The color TP's WTTG used were repro'd within this clip of color TP repros:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3yaJXo_N_0 (as seen between 0:42 and 0:51)
Maybe the electronic bars in the Metromedia era were pre-1976, as the first color TP shown in that set of repros was from that year.

I do remember those "CWTP's" (as WTFDA called it) on WTTG. The repros are good.

The funniest CWTP's I've seen were WFAN-14 in D.C. which never ran any color (except for black, white, and assorted shades of gray... but what they lacked in money, they made up for in ambition!) and WOLO-25 in Columbia, S.C. which put a comma between "South" and "Carolina" on the TP! (Yes, I have that one on VTR!)

Sorry for going off the tracks, but any way we could all see a screencap of that WOLO 'CWTP'? (And would it have been the '60's/'70's or '80's variant?)

It was the '60's version, which they were still using in the 1980's! Once I finish my recovery from two surgeries so far in 2012, and can start building my video/audio "rack", I'll u/l it somewhere.

Pity I don't have a VTR of WOLO's local news from my younger days. The credits included the developer of their slides. One Saturday, I saw a drugstore in the credits. Of the "original three" stations in Columbia, 25 (Originally WCOS-TV) had a "unique character" about itself. Maybe that came from the time someone tried cooling the klystrons with fresh water...

I now wish I'd recorded an oral history from my grandfather of early S.C. TV (and radio for that matter), from his perspective. He wanted a TV so bad in the late 1940's, that a bakelite tabletop Admiral made the trip from Atlanta in the rumble seat of his '31 Model A. It didn't matter that the nearest stations were hundreds of miles away. Or, that there was only one "regular" signal, WBTV-3, for the first five years he had a TV. But, he kept a log of what he did get. He also experimented with antennas. And, when TV came to Columbia, he got a Blonder-Tongue UHF converter to get a "noisy" (his term) WNOK-67.

When my grandfather passed away, among the things we found was an old ARRL Antenna Handbook and David Sarnoff's biography. (I still have both...) And, what of his "last TV", an RCA 19" B&W? (He always thought color TV wasn't "lifelike" enough.) It's in my house with an ATSC converter on it. Why? Because it still works! (Even though he took the back off of it as soon as he got it home!)

About 30 years after my grandfather passed away, my wife and I were finally cleaning out the last of the "stuff" from the two-car garage he designed and built himself as a 70th birthday present (his farm is now mine...), my wife and I first thought we'd found an old radio. It was that B-T UHF converter! I cleaned it up and donated it to ETF where it sits on display atop an appropriate TV.

Oh yes, when I was four years old, my parents "dumped" me on my grandparents so they could take a daytrip to Charleston. Since it was my grandparents' " city shopping day", that meant I had to go along. On that day, WIS was celebrating its 30th anniversary on air by having an open house and tours of both the radio and TV station. My grandfather wanted to see the place. So, he brought me along, and dragged my grandmother along. He would later say that I was more fascinated by the TV station than the radio. They even gave us a "special tour" where I got to see not just master control, but in the basement, a cold RCA rig, made redundant by the "new" tower. But, the old transmitter and tower remained for many years... just in case. When we got back to the farm, I made a make-believe TV camera and other pieces of equipment out of boxes. He wasn't upset when I used crayons on the kitchen wall and tried to do a "weather report". Nor, was he surprised as I got older when I started SWL'ing and BCB DX'ing and building seriously large antennas... with his help! He was prouder than my parents were when I got my FCC Radiotelephone ticket before I could legally drive a car. And, he lived long enough to hear me on a radio station with a real FCC license on the wall! (My first time as DX!) My regret is that he passed away three months before I got my first gig in the business.

In 2002, while in S.C. for a week, working on the farm, my wife, my then four-year-old daughter, and I spent a rainy day in Columbia. While there, we stopped by WIS-TV so I could drop off some video cassettes of what WIS-TV had looked like on-air 20+ years earlier. The mid-day weather guy (Joe Pinner) got a good laugh looking at himself from that long ago, We were then ushered downstairs to be the "studio audience" for the noon news. When Joe was doing the weather, my daughter was fascinated by seeing chroma-key live on-air, as opposed to a demonstration. My wife and I were scared that Joe was going to ask Rebecca to come on-set with him while he was on-air. Before the show, he had Rebecca memorize and say, "My great-great grandma watched WIS-TV, my great-grandparents watched WIS-TV, my grandparents watched WIS-TV, my parents watch WIS-TV, and so do I!" Fortunately, he didn't.

Equally fortunate is that despite following in my footsteps at the same age into that building at 1111 Bull Street, my daughter's career interest is in marine biology...

Sorry this got a bit off-topic. But, sometimes we're shy about how we got our interest in this!

wow! Common in the heyday of quad machines [two inch tape] were head clogs on-air. Techs or tape ops were quickly delegated to poor Freon into the canoe [head guide], keeping this up until the next commercial break where they'd get two minutes to clean the heads properly. Or for Australia's ABC [ad-free] that could go on until the end of the program!


teenage drug abuse