Quote:
Originally Posted by wa2ise
New York City had lots of VHF channels, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13 so no real need for UHF, and as the few UHFs were in Spanish, English only speakers never missed UHF. Orginally 13 was a commercial station, but they folded and someone bought it out and made it an educational channel in the early 60s. So forget about trying to set up an English language UHF channel, if a VHF channel couldn't cut it. Market saturation. Until the mid 70s when New Jersey set up its own educational network of stations on UHF.
Speaking of educational TV, someone provided my grammar school TV sets in every classroom. Which the teachers never used, as educational TV never taught anything that would show on the annual achievement tests we had. Testing ala "No Child Left Behind" is nothing new...
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In grade school, we had TVs that were moved from one classroom to another as needed. Channel 25, WVIZ, was the only educational station in Cleveland at the time (mid-'60s). In junior high we had TVs that were also more or less permanently set on WVIZ, except when the teachers wanted us to see shows like the Today Show or the local news on channel 3 (WKYC, NBC) in Cleveland, as part of our world-affairs classes. These TVs were not connected to a MATV (master antenna TV) system as my junior high school did not have one that worked worth a darn -- we watched channels 3 and 25 on rabbit ears, but I don't remember what the large RCA set in our world-affairs class had for UHF; probably a loop antenna that worked little better (at the time, I lived in an eastern Cleveland suburb that was at least 30 miles from all Cleveland television stations and got very poor reception of WVIZ on indoor antennas).
When I got to senior high school, there were TV jacks in every room, connected to both the master TV antenna installation and a closed-circuit TV system. The televisions in the classrooms were mostly used for viewing videotaped programming over the in-house CCTV system; however, I don't recall these sets ever being tuned to local Cleveland network stations, even for news or the educational station (NET, National Educational Television, at that time [early 1970s], now PBS).
For WA2ISE: I remember seeing a picture in Popular Science magazine years ago of a group of TVs, all tuned to New York City's channel 13 showing a test pattern -- only then the station was known as WNDT and was probably
not an NET affiliate at that time.
I looked up WNDT on Google a while back, and discovered that the station was in fact a commercial station (New Dimension Television, hence the NDT in the call sign) in its early years. I don't recall if the article mentioned when WNDT became a public-TV station, but when it did it changed calls to WNET -- for National Educational Television, but remained on channel 13.