1953 Zenith Infomercial

High All,
I found a 1953 Zenith video at the Internet Archive advertising their 'turret tuner.' The video is entitled Fog Over Portland. It's 18 minutes long, free, and downloadable. It describes how Zenith's are superior in picking up UHF to the competitors. There is a shot of a porthole set. Thought you might enjoy a look-see.( https://archive.org/details/6407FogOverPortland01214405 )
Tinker

[Steve D.]

Tinker,

Interesting Zenith informercial. Looks like more hype than fact from Zenith. Fun to watch just the same. People sure dressed up to watch TV in those days. Even the kid is wearing a tie. Lol.

-Steve D.

[Phil Nelson]

I love the descriptions of mass hysteria -- people selling their houses or clear-cutting trees from the hillside in their desperation to receive UHF.

Phil Nelson

[jr_tech]

Did Zenith *actually* develop their own line of UHF strips to fit a Standard Coil tuner... or is the tuner shown *not* a Standard Coil turret tuner?

Interesting that a couple of "special UHF" antennas shown look to be VHF Yagis (the stacked pair and the one longer Yagi in the tree)... my guess that these are cut for channel 4&5 and pointed North for KOMO and KING in Seattle.

Anyway interesting to see.

jr

[dano]

I can't watch the video now because I'm at work, but I'm guessing from the title that the "Fog over Portland" refers to Portland Oregon. Going from my fuzzy memory, Portland got its first TV station in '52 around the time with the FCC was finally freeing up licenses and encouraging the use of UHF to ease some of the crowding and interference on VHF. This worked rather poorly and the station moved to VHF a few years later. If any of that is true, a set with a good UHF tuner would have had a huge advantage in that area.

[dieseljeep]

Originally Posted by jr_tech

Did Zenith *actually* develop their own line of UHF strips to fit a Standard Coil tuner... or is the tuner shown *not* a Standard Coil turret tuner?

Interesting that a couple of "special UHF" antennas shown look to be VHF Yagis (the stacked pair and the one longer Yagi in the tree)... my guess that these are cut for channel 4&5 and pointed North for KOMO and KING in Seattle.

Anyway interesting to see.

jr

I don't think Zenith used a Standard Coil tuner in there sets, until 1957 or so, usually in the lower priced sets. They were usually fitted with a UHF strip, if the area had only one UHF channel. It was a "Neutrode", as Standard Coil, called it. It used a 6CG8 and a 6BN4.
The all channel sets built before that used the big Zenith tuner, that had the gearing, that skipped every other number. It had a "U" position, between 2&13 like the rest and had their own UHF continuous tuner.
IIRC, Zenith made UHF strips, for their earlier two and three tube tuners.
I've never seen any, even though, Milwaukee had UHF, early in the game.

[atomicomatic]

Originally Posted by Steve D.

Tinker,

Interesting Zenith informercial. Looks like more hype than fact from Zenith. Fun to watch just the same. People sure dressed up to watch TV in those days. Even the kid is wearing a tie. Lol.

-Steve D.

People dressed up for just about everything, haha.

[Jeffhs]

That "Fog Over Portland" movie could have been about the problems TV viewers have today getting digital TV stations using OTA antennas.

Further, most people did not understand why they were having problems receiving UHF stations when they were new; all they did know was they either received the station behind a hail of snow, or they did not see the station at all. I remember when Cleveland's first UHF station went on the air in 1965. It was an educational channel on UHF "educational" channel 25 (that's what the announcer said when the station signed on and off), intended mainly for use by the schools of northeastern Ohio. I lived in an eastern suburb of Cleveland at the time and, using a loop of wire on the antenna terminals of a 17-inch Silvertone all-channel portable, all I could get was a very faint picture from that station. I suppose if the TV were hooked up to a much better antenna than that loop, the station would come in slightly better, but I didn't hold out much hope for home viewers trying to receive it. The elementary school on the next street over from my home at the time eventually erected a high-power VHF and UHF antenna on the roof of the building. I don't remember anymore if the reception was that much better; however, shortly thereafter, an amplified CATV antenna distribution system was installed, which downconverted UHF channel 25 to VHF channel 4. The TVs in the classrooms, all RCA metal-cased sets, had a notice written in large letters taped to the sides of the cabinets: "To get channel 25 tune to channel 4." I guess this was to improve reception of the UHF station in our far-suburban reception area. Where I live today, any TV would need a very high-powered amplified antenna to get this channel and Cleveland's other three UHF stations, as I live in a near-fringe area--well, at least it was near-fringe for NTSC analog; now, with ATSC digital, I can get all but two Cleveland TV stations "just like downtown", with a beautiful picture, using just a small ClearTV digital antenna on my flat screen TV. The two stations I do not receive with the antenna are, wouldn't you know it, the two stations whose DTV subchannels I watch the most; this is why I still have cable. I understand the problem is that these two stations broadcast on VHF DTV channels, which my ClearTV antenna does not receive very well, or more accurately at all.

Three years later, in 1968, Cleveland's second UHF station signed on, amid much fanfare. I'll never forget it. I was downstairs in my basement working on an old radio or TV (don't remember which anymore), with a radio tuned to a local station. Suddenly, an announcer broke in: "Turn on your TVs at once! Channel 43 is on the air!" Well, I dropped what I was doing, ran upstairs, and tuned the old Silvertone portable to channel 43. The station was on the air, all right--broadcasting a test pattern.

BTW, one of Portland's problems with their first UHF station, that the channel could not be seen in many if not most parts of the metropolitan area, could have been traced to the mountainous topography of that region. UHF signals are easily blocked or attenuated by obstructions such as mountains, so the use of a good UHF antenna mounted higher than the nearest mountain was a necessity if the channel were to be received well enough to watch or, in some areas, at all.

This is one thing a lot of non-technical people did not understand about UHF television reception; they wondered why they could not get their area's UHF station(s) simply using a loop on the UHF terminals on the back covers of their televisions. In many prime signal areas it may have been possible to receive the local UHF station(s) using just a loop or the UHF loops on all-channel rabbit ears, but for the best results, TV repairmen always recommended the use of a good outdoor antenna.

The same advice rings true today for DTV. In some areas it is entirely possible to get literally dozens of DTV channels, using a simple UHF indoor antenna such as the Clear TV or Clear Cast digital antenna. However, again, for the very best results the advice almost always is to use an outdoor antenna on a rotor, mounted as high and in the clear as possible. The rotor is not absolutely necessary unless you are in an area, such as greater Washington, DC, in which TV stations can be received from several directions. I mentioned Washington because it is a rather unique reception area; with a good antenna on a rotor, one can receive stations from both Washington and Baltimore, although the ability to receive network stations from both cities doesn't mean much since you would be getting the same programs from two different stations at the same time--for example, the NBC Nightly News on channel 4 in Washington and channel 11 in Baltimore. Both cities are in the same time zone (Eastern Standard), so there is no real value in being able to get the news or other network programming on two different stations in two different cities. The only way this could be useful would be if you lived between two time zones and, for example, one station broadcast ABC news and another station, in another time zone, broadcast the same ABC newscast an hour earlier or later than the first one.

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by atomicomatic

People dressed up for just about everything, haha.

I read in one of the posts to this thread that, in TV's early days, some people dressed up to watch TV because they thought the person(s) on the screen could see them. This is ridiculous nonsense, of course, since television was then and is now a one-way medium (receive only). There is no way anyone on TV can see what the viewer is wearing.

Two-way cable hookups, of course, do not allow for this (thank heaven); rather, they are used mostly for on-air polls and the like, where the viewer's responses are entered on a keypad, mounted on a box connected by a cable to the set. I wouldn't be surprised if this too has gone wireless, with the advent of streaming video; the viewer could be watching a program on his or her TV, and also on a tablet. The questions asked on the show would be answered by means of entries on the tablet's keyboard; the tablet would then send the information back to a central point (the TV station) over a WiFi connection, and from there to the network. NBC uses this on some of its nighttime game shows for live viewer responses.