Wacky old antennas

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by bgadow

The Baltimore & DC markets had what they called "Super TV" with movies starting every night at 8pm. I would tune in to the scrambled signal (on WNUV-54) quite often as a novelty. Sometimes you could almost sorta see something! My father had a hunting buddy that subscribed. One night we all went over there for a party, to see some mob movie. I don't know what it was but there were so many "F-bombs" that my sisters and I had to stay in the back of the house. It didn't matter much because the reception was so poor that they never did make it through the whole thing. I wish I had the TV they owned, a very late Philco-Ford console.

"F-bombs"? I thought the FCC had rules about using that sort of language on television, even in the 1980s when "subscription" TV was popular and a couple decades before the flap involving a national talk-show host that resulted in the FCC really putting the brakes on indecent language on radio and TV. How on earth were you able to hear those words if the signal in your area was scrambled?

There was a subscription-TV station in Cleveland in the '80s, WCLQ-TV channel 61 (now WQHS Univision 61) that carried standard programming during the day, until about eight p.m., and subscription TV at night, all night. For the subscription service, the station had connections with a company that made decoders for the station's STV signal which it leased to interested subscribers for a monthly fee, and even special antennas cut specifically for the channel 61 frequency range. I saw at least one of those in my old neighborhood at least into the 1990s, long after STV folded in the Cleveland area.

The subscription TV service went off the air some time in the late '80s, and the local affiliate in Cleveland became WQHS-TV, an affiliate of the Home Shopping Network. This lasted a few years (I don't remember exactly how long), then HSN (now QVC) went to cable and WQHS became (and is to this day) a Spanish-language Univision affiliate. Digital channel 61.1 nowadays, of course. I believe Detroit's WXON-TV channel 20 also had a subscription-TV service called "ON" TV, which may have lasted as long as the Cleveland affiliate did.

I'm not sure what happened to channel 20 after that, although I think it became a MyTV affiliate and changed its callsign to WMYD (My [TV] Detroit). During its WXON-TV days, and before I got cable, I used to be able to get the station in suburban Cleveland in the summers, along with most other Detroit stations -- including WGPR-TV 62 (now CBS affiliate WWJ-TV). I still get Detroit stations on an indoor DTV antenna, but since I now live (and have lived since 1999) within a mile of the south shore of Lake Erie I'm not surprised.