In the early 1970s we had a Zenith B&W TV in the living room with rabbit ears antenna. It was VHF only. We lived close to Dayton, OH, and there were only two local TV stations on VHF: channel 2 (WDTN - NBC) and channel 7 (WHIO - CBS). Every now and then, depending on the weather, we could pick up a couple stations from Cincinnati (channels 9 and 12).
A couple UHF station finally sprung up in Dayton: channel 22 (WKEF - ABC) and channel 16 (WPTD - PBS). My dad bought a UHF tuner that connected to the TV. The tuner had a continuously-variable dial. To watch a UHF station, you had to turn the TV’s channel dial to channel 3.
Where I lived growing up, we got really good reception. We could receive eight out of 12 VHF channels. Three were very clear. The other five weren’t as clear, but entirely watchable. The weirdest thing was that once–just once–I got a very fuzzy picture on one channel long enough to identify it as a Channel 8 Waycross, Georgia–which was 200 miles away!
We also got lots of UHF stations. Three of them were clear, and another half dozen or so were not so clear, but still watchable. As a kid, one of the most fun ones was Ted Turner’s WRET (Ted’s initials) Channel 36 out of Charlotte. It was not network affiliated and showed lots of stuff like cartoons, Stooges, Little Rascals, old movies, etc.
So it was a big culture shock when I moved to the big city and could receive. . .
ONE VHF channel, and four UHF channels (none of which were WRET)!
We didn’t have the big three on UHF, but lots of little channels. The kind that showed Gilligan’s Island and Brady Bunch reruns after school. Plus Bowling For Dollars and Hockey Night in Canada. This was in Buffalo.
I don’t recall 39 being an NBC station back in the late-'60s to mid-'70s. I remember it being a ‘local station’ like KTLA in Los Angeles. We had Channel 8 and 10, and Channel 6 was XETV, broadcasting out of Tijuana. ISTM that 6, 8, an 10 were the local VHF stations. I think 6 was not one of the Big Three, 8 was CBS, and 10 was ABC. Am I misremembering, and 39 really was NBC?
As far as UHF, I remember that 14 was KPBS (public television). There was 39, already mentioned; and I think 58 (out of Orange County?). I think I remember one other UHF station that I didn’t discover until later.
Our PBS, NBC and Fox stations were UHF, 23, 29 and 35.
HD digital is very nice when you have a good signal. But it really seems to me that marginal analog signals were better than marginal digital signals. Yeah the analog picture would get snowy but you could still mostly see it and IIRC the sound stayed pretty good. With digital if the signal strength goes much below 40% it gets blocky and the picture freezes and the sound cuts out.
I lived in Chicago until I was 10 (1975). I remember at least three UHF stations: 26, 32, and 44 (which was Spanish-language, even then, IIRC). Channel 26 appears to have been Chicago’s first UHF station, in 1964.
We watched Channel 32 quite a lot; they had BJ and Dirty Dragon (a great, subversive local kids’ program), Batman reruns, and a lot of other reruns of comedies which I liked watching. They also had the Merv Griffin Show. I remember getting the UHF signal to be occasionally challenging (we lived in Lisle, which is 30 miles away from downtown).
We moved to Green Bay in '75, where there were no independent stations, and only the PBS station was on UHF (until around 1981, when we got our first independent station, somewhere on the UHF dial). I remember being annoyed when we’d visit my grandmother’s house, and her TV didn’t pick up the PBS station at all (because she never got a UHF antenna).
We lived at the eastern end of Long Island and couldn’t get NYC stations (before cable). The nearest NBC affiliate was in New Britain (WHNB-30), so you needed a UHF tuner to see it. My father sold TVs, so we got one relatively early (1964). I’d try to talk about The Man from U.N.C.L.E. with my classmates and they had no idea what I was talking about.
We got cable within a year; I know we had it during the Great Northeast Blackout, since we were the only place in the entire northeast that had power and we wondered why the cable had gone out.
We had PBS and several independent stations on UHF. One of the independent stations turned into a scrambled subscription channel at 8pm for a while. Later, another indy station became a Fox affiliate. Later still the first indy station became a WB station, and the other one a UPN station, while a third indy station became a CBS affiliate (Fox took it’s spot on VHF). Now the WB one is MyNetwork, and the UPN one is CW.
Aus tried to shift from VHF to UHF sometime last century. VHF is totally gone now, but so is UHF, replaced by digital.
The shift was partly driven by the desire to free up VHF frequencies, but in AUS, UHF was presented as an improvement, a better system than VHF. This was because the politicians who were supporting the shift to close down VHF take all their ideology from the UK.
In the UK, VHF was the old system of analog TV. It was actually old. obsolete. not any good. very very low resolution. very very low frame rate. The real system of TV, the TV that real people watched unless they were out in the country, or had only a very very old TV, or both, was UHF.
UHF was visibly better than UHF in the UK, and ignorant UK-biased Aus politicians believed that the same would be true in Aus. But…
UHF was not better than VHF in Aus, because we were late in the whole TV game. Our local VHF TV was already very good quality. Visibly better than USA TV. Our UHF was not late: our UHF was the same as our VHF (there was a late generation UHF adopted by small backward countries that was slightly better)
All else being equal (which it never is), UHF transmission is short-range line-of-sight, particularly susceptible to intervening building or hills, or passing airplanes. All else being equally, UHF is not as good as VHF: the advantage is that more channels can be stuffed into the UHF bands. For these reason, our commercial stations were uninterested in switching from VHF to UHF.
So: the UK had some good UHF stations. Aus had UHF stations from broadcasters that had no money, or got their frequency allocations late, and missed out.
You are clearly an older San Diegan than I. XETV/6 was the Fox affiliate by my time in the '90s.
I had to refer to Wikpiedia for the rest of this, but apparently, KNSD/39 (which had become the ABC affiliate in 1972 after acquiring the rights from XETV) became the NBC affiliate in 1977 when KGTV/10, the former NBC affiliate, dropped NBC and became the ABC affiliate for San Diego, leading to KNSD acquiring the now-vacant NBC rights.
Later on (by which time I had already moved away from San Diego), KTTY/69 became KSWB, one of the flagship WB stations, and then stole the Fox affiliation out from under XETV’s feet, which lead to XETV picking up the WB franchise and subsequently becoming the local CW outlet.
KUSI, as far as I remember, was the only San Diego station that was never affiliated with any major network (unless you count UPN as a major network, which nobody does), and KMFB was associated with CBS all along and never changed affiliations.
I wonder if any other major US city has such a cutthroat and Byzantine history of stations swapping affiliations.
I remember UHF. That weird little round antenna on our TV set.
I lived in Toronto in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. With the VHF dial nearly full of channels (CBC on 3 and 5, CTV on 9, CHCH on 11, NBC on 2, CBS on 4, ABC on 7, plus a few ever-so-slightly out of range), it seemed that UHF was the way to go for anybody wanting to start a TV station.
And they did: CityTV broadcast on channel 79, and showed “Baby Blue Movies” (softcore porn) on Friday nights. Channel 19 was TVO, Ontario’s educational channel, and showed classic movies every Saturday night. The Global network–today, a big player in Canadian TV–got its start on channel 22. Channel 25 was the CBC in French. And channel 29, out of Buffalo, was great for Sunday afternoon “Creature Features.”
Later, Multicultural TV on channel 47 would show endless reruns of “Married with Children” and “Jerry Springer” when it wasn’t showing news broadcasts in Mandarin, Italian, or Hindu. It also had “The All-Night Show,” running from about 1:00 a.m. to about 6:00 a.m., and featuring such fare as “Mr. Lucky,” “Peter Gunn,” “The Twilight Zone,” and “The Prisoner,” all hosted by Chuck the Security Guard.
To this day, I think of 2, 4, and 7 as the “natural” numbers for CBS, NBC, and ABC.
When I was visiting north east Pennsylvania in that time period, though, we could get all the NYC stations, and on UHF got the Scranton version of the networks (16 was ABC, 22 was CBS and 28 was NBC as I recall, with 44 as the PBS station).
When I was growing up in Minneapolis/St Paul (I was born in 1955), we had CBS on channel 4 (WCCO), NBC on channel 5 (KSTP), ABC on channel 9 (KMSP), and independent channel 11 (WTCN). IIRC, “the educational channel” (KTCI) was on 2 and 13 on UHF (I don’t remember PBS at all before the mid-70s). The only time I ever watched it was at school, when there was something our teachers wanted us to see.
The first big change came around 1978 when ABC moved to KSTP and WTCN became the NBC affiliate. (KMSP was left an independent.) In the early '80s, we got two new UHF channels, 29 (KITN) in the Twin Cities and 41 out of St Cloud (KXLI, geddit?). Thanks to advances in technology, you didn’t have to fiddle with your tuner and these came in just fine. I watched them a lot (probably too much) in college because they carried many of my favorite old shows (e.g., The Avengers).
I also started watching channel 2 a lot after they began showing things like The Ascent of Man and Monty Python in the '70s. I think the first time I heard the phrase PBS was in '75 during one of their interminable pledge drives. These always featured Jack, the station manager, and were actually quite funny on occasion (though not intentionally).
(reminds me - there were several networks swaps in Green Bay)
I also remember when channel 32 (Fox) came on air
In La Crosse (before the digital conversion), ABC, FOX and PBS were UHF. Rochester NBC had a translator in La Crosse (still does, but different frequency)
(which is good, since NBC in Eau Claire is iffy reception)