Originally Posted by Jeffhs
The FCC declared that all television receivers made and marketed in the U. S. on or after April 30, 1964 must have UHF as well as VHF tuners. This was to ensure that all new TVs made after that date would receive the then-new UHF stations, although Blonder-Tongue and other manufacturers continued to manufacture and market UHF converters for some years after that date for those viewers with VHF-only sets (there were plenty of those still in service well into the 1970s, so B-T, et al. were in business well after the UHF mandate).
I mentioned in my post that all-channel TVs may have been available in television markets that had only UHF stations, but neglected to say that some of the first UHF stations in large cities were started in the 1950s on high UHF channels (do a search by call sign for UHF channels in any major city for more information on this), so there was a market for all-channel sets back then -- even in cities such as Chicago, New York, et al.
However, not all TV markets in this country had UHF television stations in the 1950s. I live near Cleveland and remember when the first UHF station came to the area. The year was 1965 and the station was WVIZ-TV on channel 25, an affiliate of what was then known as NET (National Educational Television), now PBS (Public Broadcasting Service). The Cleveland area did not get its first commercial UHF station (WUAB, channel 43, then an independent station, now NE Ohio's MyTV affiliate), however, until three years later.
But I digress. The point is that from 1948 (the date of the initial sign-on of WNBK-TV, the NBC affiliate in Cleveland, then on channel 4) until 1965, Cleveland had no UHF television stations whatsoever; the nearest one was in Akron, Ohio, some 60 miles southwest, and not receivable anywhere in the Cleveland area, so most residents of the Cleveland metro area had no use for UHF until WVIZ arrived in '65 -- and even then there were reception problems galore, as at the time the station was broadcasting with just one megawatt (one million watts) of power. I grew up in an eastern suburb of Cleveland which the signal did not reach worth a plugged nickel, unless large rooftop antennas were used. I remember trying to receive the station with a UHF loop antenna on my family's Silvertone 17" all-channel portable, and seeing mostly snow -- with a faint WVIZ test pattern showing in the background. The situation did not change until we got cable, in 1982.
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