UHF Set-Top Converters for early UHF broadcasts

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by bgadow

I probably have a dozen UHF converters, from the old Mallorys, Blonder-Tongue, etc., up to some crappy later models. I have a couple small ones that attach to the back of the set. My wife brought one home for me just a couple weeks ago, someone at work gave it to her-I forget the brand but it's cheaper, from the 50s. Come to think of it, I probably have more than a dozen! Lotta good they will do me this summer! Out of the ones I've tried the old Mallory does the best. We were at a radio meet early in this decade and were browsing the silent auction tables; Kim put a bid in on it, thinking it was a radio! Around here the first real local station came on the air in '54, on UHF, and that made for brisk sales of converters. Surprisingly I don't see many sets from the 50s with built-in UHF; guess the option cost too much for most people.

Televisions with factory-installed UHF tuners were popular in areas that had (and still have) only UHF stations, such as Youngstown, Ohio, Fort Wayne, Indiana, Fresno, California, et al. In these cities a VHF-only TV would be useless unless the owner wanted to put up a huge antenna to get hit-or-miss reception from the nearest VHF stations, which could be 100 miles or more distant. The Youngstown area is a good example of what I'm talking about. The city is about 50-60 miles from Pittsburgh, which has channels 2, 4 and eleven, so a VHF-only set could receive stations from that area if a fringe-area antenna were used. It wouldn't have surprised me if many people in Youngstown got their TV reception from Pittsburgh in the '50s; I don't think Youngstown had any TV stations until the early fifties.

BTW, I've been wondering for some time how people in Federalsburg were able to receive, without cable, NBC television programming, since Salisbury only has channels 16 and 47. Was there ever an NBC affiliate in the city and if so, what happened to it? For that matter, where is the closest NBC station to Salisbury? It seems strange that they would have affiliates of two major networks but not the third, and I also think it isn't fair to force people to get cable if they want all three networks. Of course, these days with digital TV's multiplexed subchannels, channel 16 or 47 could carry NBC on one of those subcarriers.