[Jeffhs]

All-channel televisions (with the UHF tuner factory installed) such as the Hallicrafters set under discussion here were popular in the '50s in areas with only UHF stations, such as Fort Wayne, Indiana, Fresno, California, Youngstown, Ohio, et al.

"Intermixing", i.e. putting UHF stations with VHF stations in hetetofore VHF-only cities, however, did not begin until some time in the early sixties; an example is Cleveland, Ohio, which got its first UHF station, NET (now PBS) WVIZ channel 25, in 1965. Prior to 25's startup, Cleveland had only three VHF channels, 3, 5 and 8. Channels 43, 61, and 55 eventually joined 25, bringing the number of channels in Cleveland to seven. An eighth channel, WOIO 19, went on the air in 1985 and eventually affiliated with CBS, after a stint as a FOX affiliate. The FOX affiliation went to channel 8, which had been a CBS affiliate over 40 years.

The early UHF stations often were on channels 69 and higher (this was decades before channels 70 through 83 were reassigned to land-mobile in 1970). An example is Lima, Ohio's WLIO-TV. This station is an NBC affiliate and began its operations, if memory serves me (I read the following on the station's web site some time ago) above channel 70. It now transmits over channel 35. At least one of Youngstown's original UHF stations began its operations as well on a channel very near the top of the band.

While these stations may have been on high UHF channels when they initially signed on, however, later on most of them (such as the Ohio station I just mentioned) had moved to lower channels by the late '50s and certainly by the '60s. One reason for this was the eventual reassignment to land-mobile of the thirteen channels above 70, although an experimental airborne-television project in the '60s used channels 72-76. This was the Midwest Plan for Airborne Television Instruction (MPATI) project. An entire educational TV station, including the transmitter and antenna, was put into an aircraft which circled a fixed pattern over Montpelier, Ohio and was supposed to cover Ohio, Indiana and, I believe, Michigan or Kentucky.

The experiment was a good idea on paper, but it didn't last long once UHF caught on with the public and more stations went on the air. I remember when NET affiliate WVIZ first went on the air in Cleveland. I lived in an eastern suburb of the city 33 miles from the stations at the time, and reception of this channel on our Silvertone all-channel portable TV, using an indoor antenna, was terrible. WVIZ was running only one megawatt ERP at the time, however, so this would have accounted for its woefully poor coverage of the east side of Cleveland and beyond unless a very good outdoor antenna was used. The geography of the area in which I grew up played into this as well; there is an area of Lake County, very near the border of the Cleveland suburb of Euclid, Ohio known as the "Euclid shelf", in which reception of certain Cleveland television and FM stations (including channel 25) on antennas is very poor. The elementary school I attended from 1961-'68, which was only a 15-minute walk from my home at the time, at first tried to receive the local NET affiliate on rabbit ears, with very poor results. That problem was corrected several years later, when an amplified signal-distribution system was installed. It was fed by two antennas, VHF and UHF, on the roof of the building; this cleared up the reception problems once and for all. The school was converted to a senior-citizens center in the early '80s and torn down just a year or so ago, so it never had cable (our area didn't get cable service until 1982, by which time the conversion of the school building had long since been completed).