Quote:
Originally Posted by Polaraligned
Wow. I never heard of this. How could they issue a 4 year halt to new station construction when TV was just getting off the ground?
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The TV VHF band was planned based on pre-WWII RF propagation data. Pre-War VHF was bleeding edge technology that was basically the domain of HAM radio, and sun spot tropospheric propagation boosting was at a minimum. Post WWII sun spot activity was at a high peak...TV stations that were only supposed to cover a 50 mile radius were regularly getting cleanly DX'ed 1000 miles away by John Q (I'm not trying to DX) public...
Because of this stations on the same channel that the FCC thought they placed far enough apart to avoid interference were interfering with each other like mad. Adding more stations when the band was behaving outside of predictions and interference problems were rampant would only throw fuel on the fire.
The FCC froze new licenses while researching the band and solutions...The solution landed on was UHF.