Earlier quoted context omitted.
you tl;dr people are doing the lord's work. thank you
So instead of reading. --> fast paced audio.
I can read faster than any human can speak intelligibly. Also, it's much easier to skip ahead with text.
Whatever happened to Channel 1?
31–40 of 58 posts
Re: Whatever happened to Channel 1?
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably because by time cable came out, TVs were not manufactured that could tune to channel 1.
You didn't select cable channels with the tuner, though. My recollection is that you attached the cable box to the TV, tuned the TV to whatever channel was used to display hardline input, then selected channels on the cable box. Eventually cable-ready TVs came out with the cable selector built-in, but they still weren't using the radio tuning mechanism to select hardline cable channels.
> You didn't select cable channels with the tuner,
That heavily depended upon what the CATV provider did in your area. In many areas, TV channels 2-13 were transmitted verbatim on the coax, and could be tuned by a NTSC TV just by hooking up the coax (usually via an impedance matching transformer) to the antenna inputs of the TV.
This, of course, did create a 'leakage' problem. If the coax leaked somewhere, people without cable got ghosting. But worse, if the TV picked up some of the over the air signal (quite common actually) that was on the identical frequency, you got ghosting even with CATV.
Re: Whatever happened to Channel 1?
#33Project idea: Make a television system from vacuum tubes that broadcasts in the unlicensed home bands (2.4GHz & 5GHz). It could be either digital or analog, but it needs to use vacuum tubes. I'd like to see if such technologies would have been possible back in the 40's. Bonus points if they could transmit hi-def signals (1+ megapixels)
As the article mentions, Amateur Radio Operators have been active in Amateur TV (ATV) since day one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_television
The Hams don't use the Commercial TV frequencies of course, but transmit on the Amateur bands.
See the Wikipedia article for frequencies used (including the bands that you mentioned).
And yes, years ago the Hams built their own gear using vacuum tubes. These days they are building Digital and HD TV.
Do a search on "Amateur TV", it's still a big part of the hobby.
If you hunt around, you will find many books and constructional articles on ATV.
Oh, and to build your own Amateur TV station you'll need the appropriate grade of Ham license.
Re: Whatever happened to Channel 1?
#34tl;dr as more spectrum was used in the late 1940s a channel had to be freed up to deal with interference issues so they picked channel 1 and simply choose not to renumber. You'd think the article would explore why they didn't renumber, but nope. Legacy hardware and possible consumer confusion seem like the most likely speculation.
I would assume they didn't renumber because TV was becoming popular at this point and it would be a hassle.
Re: Whatever happened to Channel 1?
#35channel 1 in the United Kingdom
For the sort of "channels" discussed in the article, the UK hasn't used a channel 1[1] for TV since 1985, as VHF was only used for the older 405 line TV system. Newer 625 line analogue TV[2] was and digital terrestrial TV is UHF only in the UK, and UHF channels are numbered from 21. For convenience most TVs mapped the channels onto buttons 1/2/3/4 for analogue but behind the scenes they would be something like channe…
Indeed, if you're in the UK and you set up a new analogue TV (a few years ago when the transmitters still ran) or a new digital TV (still possible now obviously), the first thing it does is scan the entire UHF and VHF bands detecting channels, assigning them channel numbers in the order it finds them (analogue) or by some other algorithm I don't know (digital - it's not as simple as just a fixed number).
Re: Whatever happened to Channel 1?
#36Answer starts in the last section. 1946-1948 Manufacturers quickly began producing television receivers, transmitters, antennas, etc. New television stations were built all over the United States. The FCC had identified the top 140 metropolitan cities and assigned each at least one channel; a total of 400 were to be allotted. The FCC received many more applications than it had available channels. In an effort to prov…
Apologies - I fat-fingered a mobile downvote instead of the upvote you deserved. Aargh.
Re: Whatever happened to Channel 1?
#37channel 1 in the United Kingdom
For the sort of "channels" discussed in the article, the UK hasn't used a channel 1[1] for TV since 1985, as VHF was only used for the older 405 line TV system. Newer 625 line analogue TV[2] was and digital terrestrial TV is UHF only in the UK, and UHF channels are numbered from 21. For convenience most TVs mapped the channels onto buttons 1/2/3/4 for analogue but behind the scenes they would be something like channe…
Not criticising your facts but [2] would be better rewritten as:
>BBC1 and ITV started in 1969 when they introduced colour.
=>
>BBC1 and ITV started broadcasting on UHF/625 in 1969 when they introduced colour.
Also, my own 2c, BBC1 and ITV continued broadcasting on VHF/405 simultaneously until 1985.
Re: Whatever happened to Channel 1?
#38I thought for a moment this was about the propaganda "Channel 1" I was forced to watch every morning in home class in my Texan middle-school.
Re: Whatever happened to Channel 1?
#39Australia even had channel 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATV_(Australia)
As did Public Enemy:
http://genius.com/Public-enemy-she-watch-channel-zero-lyrics
Re: Whatever happened to Channel 1?
#40Another historical note, within a locality it was almost always the case that only every other broadcast channel was used, e.g. 2-4-6-8... or 3-5-7-9... to reduce interference from adjacent channels.
That's why old VCRs, DVD players, home computers, and other devices that used an RF modulator to connect to a TV display could typically be set to transmit on channel 3 or channel 4, because one of those was almost always unused in a given area.