[Jeffhs]

Chuck, I was browsing your site a few minutes ago and found a picture of a GE UHF translator (what was later known as a converter). Its design struck me as unique, if odd, in that the channel selector dial was not marked 14-17-25-35-46-56-72-83 (for example) as all later converters were, but this one had the channel frequencies marked on the dial (starting at 470 MHz and ending at 890--this was back in days when the UHF TV band was still 70 channels).

I ask you, who could remember (or even knew) the channel frequencies of the various UHF stations in any city (the few towns that had UHF TV in those days, such as Youngstown, Ohio, Fort Wayne and possibly Evansville, Indiana, et al.)? Continuous VHF TV tuners were difficult enough to adjust for proper pictures; at least their dials were marked 2-13 (with FM between channels 6 and 7 on most DuMont sets), so there was no guessing as to which channel your TV was tuned to. Why didn't GE mark the dial of their translator with the actual UHF channel numbers, rather than forcing people to remember channel frequencies which are generally known only to station engineers and some dyed-in-the-wool TV hobbyists? Ordinary viewers, after all, don't care about such things as the frequency range of, say, channel 14. Technically-savvy folks know that's 470-476 MHz, but those numbers mean nothing to the average viewer.

Later converters and continuous tuning dials on all-channel TVs were calibrated in channel numbers, which, IMO, made a lot more sense to the average viewer who has little or no knowledge of or interest in how a television set works. After all, most ordinary people don't know or care how radios work, let alone TV. The idea of sending sound over the airwaves is beyond the understanding of most folks outside electronics; how sending pictures (video to us AKers) over the air is possible is totally baffling to most people as well. I know people who don't care how their color TV picture looks, as long as it's there--even if there is no color at all, or if whatever color is there is totally wrong. These folks were the ones for whom today's completely automatic TVs, completely devoid of front-panel controls except for one row or column of pushbuttons and functions accessible only by means of onscreen menus, were made (I don't know that most people even realize these menus even exist). The menus are accessible via a menu button on the front panel or the remote, but I would guess most people don't fiddle with them--they just accept the default settings out of the box and say "whatever" if someone tries to explain the menus to them.

I also think it is a wonderful idea that all service controls on modern TVs, except for focus and, in some cases, the G2 level (as on my own RCA CTC185), are hidden in service menus, accessible only to service personnel who know the access codes to get to them. Many televisions were heavily damaged or even destroyed (or at least incurred damage which was expensive to repair, especially in the case of color sets) in the old days of potentiometer controls along the rear apron of the chassis when viewers would go turning them at random, often "just to see what happens." Small children are notorious for this kind of stunt, but curious adults have been known to do the same thing--as I said, often causing serious damage to the chassis or CRT, which in turn leads to costly repairs. Moving the service adjustments to hidden menus eliminates this problem; the fact that the focus and G2 controls are on the back of the set will not lead to nuisance service calls either, since these controls can be adjusted only by means of a special tool available only to service personnel.

Most televisions made in the last decade or so (even the cheap offshore brands with names no one ever heard of), and all current production sets, are about as close to tamperproof as one can get. There is almost no way an average viewer can damage a modern TV by fooling with the service controls (except in cases where a person guesses the access codes simply by the luck of the draw, but then again there's the code or button sequence required to access the menus in the first place, which is generally unknown to the average person, so even this is practically unheard of).

For most viewers, however, since the service menus are invisible and, in most ordinary cases, inaccessible to them, there is almost no chance of anyone but a qualified service person altering the settings of the service controls. This is a system which should have been in place (its analog equivalent, anyhow, later followed by digital of course) from the beginning; it would have saved TV repair personnel much time responding to nuisance service calls, necessitated by viewers having fiddled with rear-panel controls they had no business adjusting in the first place.