Quote:
Originally Posted by mstaton
I noticed that the UHF tuner only goes to 68. Nice set!
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The FCC reassigned channels 70-83 to land-mobile use in 1970. By the '80s most UHF television tuners stopped at channel 69, but all sets with UHF tuners made prior to about 1985 still tuned the full UHF band, 14-83; some people used the upper range to listen in on cordless telephones, before they were moved to the gigahertz range for security reasons.
I am only guessing as to when the upper 13 channels were eliminated from the tuning range of most UHF TV tuners, but '70 is the figure that sticks in my mind. Both my CRT TVs (1999 RCA/Thomson and 1995 Zenith Sentry 2) have tuners that only run from 14 to 69, so by the mid-'90s (perhaps even a bit earlier) the 55-channel UHF tuning range had become standard. The move to DTV chopped up the UHF band even more. Today, there are only about 35 channels remaining for those few UHF stations still operating under the NTSC standard.
I understand, however, from reading on broadcastingandcable.com and other TV-industry websites, that low-power and translator stations will be required to switch to digital by some time in 2015, if they haven't done so already. This will eat up what few analog UHF channels there are left, so that the entire UHF television band (channels 14-51, IIRC) will be digital by that time. We will just have to wait and see what becomes of the FCC's plan to "repack" U. S. TV channels; this plan, if and when it comes to fruition, may force the few DTV stations presently operating on VHF channels to move to UHF. The VHF band has already been vacated by full-power TV stations, so moving the few remaining DTV stations to UHF would release the rest of the former VHF TV spectrum for use by other services; this, after all, is what the FCC had in mind when they decided to end analog TV in June of 2009.