As per Cecil’s column, which I haven’t researched but have read, TV channel 1 was officially deallocated by the FTC to make room for other broadcasting. It simply doesn’t officially exist as far as the FTC is concerned, and there are no longer official frequencies associated with it. Or so I’ve thought for the past n years.
Lo and behold, here comes my new Toshiba set, with esoteric menus and buttons and other hoobyjoobs, including static on the `deallocated’ broadcast channel 1. What’s up? Could I conceivably get a signal on channel 1 with my rabbit ears?
Don’t ALL T.V.s have a channel one? I mean, can’t you manually enter “01” on the remote control and static comes out (or the blue screen or the blank screen or whatever your TV does when it gets static?)
It’s a Toshiba 14AF42 with FSTPURE and ColorStream.
Garfield226, actually, most American TVs only go down to channel 2. Try to enter channel 1 and the TV will tune to channel 2 instead, in my experience.
Whereas with this oddball, you can reach channel 1 by flipping through the channels to a point one below channel 2 (whereas every other set I’ve used would wrap around to the highest channel if you tried that). I don’t think I’m `fooling’ it into showing me channel 2 as channel 1.
You don’t understand. You’re talking different “channels”. What you have is a TV which has a limited number of pretuned slots. You can tune your slot (“channel”) 01 to any real channel. American TV sets are not like that. The dial tunes to the true channel number directly.
Data point - my Toshiba also show a channel 1 if you manually type it in. I suppose you could save it as a channel, too, then it would show up when flipping through the channels. No, there’s nothing on it, though. The TV’s only about 4 years old.
Factoid: the Japanese TV system uses the same TV standard and channels as the US. But they kept their Channel 1. Some people buying video equipment directly from Japan (e.g., Beta VCRs) get equipment that has Channel 1. Note that the Japanese AC standard is a little different from the US and has to be taken into account with such equipment.
So, WAGs:
The OPs TV maker didn’t want to bother making changes to the US version of the tuner and left it in.
The OPs TV is a grey market Japanese domestic TV. Check the spec for the AC line requirements.
You probably have your TV on the “cable” setting rather than the “TV” or “antenna” setting. When we had cable, we did get cable channel 1, so it would have been annoying if our cable-ready Toshiba could not display that channel! I will have to see if you can type in channel 1 on the antenna setting (which is what we’ve got the TV on now.)
Having your TV set on the cable setting while using an antenna makes no difference on the VHF channels. However, any UHF channels will come in on incorrect channel numbers, which can be slightly annoying.
