Quote:
Originally Posted by DavGoodlin
I mean to say that TV sets sold in this county/area (had only one local VHF-8) so they were ordered with UHF option from factory as soon as that was available, prior to them being required as standard starting in 1964.
The most popular UHF antenna was a corner reflector bowtie or a flat bowtie (not 4 bay). There are many 65+ Y.O. UHF antennas still on rooftops as part of the original installation, not added later on mast below the VHF antenna. https://www.bing.com/images/search?v...t=0&ajaxserp=0 |
My family's first new TV was a 1965 Silvertone all-channel set. We were some 30+ miles from the first and only (at that time) UHF station in Cleveland (PBS channel 25) and did not have a decent UHF antenna on the TV at the time (in fact, our first UHF antenna was a wire loop connected to the UHF antenna terminals). Channel 25 came in all right in our area, but not well; in fact, the station was just barely visible through a hail of snow on the TV screen. It was just as well, I suppose, since this station was an NET (National Educational Television) affiliate, the programming of which was meant mainly for the schools in northeastern Ohio; the station signed off at midnight every night during the week. The station did not go to 24-hour programming until quite a while (read a decade or more) later, after it became an affiliate of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the mid to late 1970s.
BTW, I did not realize, until I read your post, that your area only had one VHF TV station in the '60s-'70s. That part of the state of Pennsylvania must have been "in the middle of nowhere" as far as TV reception was concerned in those days, with little or no programming available on TV, even from Erie or whatever city was closest to your area at the time. Erie only had one VHF station, WICU-TV (NBC) channel 12, for years until channel 24 (WJET-TV, ABC) and channel 35 (WSEE-TV, CBS), not to mention WQLN-TV (PBS, then NET) channel 54, arrived in the city.
I can remember actually seeing WICU-TV's programming in northeastern Ohio during VHF band openings in the late '60s-early '70s, when I lived in a Cleveland suburb. The station, being an NBC affiliate, practically duplicated the programming of Cleveland's NBC station, WKYC-TV on channel 3; channels 24 and 35 in Erie likely duplicated the programming of our channels 5 and 8, ABC and (at the time) CBS (this was, of course, before that big TV network swap in Cleveland between channel 8 and channel 19, where 8 took Fox and 19 took CBS in the mid-1990s, IIRC).