 until May 1954. We wouldn't get a UHF channel again until KLAA (now KARD) signed on in October 1974.
I like how Ben was kinda too young to have been there for all of this but he really succeeds in replicating the experience of that era that we Boomers remember.
Ben was born in the Mid 80s, I was born in the Early 80s. UHF was before our time(Though Stores were STILL selling TVs with UHF and VHF Dials as late as 1988).
Religious TV broadcaster KPAZ-TV 21 was the first UHF television station that signed on in the Phoenix area, in 1967. I noticed the ONTV decoder to the side, and remember that one had to have one of those if one wanted to watch special programming on a then-new (as of October, 1979) UHF television station on channel 15, KNXV -- which had a strong, clear signal. Sure brings back memories! It is suspected that ONTV was in other television broadcasting markets, as well.
Ah! When it came to UHF channel selectors found on TV sets and optional UHF converter boxes (in the US) in the 1950s into the 1970s, it was entirely different than what was found on TVs from the 1980s to the present. Up until the 1980s, the UHF channel selectors on TVs or converter boxes was a circular dial that had a feel to it like turning a circular door knob, with no "clicks" to lock onto individual UHF stations. So, when tuning to UHF, the person had to slowly rotate the dial, often times overshooting the channel, then carefully turn the knob to adjust it for the best picture quality on the TV set. Tuning-in the UHF station in the 1950s thru the '70s was similar to operating an AM radio of the same era, where a knob had to be turned by hand to seek out the stations.
When I was a kid in the 90s, I had a portable 5" B&W TV and had to do that when tuning channels. Same on a lot of radios still around today, both AM and FM. I'm pretty sure Sony still makes a pocket radio with an analog tuning dial. I remember occasionally seeing those TVs with the "click" style channel selectors, but the downside was no TV remote support since that sort of tuner was more "electromechanical".
This episode and the one on early vtr's really filled in some gaps I had in my knowledge, despite having read many many articles about it I always see something new when I watch one of your history episodes
Any chance on an ep about kinescopes? Any chance of more vtr coverage , like the cv format? I would love an ep about kinescopes even if you can't get ahold of any equipment
Channel 39 broadcast in Houston in the early 1950s. My parents' first TV set had a UHF dial, and I've found the TV listings in the newspaper back in '52 that included KNUZ, channel 39. I don't know when it went off the air, but it returned in 1967. And KNUZ was also the calls letters for a an all-news AM radio station.
In the Youngstown-Warren, Ohio television market, we were one of the rare larger TV markets in the US to broadcast in the UHF spectrum starting in the early-1950s. WKBN Channel 27, Youngstown, Ohio (a CBS affiliate) was owned by a successful, long-established independently-owned AM radio station operator (Warren P. Williamson). WFMJ Channel 21, Youngstown, Ohio, (an NBC affiliate) was owned by the owner of the "Youngstown Vindicator" newspaper, William F. Maag, Jr.. The owner of WHHH Warren, Ohio (an AM radio station) owned the Dumont affiliate in our market until the network went out of business from full-time broadcasting in 1955. Several different owners operated the ABC affiliate in our TV market, until it was finally established on WYTV Channel 33, Youngstown, Ohio in the early-1960s.
My aunt on my mom's side who lived in san antonio had UHF tv every time we came to visit her, it was the only place i could watch the disney channel cause we didn't have cable tv yet
CKGN/CIII (Global) in Ontario was one of the first "big" commercial UHF stations in Canada, their transmitter was in a kinda marginal area so they needed 5,000,000 watts to get acceptable reception in Toronto. This must have cost a fortune to run because they moved to the CN tower in the late 80s.
In the Asbury Park/Long Branch/Eatontown {New Jersey} area, Channel 58, WRTV (owned and operated by the Walter Reade Organization), was on the air from January 1954 through April 1955. Not too many people had UHF converters on their TV sets to watch that channel. Compounded by financial problems, and the Reade Organization's later efforts to move to a VHF frequency [without success], the station finally went off the air.
Do not forget there was a WBCK-TV 53 in Battle Creek Michigan; I even was at the tower's original location near Augusta, Mi. The station went dark after a private airplane collided with the tower during a heavy fog at night.
It was said, in a Congressional hearing held by the Library of Congress in 1994, to determine the whereabouts of the archives of the DuMont Television Network (an early user of UHF), that the great bulk of the recordings made by DuMont from 1946 to 1957 had been destroyed and dumped in the East River of NYC.
Interesting. I was born in 61 and grew up on a steady diet TV. I remember a few sets that didn’t have UHF. I had one in my bedroom for many years, it was a “portable” in a metal box that weight at least 40lbs. UHF however was always there in my memory, the loop antenna for UHF and straight rabbit ears for VHF. I lived near Cincinnati OH and we had channels on on both bands and in town, cable became available by the time I was in high school.
I watched the nigh that XIX, Ch19 went live, from my home in Middletown. My bedroom was on the second floor, and I had our 12" Zenith B&W TV. Years later, I worked for United Video in Delhi Township and some surrounding communities. I repaired all of the electronics.
@@michaelterrell- I was a little farther out (Eaton) in the fringe area for ch19 but I watched on good TV weather days 😁. Batty Hatty form Cincinnati was a favorite! I have a brother who worked at Marsh’s IGA for many years.
@@rustyaxelrod I never shopped at IGA or A&P. I mostly used the Kroger's at Engle's Corner and the short lived one across the street when it was a discount grocery. I worked second shift for many years near Cincinnati, so it was convenient to go there after midnight. I vaguely remember Batty Hatty, but kids shows were on while I slept. I would work on my house after I got home from my job, and get up about 15 minutes before I left for work.I turned down the Chief Engineer's position at WRGT, Ch45 in Dayton in 1987. They only wanted to pay minimum wage, yet you were on call 24/7 and got no overtime. I don't remember the call for Dayton's Ch22, but I interviewed there. I didn't get hired. A friend who worked in their news department told me that their Chief was to retire in two years, and he said that he would be fired if they hired me because I knew more about their equipment than he did. Both stations had many design flaws that needed to be corrected.
I was always told that WWLP Ch. 22 in Springfield Ma.(NBC affiliate) was the nation's first UHF commercial television station going on the air in 1952 originally on Ch.61
I Love your show ben Hope you do one on the MTV Networks Digital Suite and other Digital Services Copyright Joke: Asinine (Like in Episode 23: Scary Logos and other Horrors)
One, now defunct, TV station that you should talk about, in part 2, is WJJY-TV, Ch. 14 in Jacksonville, IL, an ABC affiliate that was on the air from 1969-71. There is also KCIT-TV, Ch. 50 in Kansas City, MO, an independent TV station that carried ABC, NBC & CBS shows, that the other TV stations in the Kansas City area preempted & also some local shows, that was also on the air from 1969-71.
I enjoyed this. I look forward to seeing what else you have to say about this subject. I just find early TV, telephone, and computer topics so fascinating.
UHF gave me the ability to watch affiliate stations which weren't broadcast in our area. That's how I was able to watch my beloved reruns of Dr. Who, Space 1999 and Star Trek. This was right around when cable was beginning to take root and cost about $7.00 a month.
KLAK-TV is located in Tom Bean, Texas, and serves the North Texas/Oklahoma area. Wikipedia lists it as an FM station (97.5) now, but it's possible that they did some early UHF TV experiments.
My first experience in UHF TV was about 1962 when our family got our first color TV, a Sears Silvertone 'roundie' with the continuous uhf tuner dial. I don't remember the drift problem mentioned. Then again, despite the vhf dial being full, there was only one uhf transmitter in Los Angeles, KMEX 34. Dad called it Channel U since that's what the lighted dial said. It was only b&w, us kids only used it to watch the bullfights from Tijuana, which annoyed mother no end! It would be a few years before a second station came on, KCET 28 National Educational Television.
While the American proposal to move all TV stations to UHF turned out to be a failure, most European countries ultimately did move their TV stations to UHF around the 60s & 70s, if I can recall correctly.
Blonder-Tongue UHF converters from the '50s through the '70s are readily available on ebay, usually for $20-50. They made more of them than anyone else, for a longer period of time.
I live near Austin, Texas. An oddity around here is that during analog TV days, there was only one VHF station. All the others were UHF. The reason for this-Lyndon B. Johnson owned the VHF station. (He also owned a radio station that is still on the air-KLBJ. If he could come back from the dead, he world wring the necks of the present owners. The politics they broadcast now is completely opposite of his). There is one mistake in your video. The FCC did not mandate click UHF tuners until the 1970s. I restore antique electronics and have a couple of 1970 or so 12 inch Zenith B&W sets. The UHF tuners are continuous, not click. I also have a 1977 GE Portacolor(nicknamed Portapotty due to its grainy color crt). It has click UHF tuning.
17:20 The UHF tuners installed in all TVs starting May 1, 1964 were almost all continuous tuning with a round knob, usually marked something like 14..25..35...50...70...83. On a Zenith 22" B&W set we got in 1970, on Channels 2-13 the knob changed channels and an outer ring was fine tuning. But for UHF, the knob just spun around -- THAT was the fine tuning. To actually move the UHF dial, you had to grab a FAKE fine tuning ring that was actually part of the dial, and turn THAT. It was no trouble at all for me to find Channel 39 in Dallas to watch Bozo the Clown when I was 7 years old, but my parents never figured it out. So the FCC added a clause to the All Channel Act that by 1974 VHF and UHF channels had to be selected the same way on a particular TV. Digital tuning was still a few years off. A few very cheap TVs - often a battery operated 5 inch B&W for $59 -- just made the VHF tuner continuous as well, saving a buckortoo, but most TVs had a UHF knob with 70 stops and really tiny numbers. See page 371 www.google.com/books/edition/Code_of_Federal_Regulations/QwRuviSdktoC?hl=en&gbpv=1
The UHF tuners installed in TV sets to comply with the 1964 all channel law typically met the bare minimum requirements. The FCC later set some technical requirements to address such issues as poor noise figure, which meant a snowy picture unless the set was receiving a very strong UHF signal. The added 1974 requirement, to my best recall, included "equally easy to tune". The requirement did lead to deployment of the click stop UHF tuner. However, some manufacturers degraded the VHF tuner to continuous tuning to match the continuous UHF tuner. Some sets provided 12 user preset channels, VHF or UHF, selected with continuous tuners and locked by AFC. This was adequate until more than 12 channels were broadcasting in the market, which meant the user had to change a preset channel "on the fly" to tune a 13th channel. The click stop tuner on RCA's first production color TV set had extra stops which could be used for UHF channels, in addition to the stops for VHF channels 2-13. Cable TV operators added premium channels later on. One method was to insert the premium channels in spectrum between channels 6 and 7. Continuous VHF tuners typically were VHF-LO (channels 2-6) and VHF-HI (7-13). As a cost reduction, continuous VHF tuners for the full channel range 2-13 were developed. The new tuners could receive the premium channels between 6 and 7. So, viewers could justify the purchase of a new TV set based on adding the premium channels at no cost to themselves, enhancing new TV sales at the expense of cable TV and premium channel providers. This "feature" was also available on VCRs and tended to enhance the sales of VCRs with full channel 2-13 continuous tuners. Another method: some TV sets had very wide VHF fine tuning, enough so that channel 8 could be selected and fine tuning adjusted to tune in channel 7. So, some TV servicemen would adjust the coils for channel 7 so the set could use that channel to tune premium channels between 6 and 7. Channel 7, if active, could be received on the set's channel 8 position. The countermeasure deployed by the cable TV industry was "scrambling", which disabled the TV set's ability to recover the synchronization pulses and resulted in a scrambled picture, even though the actual signal had correct horizontal and vertical timing. A set top box restored the sync for paying subscribers.
My family's TV in the 1960s didn't have UHF built-in so my father bought a special tuner box to get it (along with a special antenna). He wanted to watch the stock car races.
From 1994 to 2005 I lived in Niles Michigan all my TV stations were from South Bend Indiana what's Saba Indiana started at Channel 16 and went up to Channel 69. In 2016 when I moved to Schoolcraft Michigan I got Channel 3 up to channel 43.
What was our (Denver) UHF first station? Was it 20 or 31??? I remember when KDVR had their old HQ over by Ball Arena (Pepsi Center) when I was a kid back in the 90's
The elementary school I went to in the 1960s tuned in to MPATI for special lessons with specially placed antennas (I attempted to tune it in from home with a normal rooftop UHF antenna and couldn't). Later, tapes of similar lessons were physically distributed to a local UHF educational channel. MPATI seems to me to have been a cool but impractical albatross. For one thing, even if an aircraft were needed to hold the transmitting antenna aloft, why couldn't a more practical ground studio transmit to it for rebroadcast, so it wouldn't have to carry and power the rest of the studio? I do admit the idea of "tuning in an aircraft" seemed pretty cool to me as a kid. Why wasn't that featured in science lessons? Also, it depended on schools kicking in funds for it. Some schools just free-rode.
Please Please Please.. do an episode on the MTS Stereo Television craze of the early 80's!! You know those "IN STEREO WHERE AVAILABLE" banners that were plastered all over early 80's sitcoms.. I'v looked everywhere on TH-cam and no body has covered the topic in depth... Thank You..
I grew up on the Missouri River bottoms about an hour from Kansas City. Because of the topography, we couldn't UHF stations except for channel 16, a TBN affiliate in St. Joseph, MO. It sucked. We couldn't get PBS, Fox or independent stations, yet our uphill neighbors could.
Some regions in the US the UHF TV channel spectrum was the only way to go, in the 1960s/60s, so that a cluster of local communities could have the big 3 TV networks (ABC,NBC,CBS) in the region; as the FCC had concerns of overlapping interference with VHF channel stations from neighboring markets. One example was the San Joaquin Valley region of California, specifically Fresno, where, back in the 1950s, the FCC would only allow 2 VHF TV stations in the market, as there were concerns of interference to the Los Angeles market to the south, and the San Francisco market to the north. The solution was for the San Joaquin Valley/Fresno region to go to UHF TV channels, as it availed a wide selection of available channel frequencies that were unused in the LA and SF markets; as well as the shorter transmitting range the UHF channels had, too. The UHF channels spectrum also made it possible for the Bakersfield, California, area to have several local TV stations, without concerns of interfering with Fresno or LA. On a technical side, the aspect of VHF Fresno TV stations affecting distance markets was a valid one, as the intense heat of the summers in the San Joaquin Valley can generate what it known as the "tropo effect," where the heating of the atmosphere can extend the broadcast signals found on the VHF/FM radio frequencies spectrum. If you ever wondered why FM radio, or VHF TV, reception seemed to improve in summer? It is the tropo effect at work.
I wonder if there’s any archivisms worth making a video about in the world of early portable TVs. My grandparents had a tv in their camper van for my dad and his siblings to watch back in the 70s. When they were on the road the kids could watch a show for about 15 minutes before the signal would cut out and they’d have to change to a closer station.
In the 70s in miami our main UHF channel (66) also had a VHF license (6) and our Sundays of boring religious/sports content were saved by Godzilla movies and Kung Fu Flicks, thank goodness.
If the FCC had been able to allocate 24 VHF channels in 1945 (when the FCC re-allocated frequencies above 44 megacycles), perhaps there wouldn't have been a need for UHF. Small cities might have have had four stations while major markets may have had ten stations.
Also, Ben, WBGU was in Bowling Green, OH, not KY.
My bad. Geographically close, I guess.
🎶"...A man in Kentucky / Sure is lucky / To lay down in Bowling Green..."🎶--The Everly Brothers
Wonderful job as always
@@OddityArchive My family and I live in Bowling Green, KY. I can confirm it wasn’t here. They are somewhat close. Just a few hundred miles. Just an error! You have great videos!
@Seth Bessinger I was thinking more in terms of Ohio and Kentucky being neighboring states, but point taken.
There's an oft-repeated story of UHF station WICC-TV in Bridgeport, CT offering to give a $100 bill to the first person to call into the station in 1953 -- and no one called. The station went dark in 1960, claiming that they still had no viewers. The station was revived in 1987 as WBCT-TV, with home shopping and ethnic programming.
That station is now WZME, running MeTV+.
Wow, another TH-camr I sub to and enjoy. You rock, VW.
@@cysjunk good old MeTV
Wow! (in all seriousness) $100 back then could be equal to over a week's worth of pay for the US workers of that era.
A mail campaign with a deal on UHF converters might have made sense to drum up viewers.
I'm a bit surprised at the claims of unstable UHF tuning. All TVs with dedicated UHF tuners and UHF converters I have seen would easily tune in, even if on a continuous mechanism, to a local UHF station. They didn't drift. Not even bad enough to affect color reception. Perhaps a UHF slug position in an otherwise VHF tuner might drift with temperature.
Man, I love these prehistoric episodes. Having another installment of UHF sounds great! It was quite the struggle to get TV up and running in the early days.
You briefly mentioned ABC - I know the ABC network isn't exactly an archivism but it had some pretty interesting history if you ever want to delve into it. In particular, former ABC affiliate XETV was beamed toward San Diego but was based in Tijuana Mexico. Apparently one of the reasons for that was that UHF wasn't considered practical for the area at the time and the VHF band was pretty much filled up by Los Angeles stations, so the owner of XETV decided to service San Diego since more people had television sets there. But it still had to adhere to Mexican law, including playing the Mexican national anthem every morning.
The reason I bring that up is that several years ago I went on TH-cam looking for clips of XETV's signon, along with other signons, and TH-cam kept suggesting this signon video by something called the Oddity Archive. I finally broke down and clicked on it, and my Archive odyssey began. :)
All I can remember coming out of Tiguana Mexico snd into LA. was the Mighty 690 am radio!
This brings up an interesting idea for Oddity Archive to do an episode on border blasters, especially since the last English-language border blaster, XHRIO-TDT, signed off the air earlier this year.
Hey now, I got into the Arcivisms with the 2nd Episode the First EBS Salute looking for severe weather warnings from 1985
The Really ODD and most Fascinating thing about ABC is that they spun off from NBC and didn't launch until 1948(1 year after the advent of Television coming into Home Consumers), Had multiple problems trying to get a UHF license(They were FINALLY able to in 1954) and went through most of the 1950s until 1962 or so going through Different Parent Companies including the United Paramount Theater,Inc who ALSO ironically bankrolled Dumont, when Dumont went belly up in 1956, UPT now Paramount Pictures Incorporated, FINALLY started Expanding ABC Affiliates, and in 1962, ABC followed suit after NBC to adopt Color Broadcasting.
ABC's Glory Days and Success FINALLY hit in the 1970s, with Monday Night Football, Schoolhouse Rock and successful shows like Love Boat, Fantasy Island, Charlie's Angels, Three's Company and Laverne and Shirley.
Even the BARREN and horrible Nonexistant Saturday Morning Wasteland of the Dark Ages of Animation in the 1970s, ABC was king and had almost ALL the biggest IPs from Hanna Barbera,Filmation and Ruby Spears.
And of course, ABC's long association with D***y, first in 1955 when they hosted "The Wonderful World of D****" Culminating all the way to July 31,1995 when Michael Eisner and The Mouse Factory Acquired ABC for $19 Billion.
The first CBS station in the St. Louis market started its life as a UHF station on channel 51. WTVI (call sign now held by a Charlotte NC station) hit the air in 1953 as the primary CBS affiliate, with secondary affiliation with ABC and DuMont. The CBS affiliation lasted about a year when channel 4 became available, with WTVI becoming a primary ABC affiliate. The original city of license was Belleville, IL (a suburb about 10 miles east of STL).
From there it moved to St Louis, became KTVI, and went up the dial a bit to channel 36. When channel 2 was reassigned to St Louis in 1957, KTVI snatched it up, where it remains to this day.
There would be no more UHF stations in St Louis until 1969 when channel 30 KDNL launched. (Ironically through a series of station acquisitions, ABC ended back on the UHF band in St. Louis, switching frequencies with FOX.)
Don't change that channel, don't touch that dial! We got it all on UHF!
Ah yes wierd al!😊
LOVE IT! I even have a promo 45rpm of that theme song
You beat me to this. I was just going to say the same thing. Weird Al FTW! Hopefully there's no word crimes here! 🤣🤣
U62, Be There!
You get to drink from the fire hose
I've got a little Blondertongue UHF tuner box from the 50s. Attaches into the antenna input and puts the higher channels onto older TVs. It's like a Roku for early TVs.
I Repaired a lot of those for the local school system, in SW Ohio. They had over 100 metal cased VHF only TVs that were bought just prior to the mandatory UHF tuners, so they bought the converters. Later, they put up roof mounted antennas and a fixed tuned down converter, and fed the signal to all classrooms. I also repaired those systems. They were later replaced by Cable TV.
Anyone near Toronto would remember CITY-TV channel 79. They had concerts and performances of now-classic Canadian bands. I remember their "Great Movies" or "Baby Blue" (after midnight/anything goes) movies. Interference to us across Lake Ontario gave various fading vertical lines (if the VHS's aren't shedding yet, I have footage).
Channel 79 wasn't forced a change to channel 57 until mid-1983. Now "CITY" is a cross-Canada corporate network but 57 still exists. Old TV's could still pick up cell signals in earliest 90s (when I tried 79 on one).
I used to pick up CITY-TV very occasionally over the air on channel 31 if I remember correctly. Maybe it was a repeater transmitter. Even when our local cable finally added CITY to their system the picture was often weak and fuzzy which was unusual for a cable channel. I remember watching Star Trek TNG like that. It was finally cleared up and I'm assuming it was because the cable CITY feed started being supplied by satellite.
@@Nathan-jq1uw The station itself was amazing to see. Got a tour of the building while in high school (early 1990s). Their wild shooting style was what most remember, later seen nationwide by Muchmusic from the same building. LONG before extremely portable digital equipment, the whole building was wired to its production room in the basement through "hydrants"; capped metal tubes that turned any building location into an "instant studio". This was how they were able to work cheap without studios and shoot as Mark Dailey always announced, "EVERYWHERRRE". For the longest time, they only had two rooms that resembled real "studios"...one with seating for talk shows, and the one everyone saw on Muchmusic...both with huge windows toward Queen St. W.
Moses Znaimer owned CITY-TV/Muchmusic, but shifted to radio. He now owns AM-740 "Zoomer Radio Toronto" as 'MZ Media', and he went the extra innovative kilometers again for his listeners. Because of metropolitain AM signal interference, Zoomer simulcasts on a weak FM band in stereo just for Toronto itself.
@@djhrecordhound4391 Thanks for your comment! I remember well Muchmusic's debut in 1984(?) playing the same handful of videos over and over. Their personable VJs. Steve Anthony was my favourite. I can still hear Mark Dailey's voice in my head. People ask me "What are you doing here? I just saw you over there!" I respond "I'm like CITY-TV, I'm everywhere!"
@@Nathan-jq1uw He had the best voice ever.
The story of channel 37 and the twist at the end of the UHF movie make me now wish the station in the film had been U37! That would have been an ultra deep nerd Easter egg!
Oh yes. Higher frequency broadcasts. I remember getting like 4 clean looking-ish channels for the most part if it wasn't too cloudy or not cloudy enough, and a bunch of fuzzy, snowy off channels that only came in once in a blue moon if any. And then most of the ones not bought out by major entertainment congloms turned into either Spanish language channels and 24 hour infomercial stations. Once even got MTV 2 for a few months in 2003 or so on actual broadcast UHF station that eventually went through the cycle of home shopping channel, infomercial channel, AND Spanish channel.
We had our first station here in 1954 as wAYS-tv. It lasted until 1955 and then moved to channel 18 from 36. It is now known as WCCB-tv, a CW affiliate. It was an ABC affiliate until it switched with another station and became independent. It became one of the last affiliates of FOx before losing it in 2013. this one helped out a lot. Funny that most channels now use UHF as their real frequency.
This is my favorite episode of Oddity Archive so far. KLAK notwithstanding, amazing detail and so educational. It's obvious that a tremendous amount of research went into this video. Thank you!
My local CBS station is WRGB and was an experimental station beginning in 1928 as W2XCW, it broadcasted 24 lines of picture at around 20 frames per second.
They got a license from the FCC in 1938 and were assigned the callsign W2XB, operating as a General Electric tv station.
It officially began broadcasting under NBC in 1942 as WRGB, but GE owned the station until 1983. It became CBS in 1981. It had secondary affiliations with the others in the big 3, and also the DuMont Network.
WPAG 20 was the Detroit area’s first UHF station. Very little is known about it. It is believed they carried some ABC and DuMont programming. On air from 1953-1957.
I remember watching Channel 20 as a kid in the early-mid 80’s when you could still pick up that channel in a decent part of the state depending on the weather that day. WKBD 50 is another interesting story just like 47 out of Lansing.
I used to watch the Detroit Red Wings play on channel 50. Kaiser Broadcasting.
Channel 56 was the first UHF I remember in the Detroit area. They had a lot of programming in the early days intended for classroom use... or maybe it was something else that used UHF. I remember the teacher asking me to disconnect the antenna and hook up the rabbit ears so we could watch coverage of the JFK assassination on the network. Channel 50 came later, and I remember it best as home of "The Ghoul" horror movie host, and Star Trek reruns just after NBC canned it.
@@jimsteele9261 Was waiting for someone to mention “The Ghoul”. I have vague memories of him from my older uncles scaring me as a toddler 😂. I also remember his or someone else’s Horror Movie Marathons during October on of those local Detroit Channels from mid-late 80’s era before FOX became a thing, which we were one of the 1st places to get after it launched. I also remember having HBO 2 & 3 in ????-1992. Getting early PPV. So much info that becomes more lost every day because we didn’t save it properly. 😞 #LostMedia
@@jimsteele9261 WTVS took to the air in 1955. So, they were Detroit's first UHF station to survive. WPAG still holds the title for first UHF station in the area, though, by 2 years.
I've always felt these history episodes are my favorite episodes of Oddity Archive. Can't wait to see more on UHF!
The most fascinating thing to me is that Ben said the first R in "Aurora" this time! Impressive.
Seriously though, I love the history lessons. The older the better.
Same here, love the history lessons, the more the merrier.
My area was actually kind of right on par with everybody else in getting their first UHF station, the Tri-Cities got channel 19 in 1969, and Channel 20 was started here in Knoxville in the early 70s. Of course the history of Knoxville Television does have a weird bit of history where a regional PBS Member Network was created by a sheer fluke.
In the Late 1969s, Tennessee had four NET/PBS (this was in the middle of their big transition) stations built across the state, Channel 11 in Jackson serving West Tennessee outside of Memphis, Channel 45 in Chattanooga, Channel 22 serving the Cumberland Mountains that didn't really identify with Nashville or Knoxville, and Channel 2 which was meant to serve both Knoxville and The Tri-Cities...This set-up looked fine on paper, considering Knoxville and the Tri-Cities are basically sister cities (Technically Quadruplets!), but the biggest problem was the channel the FCC assigned the Non-Commercial status to, because if they placed the Channel 2 transmitter anywhere South, West or East of Sneedville, it would've interfered with Channel 2 stations in Atlanta, Nashville, or Roanoke badly, and they couldn't put it North of Sneedville to help the Tri-Cities get better coverage because then Knoxville would've been left cold. As such, the transmitter was basically frozen in place.
There were plans to get both a Channel 15 satellite station in Knoxville and a Channel 41 satellite station in the Tri-Cities and Southwestern Virginia, but funding dried up due to the recessions of the 70s, and Knoxville adopted cable in 1975 (the first market in the south outside of Atlanta to get Cable, to the best of my knowledge.) which theoretically rendered the plans moot, while Channel 15 did eventually happen in 1990, Channel 41 never did happen due to a lack of funding from the state, and Blue Ridge PBS getting there in 1971 with one of their satellites, which has since shut down in 2017, although I'd like to see it come back since I'd like to see places like Blacksberg (Home of Virginia Tech) get PBS again.
In Nashville, the PBS and ABC towers were (and are still) right next to each other. In the early 80’s, the ABC affiliate paid the PBS station to switch channels and facilities. The lowest channel on the dial was a big deal back then!
I grew up in the Lincoln park area of Knoxville and remember only having channels ABC 6 (WATE), CBS 10 (WBIR),& NBC 26 (WTVK). Sometime in the early 80s we got a new RCA tv with rabbit ear antenna and eventually I discovered PBS 2 (WSJK) and began watching this old house, home time, motor week. It was a snowy picture but watchable. I was somehow also able to pickup a snowy CBS 12 (WDEF) out of Chattanooga using only the rabbit ears. Channel 10 and 12 we're both CBS but would play different programs a during primetime. At some point in the late 80s NBC 26 (WTVK) was hit by lightning and went off air then came back as NBC 8 (WKXT). I think also around this time their affiliates had swapped NBC is now on 10 & CBS is now on 8. I also remember watching FOX 43 (WKCH) tower being built and began watching star trek when they came on air. I vaguely remember what else popped up OTA back then but it was fun while it lasted.
@@onelonelybearcub I think you're misremembering some details, The NBC/CBS switch between WTVK/WKXT and WBIR happened before WKXT's move to Channel 8.
In 1974 I lived in Somerset, Kentucky, where we had 12-channel cable. We got stations from Knoxville and Lexington, Kentucky, plus channel 13 from Bowling Green, Kentucky (weak signal) and channel 2 (PBS) from Sneedville, Tennessee.
Lucky for me, the cable TV operator was interested in DX’ing. Sneedville channel 2 started at 9 AM. Before 9 AM we got channel 2s from other cities. Some mornings it was Dayton, Ohio, other mornings it was Nashville. One morning I saw a test pattern from Havana, Cuba!
Channel 13 would also change on occasion. Usually it was WBKO from Bowling Green, Ky, to the west, but on rare occasions depending on a change in the weather (or perhaps the cable operator was experimenting), we would get WLOS from Asheville, North Carolina, instead.
That's a really advanced show title sequence for the 1960s.
Not sure I would want to go back to the days of static and drift on TV and radio, but I miss the randomness of analog signals. Yes, your favorite shows could actually be interrupted when a storm came in and you lost your signal, but on the other hand, the storm might also blow in stations that you had never been able to get before with interesting programming. Nowadays, with thousands of crystal clear channels operating literally 24 hours a day, it is interesting that most of the time, there is nothing worth watching on any of them.
'56 channels and nothin' on....'
I know exactly what you mean. When the atmospheric conditions would wreak havok on your local station, but you'd discover a new channel you'd never heard of from far, far away. It was like you were picking up transmissions from another planet! Analog had its charm.
history lesson episodes are the best. can’t wait for the next video on uhf, it is very interesting.
For whatever it’s worth, I always prefer your history lesson episodes and enjoy them the most. Keep up the good work !
I moved and rebuilt a RCA TTU25B transmitter in 1990. It started life as a TTU1, and was stamped 'August 05 1952' as the final test date at the factory. The TTU25B's exciter stages had caught fire, so the three cabinets that were damaged were replaced with the earlier transmitter. This was a simple task, since many TTU1 transmitters had been field upgraded to TTU 25. This was put on Ch58, in Destin Florida.
I also remember those flying TV stations. Explicitly, because a science program that we were to watch faded in and out, but it had the wrong audio as someone drowned on about cows. The entire class was laughing, like crazy.
In your opening I spotted the 'VD is for Everyone' PSAs that were produced by the Mormons. I was a Broadcast Engineer in the US Army in the early '70s. (Ch8, B&W, at Ft. Greely. No video tape, only 16mm or live.) We were required to run a few PSAs each day, and the Base Chaplain threw a hissy fit about them. Both for the subject, and the source so I ran them until the 16mm film was unusable.
I worked at a 5MW EIRP UHF station on a 1700 foot tower in the Orlando market in 1988. We had a three Klystron Comark transmitter, and an early automation system with 12 Sony U-matic tape players, plus one recorder/striper to set the cues for the computer.
Some brands of TVs let you pop out a single tuner strip on drum tuners to add a low UHF channel, but they had low sensitivity. I was reparing TVs after school, in 1966, when my dad bought one of the first production Motorola Quasar color TV sets. I still have it.
Very well done history lesson. I learned quite bit from this episode. Early TV was quite a time with the advent of color, things were really crazy, spinning wheels.. oh boy.
Very cool. Always wondered about some of this stuff. As a kid, we didn't have cable. And, as a curious child, I always wondered why we never used "the other dial" on our TV's. Come to think of it, and here's a question for the next episode.... Did Canada EVER have ANY UHF stations?? We got "cable" TV, more "Community Antenna" style in the 50's.... and it went mainstream in the 80's when we finally got a bunch of American stations on the system.
"I'm a fun guy,
can't you tell by my shirt?"
LMAO I lost it there
Ironically, UHF won in the end as the majority of DTV stations in the US are on UHF.
No irony, the electronics had improved enough to make UHF acceptable. Lower noise figures and higher gain per device provided a much cleaner output.
Also, ironically, the FCC has sold off most of the UHF TV channels to the highest bidders. Goodbye UHF.
There was yet another factor against early UHF.....besides drift, which was indeed a problem, the UHF tuners generally had a higher level of internally generated noise than VHF tuners did.
This meant that you were more likely to get a "snowy" picture.
Of course, the fact that many UHF stations were underpowered made this even worse.
UHF Stations didn't start having Better Frequency until 1958 or so.
Early UHF tuners used a vacuum tube, typically 6AF4, or 2AF4 in series string sets, which had a relatively short lifespan at UHF frequencies. An inherent problem with the cathodes in vacuum tubes of that era was that the performance degraded at UHF frequencies while the tube still had strong emission and worked well at lower frequencies. The tube was not powered down when the TV was tuned to a VHF station, so the tube was wearing out all the time that the TV set was on. Drug store tube testers didn't pick up the problem. The degradation resulted in a snowy picture. Probably the first use of transistors in TV sets was in the UHF tuners.
Before the all channel receiver act became law, manufacturers assumed that a buyer who was willing to pay extra for a UHF tuner was going to use it, so they provided a fairly decent tuner. Just after the law took effect, as I understand it, manufacturers typically provided the minimum tuner that would comply with the law.
This was fun. I love the history of television. I grew up in the coverage area of one of the original UHF islands (Youngstown OH). We were about 60 miles from either Pittsburgh PA or Cleveland OH, which had VHF channels from the late '40s, so everyone had a tall antenna on the roof to get the snowy signals. When WKBN-TV (channel 27) WYTV (channel 33) and WFMJ-TV (channel 73) went on the air in 1953 everyone was very excited for the clear signals (I was 5 then, so I rely on my parents' reports). Our 1954 Emerson TV had UHF built in, and I do not recall ever having to adjust it, so they must've solved the drift problem early. Those early UHF experiences affected me, since I became an electrical engineer specializing in TV equipment, and now own the world's largest collection of UHF converters and VHF signal boosters (tv-boxes.com). In retirement I write the Television column for the Antique Wireless Association's Journal, and just did a video presentation: th-cam.com/video/yyJCgkHPPeI/w-d-xo.html
When we got channels 17, 29 and 48 in Philadelphia, to supplement our 3, 6, 10 a,d 12, it was like getting cable! Three more channels, but mostly bullfights, low budget movies and local DJ dance shows. Amazing how that tiny loop antenna picked up those weak signals.
Agree, I watched them too for the old movies. This was in the late ‘60s & early ‘70s.
I am from Elmira, NY and I never knew that I lived on an UHF Island. How cool! I love this stuff. Take care...
I'm so happy this channel is still around!
I'm a huge buff of early TV history, especially with the olden days of analog TV. Thanks for sharing, Benny. 📺
Meanwhile, in the UK, our TV started off on VHF with the black and white 405 line service that we used before switching over to 625 line PAL. Apparently we did use Channel 1 (we used Band I and Band III, I think the BBC had Band I and ITV had Band III)
The 405 line picture standard never used colour, it was always black and white. The UK adopted 625 line PAL for colour TV which was only on UHF.
The black and white 405 line service went on until 1985 and nothing was broadcast on VHF until the DAB digital radio service was launched, which uses Band III.
Our digital TV is still UHF only and part of the UHF band has been taken out of service and handed over to 4G (and I think 5G) mobile phones.
Also, I think the bother with UHF was part of what did DuMont in. They couldn't get enough of their stations on VHF, they had to go on UHF. Also, there was a limit on how many O&O stations any network had and KTLA was counted as one of DuMont's stations even though it wasn't part of the DuMont network. From what I remember, Paramount Pictures had stakes in DuMont and also owned KTLA.
Also, we had kind of an MPATI service, but it wasn't a dedicated station, it was a Television for Schools and Colleges service that was carried by ITV and the BBC... and ITV launched their service before the BBC. ITV also moved their schols TV service to Channel 4 when that channel launched.
It looks like, unless I am very much mistaken, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula didn’t have its first UHF station (WZMQ 19) until 2003.
UHF went on the air in Western Massachusetts in March 1953 with WWLP TV and in April with WHYN TV. This was one of the few areas of the country where all channel VHF/UHF TV's were available.
One of the reasons that UHF had drifting problems back in the 50's was because trying to make vacuum tubes operate at such high frequencies was very difficult. The higher you go in frequency, the more stable the oscillator circuit had to be. And since vacuum tubes are inherently unstable devices. The only way to make tube stable at such high frequencies would have required a lot of support electronics which would have added significant complexity, cost, power consumption and heat to the device. It wasn't until the advent of the transistor that a stable(yet cheap) UHF tuner was possible. You may not know this, but of you were to take apart a TV set that had UHF tuning from the 1960's and even though it may look like it's a 100% tube TV. If you were to take apart the UHF tuner of that seemingly 100% tube TV. You will find a single transistor in there and it's because of that one transistor that made it possible to have a UHF tuner that doesn't drift.
No nostalgia here - I genuinely learned something new and mind blowing from the Stratovision / MPATI discussion! Thanks!
I particularily like the info on the MPATI program. I got a snicker out of your "barely reached Louisville" reference. Back in the Fall of 1959, I was a 3rd grade student in Louisville and we had a Spanish language "class" via MPATI. It was frequently either cut short or cancelled due the reception issues and weather issues that grounded the plane. Many years later, I knew one of the pilots in the program and his daughter, who as a young student, had participated as an actor in some of the Spanish language instruction classes.
I’ve come back to watch this so many times. Thanks for the good stuff Ben
I'm gonna say it was '60 or '61, I remember when Fresno's CBS affiliate KFRE switched from VHF Channel 12 to UHF channel 30. The switch was a prime time special with celebrity switcher Bob Denver, who was a big star on 'The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis' as Dobie"s beatnik buddy Maynard G Krebs. Appearing in costume, Maynard stepped up to the ceremonial red button (sadly gray for us) and pushed it. The screen then turned to snowy static until Dad could figure out how to tune the UHF dial. As far as I know, channel 12 has remained vacant in the local area to this day.
BTW, the Fresno market is still a UHF island (I hadn't heard that term before). The nearest VHF stations are in San Francisco, Sacramento, San Jose, and Monterey.
UHF started finally becoming the Broadcast Standard during JFK.
Whenever Ben uploads a new Archive episode, I stop everything I'm doing so I can watch.
As a child of the 60s and 70s I can attest to the annoyance of drifting UHF and generally crappy signal quality. Even as a kid full of energy, it sure got old fast jumping up to tweak the tuning on the TV several times in a half hour. When we finally got a set with the clickety-click UHF knob with discrete channels, it was amazing and seldom took fine tuning adjustments.
Even as a kid I also used to ponder the names "VHF" and "UHF" -- who determined that Ultra High is necessarily higher than Very High in the first place? (Not talking about recreational drug use here.) I used to wonder if we would evolve to super-duper, almighty, really, really high frequency broadcasting. Lo and behold, with 5G, it's here1
When television first came to my area in 1953, there were 2 UHF stations and only one VHF station. These stations were WKNX (57), WNEM (5) , and WTAC (16). WTAC was shut down after one year of broadcasting while WKNX (now WEYI 25) is still on the air, and still is even to this day. It's surprising that two of Flint, Michigan's first tv stations were UHF stations.
Schenectady, NY. had one VHF station, pioneering WRGB, originally assigned channel 4 and later moved to channel 6. Channels that were added later were given UHF assignments. Eventually, later in the 1950s, 2 of the channels received VHF assignments, 10 and 13, so all 3 major broadcast networks, NBC, CBS and ABC, were on VHF channels in that market. (Channel 13 in Utica was moved to channel 2 to avoid interference.) The local "Educational TV" station remained on UHF channel 17. ("Educational TV" was later designated as the Public Broadcast System.)
My Dad had installed a fringe area VHF antenna with rotator to receive signals from distant VHF stations. We sometimes got 2 or more stations on the same VHF channel, by repositioning the antenna. However, most carried network programming, which meant we could receive the same programs on local channels. The exception was baseball games. My Dad was from New England and a die hard fan of the Boston Red Sox, and we were living in a sea of New York Yankees fans. His fringe area antenna would receive Red Sox games broadcast by WMTW, channel 8, transmitting from the top of Mount Washington, in NH. The picture was snowy but viewable, and sound was clear. He and my brother would watch those games. Even if the game were between the Red Sox and Yankees, broadcast on a local channel, they would watch a snowy WMTW to avoid having to hear Mel Allen, the Yankees announcer who was extremely favorable to the Yankees.
Don't change the channel, don't touch that dial, you got it all on UHF!!!
Greetiings from the still (hypothetical) UHF island of Fort Wayne, Indiana. During the actual UHF era, we had WANE (CBS) on channel 15, WPTA (ABC) on channel 21, and WKJG (NBC) on channel 33 when I first moved to town in the mid 70s. Channel 39 at that time repeated the also mentioned WBGU (PBS) from Ohio. Sometime in the 80s, the station became the local PBS member station WFWA. In the later 70s, WFFT debuted on channel 55 as an independent station showing lots of old reruns black and white movies, and early Looney Tunes. It picked up FOX prime time programing upon that network's debut in the late 80s, and continues as an affiliate today,.
A tangentialy related (to MPATI) fact: the Brasília (Brazil's capital city) inauguration in 1960 was relayed to broadcasters around the country by 3 airplanes flying in circles along the way from Brasília to São Paulo.
Nice documentary. Quite amazing the US was late to implement UHF television.
My oldest TV set with factory installed UHF tuner is from 1959. This is a German television set.
The reason the Germans where quick with starting UHF broadcasts is simple;
After the war Germany was only allowed to use a limited frequency space.
UHF frequencies excluded from this limitation, thinking a practical use of UHF was stil years away.
How wrong was that thought :-) The majority of analog TV in Europa ended up broadcasting in UHF!
As far as I know, the US was the first country to implement UHF broadcast television, in 1952. European television transmitted on VHF frequencies, below about 220 MHz, until around 1965, though I can't find a specific reference to that yet.
UHF was optional, but not standard, until 1964. After 1964, the government mandated UHF. Some sets had it, most didn’t.
WQEX 16 in Pittsburgh was likely the last station to broadcast in b/w. Their ancient transmitter from the 50s broke down March 10, 1985.
Wow, that must've really been an ancient transmitter if it couldn't pass the color signal! Any TV transmitter made after about 1954 had to be able to handle color, though keeping it properly adjusted to FCC specs may have been beyond the capability ($) of the station owner.
In the 60s SF had UHF channel 44 which was quite entertaining for us kids - roller derby, wrestling, odd movies...
And, for little me in the 1980s, KBHK was the cartoons channel
Yeah...for markets that were UHF islands in the day...it was pure hell.
I grew up in one of the first UHF islands (Youngstown Ohio). All of the three stations we watched as kids are still on the air. WKBN-TV still has its original call letters and channel assignment (27) from 1952.
@@k8zhd I actually am in that Youngstown, Ohio Market (Mercer county, Pa), so I know what you're taking about. At my age, it was a miracle getting TV 55 out of Akron to watch afternoon cartoons back in the day.
@@newstarcadefan I recall occasionally getting WAKR-TV, channel 49, out of Akron, but it was pretty rare, and we were on the west side of Youngstown (Canfield, actually) -- a distance of only about 45 miles. After I went to college in 1966 I understand there was some channel-swapping, and WAKR ended up with 23. That's a surprise, since I thought the FCC tried to keep 6 channels between adjacent assignments, since the "front ends" of UHF converters were not very good at separating close frequencies. Maybe WAKR had to have a directional antenna to protect Youngstown's channel 21, WFMJ-TV.
@@k8zhd Ah, that now is interesting. I did grow up with Channel 23 (first when it was an ABC affiliate, then it became an Ion owned an operated).
Growing up our tv only had vhf but there was a little blank plate on the front that said “provision for uhf tuner”. We didn’t have a uhf capable tv until the early 70’s and we didn’t have a color set until the late 70’s. I remember uhf always had old movies, re-runs of 1950’s-60’s tv shows and super low budget kiddie shows.
You really did your homework for this episode Ben.. Awesome Job!
you made a UHF episodes without mentioning Weird Al Yankovic?
Congratulation Ben
Hate to disappoint you, but, check the end credits.
@@OddityArchive You indeed got it all on that one, good sir! 😉😆
@@OddityArchive A Twinkie Wiener Sandwich!
Ohhhhh, maaaaan!
UHF took off in areas that had no VHF stations.
Where they were VHF stations, UHF didn't get watched much until the FCC mandated that all new TV sets would have UHF, starting in 1964.
Indeed, until the mid 1960's, there were very few UHF stations in cuties that had VHF stations.
The FCC should have mandated that all TV sets built after 1952 would've had UHF.
If that had happened, UHF might have prospered.
21:22 "..carefully evaluated by specialists before each program is accepted..." means needing to pass the Person Born in 1893 Test.
Interesting. In our area, we had a short-lived UHF channel, KFAZ (on channel 43), which only lasted from August 1953 until May 1954. We wouldn't get a UHF channel again until KLAA (now KARD) signed on in October 1974.
I like how Ben was kinda too young to have been there for all of this but he really succeeds in replicating the experience of that era that we Boomers remember.
Ben was born in the Mid 80s, I was born in the Early 80s. UHF was before our time(Though Stores were STILL selling TVs with UHF and VHF Dials as late as 1988).
Religious TV broadcaster KPAZ-TV 21 was the first UHF television station that signed on in the Phoenix area, in 1967. I noticed the ONTV decoder to the side, and remember that one had to have one of those if one wanted to watch special programming on a then-new (as of October, 1979) UHF television station on channel 15, KNXV -- which had a strong, clear signal. Sure brings back memories! It is suspected that ONTV was in other television broadcasting markets, as well.
Ah! When it came to UHF channel selectors found on TV sets and optional UHF converter boxes (in the US) in the 1950s into the 1970s, it was entirely different than what was found on TVs from the 1980s to the present.
Up until the 1980s, the UHF channel selectors on TVs or converter boxes was a circular dial that had a feel to it like turning a circular door knob, with no "clicks" to lock onto individual UHF stations. So, when tuning to UHF, the person had to slowly rotate the dial, often times overshooting the channel, then carefully turn the knob to adjust it for the best picture quality on the TV set.
Tuning-in the UHF station in the 1950s thru the '70s was similar to operating an AM radio of the same era, where a knob had to be turned by hand to seek out the stations.
When I was a kid in the 90s, I had a portable 5" B&W TV and had to do that when tuning channels. Same on a lot of radios still around today, both AM and FM. I'm pretty sure Sony still makes a pocket radio with an analog tuning dial. I remember occasionally seeing those TVs with the "click" style channel selectors, but the downside was no TV remote support since that sort of tuner was more "electromechanical".
WOW super interesting! I have always been interested in the histories of TV, radio, computers, telephonics and the internet. LOVE this stuff! 🤩🤩♥♥
This episode and the one on early vtr's really filled in some gaps I had in my knowledge, despite having read many many articles about it I always see something new when I watch one of your history episodes
Any chance on an ep about kinescopes?
Any chance of more vtr coverage , like the cv format? I would love an ep about kinescopes even if you can't get ahold of any equipment
Channel 39 broadcast in Houston in the early 1950s. My parents' first TV set had a UHF dial, and I've found the TV listings in the newspaper back in '52 that included KNUZ, channel 39. I don't know when it went off the air, but it returned in 1967. And KNUZ was also the calls letters for a an all-news AM radio station.
In the Youngstown-Warren, Ohio television market, we were one of the rare larger TV markets in the US to broadcast in the UHF spectrum starting in the early-1950s. WKBN Channel 27, Youngstown, Ohio (a CBS affiliate) was owned by a successful, long-established independently-owned AM radio station operator (Warren P. Williamson). WFMJ Channel 21, Youngstown, Ohio, (an NBC affiliate) was owned by the owner of the "Youngstown Vindicator" newspaper, William F. Maag, Jr.. The owner of WHHH Warren, Ohio (an AM radio station) owned the Dumont affiliate in our market until the network went out of business from full-time broadcasting in 1955. Several different owners operated the ABC affiliate in our TV market, until it was finally established on WYTV Channel 33, Youngstown, Ohio in the early-1960s.
My aunt on my mom's side who lived in san antonio had UHF tv every time we came to visit her, it was the only place i could watch the disney channel cause we didn't have cable tv yet
Up until the late 1980s there were 2 separate antenna connections. One for VHF, the other for
CKGN/CIII (Global) in Ontario was one of the first "big" commercial UHF stations in Canada, their transmitter was in a kinda marginal area so they needed 5,000,000 watts to get acceptable reception in Toronto. This must have cost a fortune to run because they moved to the CN tower in the late 80s.
In the Asbury Park/Long Branch/Eatontown {New Jersey} area, Channel 58, WRTV (owned and operated by the Walter Reade Organization), was on the air from January 1954 through April 1955. Not too many people had UHF converters on their TV sets to watch that channel. Compounded by financial problems, and the Reade Organization's later efforts to move to a VHF frequency [without success], the station finally went off the air.
Do not forget there was a WBCK-TV 53 in Battle Creek Michigan; I even was at the tower's original location near Augusta, Mi. The station went dark after a private airplane collided with the tower during a heavy fog at night.
It was said, in a Congressional hearing held by the Library of Congress in 1994, to determine the whereabouts of the archives of the DuMont Television Network (an early user of UHF), that the great bulk of the recordings made by DuMont from 1946 to 1957 had been destroyed and dumped in the East River of NYC.
Interesting. I was born in 61 and grew up on a steady diet TV. I remember a few sets that didn’t have UHF. I had one in my bedroom for many years, it was a “portable” in a metal box that weight at least 40lbs. UHF however was always there in my memory, the loop antenna for UHF and straight rabbit ears for VHF. I lived near Cincinnati OH and we had channels on on both bands and in town, cable became available by the time I was in high school.
I watched the nigh that XIX, Ch19 went live, from my home in Middletown. My bedroom was on the second floor, and I had our 12" Zenith B&W TV.
Years later, I worked for United Video in Delhi Township and some surrounding communities. I repaired all of the electronics.
@@michaelterrell- I was a little farther out (Eaton) in the fringe area for ch19 but I watched on good TV weather days 😁. Batty Hatty form Cincinnati was a favorite! I have a brother who worked at Marsh’s IGA for many years.
@@rustyaxelrod I never shopped at IGA or A&P. I mostly used the Kroger's at Engle's Corner and the short lived one across the street when it was a discount grocery. I worked second shift for many years near Cincinnati, so it was convenient to go there after midnight.
I vaguely remember Batty Hatty, but kids shows were on while I slept. I would work on my house after I got home from my job, and get up about 15 minutes before I left for work.I turned down the Chief Engineer's position at WRGT, Ch45 in Dayton in 1987. They only wanted to pay minimum wage, yet you were on call 24/7 and got no overtime. I don't remember the call for Dayton's Ch22, but I interviewed there. I didn't get hired. A friend who worked in their news department told me that their Chief was to retire in two years, and he said that he would be fired if they hired me because I knew more about their equipment than he did. Both stations had many design flaws that needed to be corrected.
I was always told that WWLP Ch. 22 in Springfield Ma.(NBC affiliate) was the nation's first UHF commercial television station going on the air in 1952 originally on Ch.61
WWLP didn't go on air until March of 1953. KPTV went on in September of '52.
I Love your show ben
Hope you do one on the MTV Networks Digital Suite and other Digital Services
Copyright Joke: Asinine (Like in Episode 23: Scary Logos and other Horrors)
One, now defunct, TV station that you should talk about, in part 2, is WJJY-TV, Ch. 14 in Jacksonville, IL, an ABC affiliate that was on the air from 1969-71. There is also KCIT-TV, Ch. 50 in Kansas City, MO, an independent TV station that carried ABC, NBC & CBS shows, that the other TV stations in the Kansas City area preempted & also some local shows, that was also on the air from 1969-71.
I enjoyed this. I look forward to seeing what else you have to say about this subject. I just find early TV, telephone, and computer topics so fascinating.
Rockford Illinois first tv station was channel 39 WTVO. Then they got channel 13 WREX. In the 1960s Rockford finally got 3 stations 23 WIFR
UHF gave me the ability to watch affiliate stations which weren't broadcast in our area. That's how I was able to watch my beloved reruns of Dr. Who, Space 1999 and Star Trek. This was right around when cable was beginning to take root and cost about $7.00 a month.
KLAK-TV is located in Tom Bean, Texas, and serves the North Texas/Oklahoma area. Wikipedia lists it as an FM station (97.5) now, but it's possible that they did some early UHF TV experiments.
My first experience in UHF TV was about 1962 when our family got our first color TV, a Sears Silvertone 'roundie' with the continuous uhf tuner dial. I don't remember the drift problem mentioned. Then again, despite the vhf dial being full, there was only one uhf transmitter in Los Angeles, KMEX 34. Dad called it Channel U since that's what the lighted dial said. It was only b&w, us kids only used it to watch the bullfights from Tijuana, which annoyed mother no end! It would be a few years before a second station came on, KCET 28 National Educational Television.
While the American proposal to move all TV stations to UHF turned out to be a failure, most European countries ultimately did move their TV stations to UHF around the 60s & 70s, if I can recall correctly.
I should have taken your advise on not visiting that domain.
I was dead serious.
For those who are taking Ben's advice, what is on there?
@@ChrisKewl Typical NSFW adult content. Not sure if there's any other nefarious shenanigans embedded therein.
yikes
Thank goodness for the Wayback Machine.
Any page from 2020 or earlier will work.
Now I want to own something (anything) branded Blonder-Tongue.
Blonder-Tongue UHF converters from the '50s through the '70s are readily available on ebay, usually for $20-50. They made more of them than anyone else, for a longer period of time.
Sending good thoughts to a fellow media nerd and 20th century fan. Thanks.
I think that your Manhattan Cable box became the Manhattan Project
I live near Austin, Texas. An oddity around here is that during analog TV days, there was only one VHF station. All the others were UHF. The reason for this-Lyndon B. Johnson owned the VHF station. (He also owned a radio station that is still on the air-KLBJ. If he could come back from the dead, he world wring the necks of the present owners. The politics they broadcast now is completely opposite of his). There is one mistake in your video. The FCC did not mandate click UHF tuners until the 1970s. I restore antique electronics and have a couple of 1970 or so 12 inch Zenith B&W sets. The UHF tuners are continuous, not click. I also have a 1977 GE Portacolor(nicknamed Portapotty due to its grainy color crt). It has click UHF tuning.
17:20 The UHF tuners installed in all TVs starting May 1, 1964 were almost all continuous tuning with a round knob, usually marked something like 14..25..35...50...70...83. On a Zenith 22" B&W set we got in 1970, on Channels 2-13 the knob changed channels and an outer ring was fine tuning. But for UHF, the knob just spun around -- THAT was the fine tuning. To actually move the UHF dial, you had to grab a FAKE fine tuning ring that was actually part of the dial, and turn THAT. It was no trouble at all for me to find Channel 39 in Dallas to watch Bozo the Clown when I was 7 years old, but my parents never figured it out.
So the FCC added a clause to the All Channel Act that by 1974 VHF and UHF channels had to be selected the same way on a particular TV. Digital tuning was still a few years off. A few very cheap TVs - often a battery operated 5 inch B&W for $59 -- just made the VHF tuner continuous as well, saving a buckortoo, but most TVs had a UHF knob with 70 stops and really tiny numbers. See page 371 www.google.com/books/edition/Code_of_Federal_Regulations/QwRuviSdktoC?hl=en&gbpv=1
The UHF tuners installed in TV sets to comply with the 1964 all channel law typically met the bare minimum requirements. The FCC later set some technical requirements to address such issues as poor noise figure, which meant a snowy picture unless the set was receiving a very strong UHF signal. The added 1974 requirement, to my best recall, included "equally easy to tune". The requirement did lead to deployment of the click stop UHF tuner. However, some manufacturers degraded the VHF tuner to continuous tuning to match the continuous UHF tuner. Some sets provided 12 user preset channels, VHF or UHF, selected with continuous tuners and locked by AFC. This was adequate until more than 12 channels were broadcasting in the market, which meant the user had to change a preset channel "on the fly" to tune a 13th channel.
The click stop tuner on RCA's first production color TV set had extra stops which could be used for UHF channels, in addition to the stops for VHF channels 2-13.
Cable TV operators added premium channels later on. One method was to insert the premium channels in spectrum between channels 6 and 7. Continuous VHF tuners typically were VHF-LO (channels 2-6) and VHF-HI (7-13). As a cost reduction, continuous VHF tuners for the full channel range 2-13 were developed. The new tuners could receive the premium channels between 6 and 7. So, viewers could justify the purchase of a new TV set based on adding the premium channels at no cost to themselves, enhancing new TV sales at the expense of cable TV and premium channel providers. This "feature" was also available on VCRs and tended to enhance the sales of VCRs with full channel 2-13 continuous tuners.
Another method: some TV sets had very wide VHF fine tuning, enough so that channel 8 could be selected and fine tuning adjusted to tune in channel 7. So, some TV servicemen would adjust the coils for channel 7 so the set could use that channel to tune premium channels between 6 and 7. Channel 7, if active, could be received on the set's channel 8 position.
The countermeasure deployed by the cable TV industry was "scrambling", which disabled the TV set's ability to recover the synchronization pulses and resulted in a scrambled picture, even though the actual signal had correct horizontal and vertical timing. A set top box restored the sync for paying subscribers.
My family's TV in the 1960s didn't have UHF built-in so my father bought a special tuner box to get it (along with a special antenna). He wanted to watch the stock car races.
This is my fourth watch through and I still can’t stay focused long enough for all the dates. Lucky number five here we go!
One thing I always thought weird was my parents cable went from 36 to 38 (no 37), and when I found out about channel 37 for astronomy it made sense.
83 channels! My god.
BTW, my grandmother had a TV with a slot for a UHF tuner upgrade....and was never installed.
_Just pretend these are transmitter parts being delivered_ ! Finally, somebody put a disclaimer on the stock footage that usually makes no sense!
From 1994 to 2005 I lived in Niles Michigan all my TV stations were from South Bend Indiana what's Saba Indiana started at Channel 16 and went up to Channel 69.
In 2016 when I moved to Schoolcraft Michigan I got Channel 3 up to channel 43.
What was our (Denver) UHF first station? Was it 20 or 31??? I remember when KDVR had their old HQ over by Ball Arena (Pepsi Center) when I was a kid back in the 90's
KDVR was first (1983). There were some construction permits issued prior to that, but nothing came of them.
Ironically, nearly all digital TV stations transmit on UHF!
The elementary school I went to in the 1960s tuned in to MPATI for special lessons with specially placed antennas (I attempted to tune it in from home with a normal rooftop UHF antenna and couldn't). Later, tapes of similar lessons were physically distributed to a local UHF educational channel. MPATI seems to me to have been a cool but impractical albatross. For one thing, even if an aircraft were needed to hold the transmitting antenna aloft, why couldn't a more practical ground studio transmit to it for rebroadcast, so it wouldn't have to carry and power the rest of the studio?
I do admit the idea of "tuning in an aircraft" seemed pretty cool to me as a kid. Why wasn't that featured in science lessons?
Also, it depended on schools kicking in funds for it. Some schools just free-rode.
Please Please Please.. do an episode on the MTS Stereo Television craze of the early 80's!! You know those "IN STEREO WHERE AVAILABLE" banners that were plastered all over early 80's sitcoms.. I'v looked everywhere on TH-cam and no body has covered the topic in depth... Thank You..
I used to have one of those UHF boxes that you would connect to a TV that was not UHF compatible, aka One tuning knob
I grew up on the Missouri River bottoms about an hour from Kansas City. Because of the topography, we couldn't UHF stations except for channel 16, a TBN affiliate in St. Joseph, MO. It sucked. We couldn't get PBS, Fox or independent stations, yet our uphill neighbors could.
Some regions in the US the UHF TV channel spectrum was the only way to go, in the 1960s/60s, so that a cluster of local communities could have the big 3 TV networks (ABC,NBC,CBS) in the region; as the FCC had concerns of overlapping interference with VHF channel stations from neighboring markets.
One example was the San Joaquin Valley region of California, specifically Fresno, where, back in the 1950s, the FCC would only allow 2 VHF TV stations in the market, as there were concerns of interference to the Los Angeles market to the south, and the San Francisco market to the north.
The solution was for the San Joaquin Valley/Fresno region to go to UHF TV channels, as it availed a wide selection of available channel frequencies that were unused in the LA and SF markets; as well as the shorter transmitting range the UHF channels had, too.
The UHF channels spectrum also made it possible for the Bakersfield, California, area to have several local TV stations, without concerns of interfering with Fresno or LA.
On a technical side, the aspect of VHF Fresno TV stations affecting distance markets was a valid one, as the intense heat of the summers in the San Joaquin Valley can generate what it known as the "tropo effect," where the heating of the atmosphere can extend the broadcast signals found on the VHF/FM radio frequencies spectrum. If you ever wondered why FM radio, or VHF TV, reception seemed to improve in summer? It is the tropo effect at work.
I wonder if there’s any archivisms worth making a video about in the world of early portable TVs. My grandparents had a tv in their camper van for my dad and his siblings to watch back in the 70s. When they were on the road the kids could watch a show for about 15 minutes before the signal would cut out and they’d have to change to a closer station.
AFAIK the first truly portable TV was the Philco Safari, which was released in 1958 or so.
I remember twisting the aerial on the back our tv in the seventies to get the uncle floyd show on uhf. That was the only we ever watched on uhf.
In the 70s in miami our main UHF channel (66) also had a VHF license (6) and our Sundays of boring religious/sports content were saved by Godzilla movies and Kung Fu Flicks, thank goodness.
If the FCC had been able to allocate 24 VHF channels in 1945 (when the FCC re-allocated frequencies above 44 megacycles), perhaps there wouldn't have been a need for UHF.
Small cities might have have had four stations while major markets may have had ten stations.