UHF TV: Fog Over Portland 1953 Zenith Radio Corp; Ultra High Frequency Television
more at
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Tells the story of the first commercial
UHF television station,
KPTV,
Channel 27, in
Portland, Oregon, and of the advantages of TV sets made by the
Zenith Radio Corporation.
Public domain film from the
Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/
3.0/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UHF_television_broadcasting#United_States
UHF television broadcasting is the use of ultra high frequency (
UHF) radio for over the air transmission of television signals.
Soon after the introduction of television broadcasting, the demand for additional stations in urban areas motivated the allocation of UHF frequencies to provide additional non-interfering channels. The high demand for mobile radio services and the difficulty of covering a large area with powerful transmitters at these frequencies has led to reallocation of television channels to other services.
Digital television often uses UHF channels, providing additional programming content in the same bandwidth
...
United States
On
December 29, 1949,
KC2XAK of
Bridgeport, Connecticut, became the first UHF television station to operate on a regular daily schedule. The first commercially licensed UHF television station was
WWLP in
Springfield, Massachusetts; however, the first commercially licensed
TV station on the air was KPTV, Channel 27, in Portland, Oregon, on
September 18,
1952. This TV station used much of the equipment, including the transmitter, from KC2XAK.
American television broadcasting, which began experimentally in the
1930s with some regular commercial broadcasting in just a few cities (such as
New York and
Chicago) in
1941, was originally allocated (by the
Federal Communication Commission – the
FCC) broadcasting channels solely in the
VHF (
Very High Frequency) band. All VHF TV channels except channel 1 through 13 had been removed from the FCC allocation list during
World War II and those frequencies re-allocated for military use, leaving thirteen channels as of May
1945...
After VHF
Channel 1 was re-allocated to land-mobile radio systems in 1948 due to radio-interference problems, a mere one dozen TV channels remained. These were found to be not enough to serve the needs of television broadcasting as it grew nationwide during the latter
1940s and the
1950s...
With a grand total of 106 VHF stations broadcasting by the end of the 1940s in the
U.S., problems with interference between stations due to some overcrowding of stations were already becoming apparent in the densely populated areas, such as the eastern mid-Atlantic states (New York,
Pennsylvania,
New Jersey,
Delaware,
Maryland, and
Connecticut) and
Southern California. In 1949, the
Federal Communications Commission stopped accepting applications for licensing new stations (a freeze that lasted until 1952) in order to address questions such as the allocation of additional channel frequencies, and also the selection of an electronic system for color television.
Allocating more of the VHF band (30 to
300 MHz) by moving existing radio communication users off this band seemed to be impossible...
When the
Freeze ended in 1952, the television industry exploded. It grew from the
108 pre-Freeze stations to more than 530 in 1960...
The majority of the 165 UHF stations to begin telecasting between 1952 and
1959 did not survive. Under the
All-Channel Receiver Act, FCC regulations by
1965 would ensure that all new TV sets sold in the U.S. had built-in UHF tuners that could receive channels 14–83. In spite of this, by
1971, there were only about 170 full-service UHF broadcast stations nationwide...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenith_Electronics
Zenith Electronics LLC is an
American brand of consumer electronics owned by
South Korean company
LG Electronics.
The company was previously an American manufacturer of radio and television receivers and other consumer electronics, and was headquartered in
Glenview, Illinois...
The company was co-founded by
Ralph Matthews and
Karl Hassel in
Chicago, Illinois as Chicago
Radio Labs in
1918 as a small producer of amateur radio equipment. The name "
Zenith" came from ZN'th, a contraction of its founders' ham radio call
sign, 9ZN. They were joined in
1921 by
LCDR Eugene F. McDonald, and
Zenith Radio Company was formally incorporated in 1923. Zenith introduced the first portable radio in 1924, the first mass-produced AC radio in 1926, and push-button tuning in
1927. It added automobile radios in the 1930s... The first Zenith television set appeared in
1939, with its first commercial sets in 1948...