That's there actual slogan they do news for The Lehigh Valley where I live Lehigh and Northampton counties and a Bucks edition for the Bucks county viewers with a different news crew the ad he showed was the Allentown, PA Lehigh Valley team. They also own network in Philly called ME 2 they are sponsors of PPL Center and Dorney Park and have a weather cam on top of domenatior
Yep, as a clevelander, every handmedown video game console with an RF modulator was tuned to channel 4 when I got it. I never really gave this any thought until now.
I remember using channel 4 in NC, south of Raleigh. The signal was slightly cleaner, despite there being an existing channel 4 broadcaster, WUNC, in the broadcast area. There was a channel 3 broadcaster, WWAY, further away from me and closer to the coast.
Grew up in Cleveland myself - a couple times over the years, friends have questioned me why I flipped things to channel 4 out of habit. It’s because I didn’t want NBC News overlaid over my game of Sonic The Hedgehog!
@@matthewlwoodThat could have been to maybe channel 3 broadcasting at much higher power, and also there the complicated aspect to polarization of radio waves, which could differ between TV channels, but I always used channel 3, since being in Western NC, there was out of Greenville SC, WYFF NBC 4
Clicked on this video just because it was a topic I'd never seen covered before, and was surprised at the quality. Well researched, receipts shown, well written, clearly spoken, and a few jokes without getting too wacky and keeping to the point. Very good video! All we need now is to get you a bit of a better mic lol
I grew up in Maine in the 90’s and knew of WCSH broadcasting on radio. Many of our cars bottomed out at 87.9 (digital tuning radios) and I never understood why they’d put it on a low frequency. It wasn’t until adult years I realized it was the same audio transmission for the TV and learned this “feature” was a free side effect of this overlap.
In southern NH, didn't get WCSH on cable, but could sometimes get it over the air, and it came in better audio-only on 87.7. Sometimes WCSH and WLNE Providence would both be battling it out LOL
This is because Channel 6 already has an allocated FM frequency/carrier (87.75), which is why you can listen in on 87.7. It’s not a rebroadcast, but the audio is from the TV signal itself.
3:25 Manually tuning in channels on the VCR. God I remember that, and even though I was only a kid, I was the only one in the household that understood how this worked. Worse yet, the Cable channels weren't entirely in order. It would go through channels 2-6, 14 to 22?, 7-13, then 23 forward. Yeah, explain that to your mother LOL!
@@steviebboy69 but only 2/7/9/10 worked until uhf came - that was doubled up on 0 i think for a few years ( sbs was unique as it was both uhf and vhf ) UHF started transmission in 1980 Side note my C64 in the day worked OK, but it worked better when you wrapped the co-axial lead in silver foil( hmm or was it the standard older style tv flat twin ribbon VHF ) We discussed it back in the day at work, then one day some one bought in their C64 and sony colour tv, turn it on and setup a game, if was ok - lets call it 10% grainy - then while the game is running on the title screen or the game running, wrap 2 or 3 layers aluminum cooking foil on the tv out wire and bam - a better picture
It's funny because last week I was on vacation and picked my copy for $1. Then my HDMI cable failed... If only I pirated it and had a coax, I would have been OK.
This is hands down, one of the most fascinating videos ive watched in awhile. Tv channel 6 bleeding into fm radio blew my mind. I didn't even know what i didn't know. Im gonna sub. This dude earned it with this one.
And as you alluded to, the interference of non shielded machines like the original Apple II, especially affects those low VHF channels like 2, 3 and 4. So the modulator that chose to use 32-34 was a nice touch to avoid interference and it was a shame it wasn't adopted as a universal standard in North America.
My dad had a TRS 80 coco and would wrap the expansion cards in aluminum foil to block a lot of the interference put off by them that would mess with the picture.
@@christo930If it was Channel 31 back in the analog NTSC days then yes I believe it would have broadcasted on the same frequency as an RF modulator that used Ch. 31. Now that the digital TV (ATSC) switchover has occurred, this Ch. 31 might still be tunable by entering Ch. 31 on the remote of a digital ATSC TV or tuner/converter box awhile actually being broadcast on a different frequency. This is all done via virtual channel assignments where what was analog UHF Ch. 31 back in the analog days now can be assigned to any frequency on digital ATSC tuners while the TV viewers can continue to just enter 31 on their remote as they always did. The TV handles actually tuning to the right frequency based on data sent by the TV station when you initially scan for TV stations. The TV stores the real channel location it’s broadcasted on and the virtual channel number the viewers used to tune in the channel. So Ch. 31 might actually be Ch. 13, but the TV is told to assign it virtual ch. 31. This means that even if the FCC moves channel from 13 to say 26, for example, the viewer can always tune in the Ch. 31 and get the channel provided the rescan their channel after the frequency moved (or spectrum repacking as it officially called). This is much like a shortcut or alias in Windows, Mac, or Linux where the user needn’t know where the actually file or program/app is stored as the shortcut/alias handles that for them.
The VHF/UHF situation was very confusing for a Brit coming to the US without anyone to explain it, and the 3-4 modulator split was also confusing. Thanks for clearing it up!
I have at least one TV, bought here in the U.K, which scans through the entire VHF band (and of course doesn't find anything) each time you tell it to do a retune.
My Nintendo came with a channel selector built in. Does not require any splitter. And is not confusing at all. If you can work a TV you can work a splitter.
AFAIK, Soviet radios also commonly had tuning scales marked in wavelengths, even for the FM band, and even though contemporary tuners from other Eastern Bloc countries were all marked in frequencies.
Kinda surprised the Soviets ended up with a split TV band plan like the States rather than just a contiguous block, always figured that split was just a quirk of how it evolved here.
West central Ashtabula county fella up here. I get Youngstown, Cleveland and Erie.. But Youngstown is, by far, the strongest. Fun fact, 27/33 is physically channel 31 now (WKBN/WYTV share their channel), and 21 is now physically 33.. WYFX (not listed) is physically channel 32 (and is on the WYTV/WKBN tower). (Cue "the more you know" music)
3 was never a "nonstation" channel. Just not many people are able to see channel 3 but their TVs still have it. The way you are wording everything it seems you are one of the few that actually has a station on channel 3.
Interesting info about 87.7FM, had no idea it was a byproduct of TV airwaves and not a deliberate secondary broadcast. I remember getting excited that we could listen to the Simpsons in the car from GlobalTV, channel 6 out of Toronto
It's 1988 and we're sitting in my car in Montreal. We're saying goodbye to a friend who's moving. We were parked by the bus stop, waiting for the last bus, all feeling a bit melancholy but trying to be cheerful. We partook of a goodbye joint and, after a while, just scanned the radio. 87.7 FM was playing CBC channel 6's audio. It was after 11 pm, and the station ran reruns of "Welcome Back Kotter". We turned our focus and realized it was the episode where Vinnie decides to pretend to be a drug addict to catch a drug dealer who's been visiting the school. We came in just as they were coming up with a plan. Suddenly, John Travolta gives the line, "I know how to act like those drug people, 'Gimme drugs! Gimme drugs!' ". We completely fell apart laughing. There was our childhood, the things we used to find hilarious, almost a closing chapter. It made things easier; the laugh will always be well remembered...as will 87.7 FM.
@@tsufordmanWKMG now, but in the 80s and 90s it was WCPX, the local CBS affiliate. I remember watching Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes after school at 4pm and tuning my stereo to pick up the audio. The “bass boost” was all the way up to push that ever-present background hum of the Enterprise. Didn’t know until now that it was a common feature for that wavelength.
Channel 36 wasn’t a UK only thing for RF modulators, but it was used basically in all of Europe. The VHF bands in Europe for television were a mess. When television was first introduced in the 1930s, every country had their own television system and their own frequency plans for TV channels, the UK used 405 lines, Germany used 441 lines, and later France 819 lines. Then after WW2, the 625-line system was introduced, which eventually became a standard, but the frequencies were still a mess. Western Europe and Eastern Europe used very different frequencies for VHF. They even had separate bands for FM radio, with Eastern Europe using 66-74 MHz, and Western Europe using the more familiar range of 87.5-108 MHz. With the introduction of UHF frequencies, all countries agreed on using the very same frequencies for TV channels, with channels 21-69 having the same frequency anywhere in Europe. Except for channel 36, which was used for radio astronomy, therefore no transmitters were allowed to operate on channel 36. And since UHF was adopted earlier in Europe, with high power networks broadcasting on UHF even from the early 1960s, there were a lot more TV sets that supported UHF compared to the US, so it was an obvious choice for RF modulators to use channel 36.
I also read that when Channel 5 was preparing to launch in the UK in the 90s, the operators of the upcoming channel were required to launch a massive retuning program since the frequencies for Channel 5 were also used by consumer VCRs as well, and the new Channel 5 could have caused interference with said VCRs. During pre-launch test broadcasts, the possibility was interference was mentioned and viewers had to call a number on the screen if their VCRs or other equipment suffered interference and to schedule a time for the affected equipment to be retuned.
I don't agree with you about the reason for higher popularity of UHF in Europe than in the US. Some European countries didn't have a nationwide UHF network until the 1970s, and UHF converter boxes for VHF-only TVs were also sold in Europe. Television in Europe was in most cases a government monopoly, so the priority was to cover most of the country as opposed to offering additional channels in the larger cities. As a consequence, the VHF bands became congested even though most Europeans could only receive one channel. When European countries launched their second and third television channels, as the VHF bands were congested, they could only go to the "new" UHF band. In the US on the other hand, most television was commercial, and the bigger cities had multiple channels on VHF, so UHF was used less intensively than in Europe, and the viewers had fewer reasons to buy a UHF-capable TV or converter.
Another advantage of the standardization of Channel 36 (and I think, later on, more channels in the high 30's), it was possible to design VCR's and other equipment that didn't need a TV/VCR switch like all VCR's in the USA. All VCR's just mix the incoming antenna or cable signal with their own modulated signal and send that to the output. You can tune your TV to any live TV channel(*) you want to watch or you can tune to channel 36 to watch the VCR. And if you have a second VCR or a video game or a computer, you just adjust their modulators to use channel 37 or 38 or 39 and daisy-chain your cable or antenna through all of them. (*) Of course most TV's in Europe didn't have channels but presets but that's another story.
Wow, great video. I'm 45 years old and just now put together some things I had wondered about as a kid, like why you could listen to some tv channels on the radio. I thought they just broadcasted for the radio for whatever reason and never really thought that they were all radio waves. I never knew that each channel on a TV corresponded to a radio frequency, but it makes sense. What I find curious, though, is for home consoles like the NES we always used channel 3, but our local TV stations were 3, 6, and 12. I don't remember ever having any interference, but we also had cable at that point and probably didn't have antennas hooked up.
NES when turned on it can take over the channel it is set for use. It didn't take me to turn 45 years old to figure these things out. You just have to start messing with the tech. Or read the instructions. You can also take over radio signals. I did when I was only 6 years old. It is not hard and old news.
I remember using channel 4 as preferred in my area for my VCR, SNES and N64 since channel 3 was taken. Getting a TV with not only one but two composite inputs and one S-video input made AV quality for my SNES and N64 much better. I never went back to RF since.
In Europe we didn't typically use channel numbers (in the radio tech meaning of this term) in daily conversations. Our TVs had presets like HiFi component radio tuners - and they had them since the 70s, sometimes even late 60s. We'd tune the available stations to those and never remember the physical channel numbers. There was no "standard" preset assignment, but a common pattern was: the state-operated channels first (and they were typically numbered on air as well), then a local public channel, then commercial channels, ordered roughly by their launch date. Those were initally hard press buttons, then soft touch controls, and eventually keypad entry from a remote - the OSD would display the preset number, NOT the channel number. In those remote+OSD times, most TVs would allow setting up "preset number 0", and that would be typically tuned to the VCR's modulator if a composite connection was not used. On older TVs with individual button presets, the VCR would be tuned to the last available preset or something like that - and as far as physical frequencies go, it was commonly on UHF, adjustable in the range of channels 30-39 or something like that, with channel 35 a common default (note that channel numbers don't align between Europe and US). But since the mid-90s, pretty much everything used SCART anyway. EDIT: And nowadays in the digital age, the preset numbers are typically provided by the cable/satellite company, or the organization that oversees terrestrial licenses. But still, they commonly start at 1, are more-or-less continuous, they have nothing to do with physical channels, state-owned channels are usually at the start of the list and for other channels the preset number usually also has nothing to do with on-air branding either. Those numbers are not consistent between providers, either.
And before hard-press buttons there were 12-way rotary switches with fixed channel settings, were they not? German makers switched from rotaries to pushbuttons as early as mid-1960s, although the small-tube portables used rotaries through the 1970s.
@@jmi5969 Yes, the earliest European TV tuners (and the dials that protruded from them) looked and operated much like their US counterparts. We just switched to push-buttons programmed to presets early on. By the way, in the days before computer control and OSDs, programming those presets looked much like the thing Kevin showed at 3:23. I guess that VCR model could have shared the tuner design between regions. And as to why we adopted presets - I think it has a lot to do with the popularity of the UHF band in Europe. In the earliest days of TV, most European countries only had one state-operated channel and that was it. When the "second channels" started rolling out across the continent, in a lot of areas they broadcast on UHF. UHF converter boxes like the ones Kevin shows at 2:42 were often called "channel 2 adapters" over here ("channel 2" referring to the second channel of the state broadcaster, not physical channel 2). Some countries like UK and France even used UHF pretty much exclusively, because VHF was used only for the legacy black-and-white-only, incompatible signals (405 and 819-line systems, respectively). In the 90s and early 2000s, you'd usually receive at most 2 channels on VHF and all the rest on UHF, and tuning on UHF with a dial when there are multiple stations there is just a pain - that's my guess as to why presets became the norm.
Exactly, when a TV gets setup all the available channels gets stored into the TV's memory and the only used reference is which channel is stored to which (preset) number. Older TVs usually only can store 0-99 presets (channels).
In my area (Veneto), there was a local channel called "Canale 68", which had its main analogue transmitter (and later, digital SFN network until those channels were removed from TV use) on channel 68. Maybe it was an holdover from the days before presets.
@@zsombor_99 My parents used to own a TV from the early 90s that only had presets 1 through 39, and the remote had separate buttons for 10, 20 and 30 (so you'd key just 3 for channel 3, and 10-then-3 for channel 13). But that was before the advent of Hyperband on cable which actually allowed for around 100 channels to be received simultaneously.
RF modulators for the European market could usually be tuned to any UHF channel, with 36 or 37 being the default. In the largest cities in Italy, the UHF band was so crammed you'd have been lucky to find any vacant channel to use! SCART was the most common AV connection anyway, being pretty much everywhere by the early 90s, with RF used as a last resort. I guess UHF was used over here because colour TVs in the UK couldn't tune VHF channels at all. The band was relegated to the legacy 405 line B&W system and abandoned in 1985, with France doing the same a year later.
@@RyanGonTV I guess in Ireland people would want to watch channels from both countries, and allocating them would need more frequencies. When I went to Dublin I was quite surprised to find that buttons 1 to 4 on the hotel TV were BBC1, BBC2, ITV, and Channel 4.
When Channel 5 TV went live here in the UK in 1997 it used UHF CH36 as that was the only channel available that wouldn't cause co-channel interference issues between transmitters. Even then it had to be transmitted at reduced power. As CH36 was used by most VCRs you had the option of an 'engineer' visiting your home to re-tune your VCR to another channel so it wouldn't interfere.
On the south coast we never got analogue channel 5 as it would have interfered with France. The allocation of four TV channels over the entire UHF band took a lot of planning. The Mendip transmitter was right at the top of the band while Rowridge was right at the bottom. With analogue TV receiving two transmitters at once would have given you severe ghosting at best.
Broadcast industry used BNC connectors for analog composite for decades, When Sony invented the D1 digital video system back in early 80's the choice of SDI was based on a smart and genius way from Sony to save companies who were switching to digital a lot of money from not having to recable their studios, Such high quality cables cost a lot of money plus the labor and down time to retrofit a studio. So Sony designed the SDI and put a serializer chip before the SDI out and another deserializer chip in the receiving device to send digital video frames, audio and other data such as teletext, caption, aspect ratio and other proprietary data in a single wire.
wish that would have been the case in the non-broadcast video world. Much of the computer display world used VGA and the RGB5 video standard (red green blue horizontal, vertical) Large crosspoint switchers and many other components were all built to this. You can actually deliver 1080p over it too. It would go over 100ft without boosters. Many installed AV systems used RGB5. HDMI however wouldn't travel that distance, and so we had a whole host of digital video over CAT6 cable come out in the 20teens. Each one having good points and bad points. *NOBODY* made an HDMI to RGB5 converter to use existing cable infrastructure though. We ended up having to rip out thousands of feet of expensive RGB5 cable and install shielded CAT6 for digital video formats
Most of the industry is moving to IP based systems over fibre, but a lot of applications still use SDI. Dejero was still using it exclusively up until very recently. We also use it for long runs. You can buy SDI-to-HDMI converter boxes for this. So if you want to run a monitor up to say a commentator booth, that's the easiest way to do it. And like you said, BNC cables support analogue video. So you just need a dirt cheap BNC-to-RCA adapter, since applications like a return feed for your hosts don't need to be high def. IDK if it's better than HDMI for home use, since you're not usually doing long runs. What we really missed out on in North America though was SCART. Europe had RGB output and audio in one cable long before component came along. I suppose it wasn't used here to maintain backwards compatibility, since RCA was the default for audio since the 30s. It's the same reason why broadcast HDTV is still 1080i, even though every TV made in the last 15 years supports a 1080p signal. So it still works with early CRT based HDTVs that only supported 1080i.
I see a lot of passive hdmi to vga adapters. Since that isnt physically possible, my guess is for those already wired projectors in conference rooms (run hdmi over the existing vga cable). There may not be rgb5 to hdmi, but there is rgb5 to vga, and then vga to hdmi @@audvidgeek
It should be noted that the FCC assigned channels to markets so that two adjacent channels wouldn't be used to avoid interference. The exception is with 4 & 5 because there is a 4 MHz gap in the end of channel 4 and the start of channel 5, so though the channel number is adjacent they can both be used in the same TV market. They also made sure nearby TV markets didn't have overlap on assigned channels. I grew up in the LA market and we had/have 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13, whereas San Diego had 6, 8, and 10 and Santa Barbara had 3, 6, and 12. Of course, all three markets had UHF channels, as well.
What’s interesting about Channel 6 in San Diego was that it was actually licensed to Tijuana, Mexico, yet targeted San Diego until its English-language operations were shut down in 2017. It also had a callsign of XETV, as Mexican callsigns all begin with X.
I'm guessing tuners were less precise in the early days, then? Because obviously interference between channel 4 and your VCR sending on channel 3 was no longer an issue by the time VCRs came along.
My local news station/ABC affiliate was on channel 3, so I and everyone else I knew was on channel 4 until connecting via RCA became more common. I only realized that 3 was more common elsewhere when I went to visit my dad in Utah, where 3 was unoccupied. I tried switching ours to 3 for a bit and that was a fun lesson on RF interference when my mom couldn't watch Lois & Clark while I was playing on the Sega Genesis!
Around here ABC is channel 4, nothing is on channel 3. We had channels on 4,5,7,9,10,11 and 13. As well as whatever UHF channels existed. (I can't say that I ever really used those as there didn't seem to be much on.
@@stevensuarez4843 Yup, I misremembered for my local station, it was a CBS affiliate, so my mom was probably watching Diagnosis: Murder, rather than Lois & Clark. In my defense, I was a young girl and am now in my 30s so it's been a while!
the original north american NES actually supported composite video, being the only input on it (though nintendo offered a RF modulator). what's interesting is that the famicom (the japanese nes) was RF only, but japan's version of the top loader was composite only (and thus was called "AV famicom"), weird that its US counterpart was RF only (basically going a step back).
The original US "toaster" Nintendos actually offer RF out on the back and composite video out on the side(for some godforsaken reason). Nintendo included an RF switchbox, but the modulator was integral to the system. (This was also true of the US Super Nintendo, as well as Sega's Master System and Genesis, and I believe even NEC's TurboGrafX.)
There was also Sharp's Twin Famicom (basically, a Famicom and a FDS in the same case) that had composite output out of the box, but what's interesting is that it has a DIN connector on the back for an optional RF modulator. When I'll add a NESRGB mod board in my Twin Fami (AN-500R) I'll repurpose the DIN jack to output RGB.
@@Alexis_du_60 Which is odd, actually. The TwinFami's 8-pin DIN connector is kinda overkill for an RF modulator. Composite video, mono audio, voltage, and ground is only four pins. Three if we use the DIN shell for ground.
I grew up in Tampa with WEDU on Channel 3 but we used it anyway for our NES. It’s the PBS station and not a super strong signal, so there wasn’t any interference. Plus if we were playing when we shouldn’t have been, we didn’t want the static noise from Channel 4 to give us away.
This explains something I've long since wondered abt. When I was a kid my Grandmother bought me a Nintendo used on channel 3, not long afterwards my Grandfather bought a rather large a powerful antenna for his television in his room. It had to actually be plugged into the wall 1 plug powered a motor that would turn and tune the antenna 1 was a booster and he could pick up far away channels. Not long afterwards I discovered if the Nintendo was on and I didn't matter if it was hooked to a television or not , you could watch the Nintendo on his television as long as it was turned to channel 3. Not long afterwards I discovered I could watch the neighbors Nintendo as well and any thing else they where using channels 3 or 4 for.
A fun fact about the use of CH36 in the UK, when Channel 5, the 5th terrestrial (I.E. not cable or satellite) channel first started test-broadcasting, people found they couldn't use their VCRs over RF properly any more, as, in a number of regions, Channel 5 used the CH36 frequency, so at their own cost, they had to send out fleets of "engineers" to adjust the potentiometer on the back of peoples' VCRs (you could adjust between CH32 to 40) and re-tune their TVs for them both to return VCR operation and to add the fuzzy, low-power mess that was Channel 5... :P
Wouldn't it have been cheaper and easier to just change the frequency of the station than to send men out to fiddle with every TV and VCR in the entire country? Or was that not possible for some reason?
@@BigCJ It was basically a case of "not enough room", as the UK has different regions which use their own transmitter sites, they have to avoid overlap between regions that could cause interference and 'ghosting' (where one signal overlays itself on another), and of course, 36 was about the only "clear" channel they had in the majority of the UK, but at the expense of having to advise people to adjust the modulators on VCRs or send someone out to do it, it was an absolute farce really, and given the low-power nature of Channel 5 in general, it wasn't really worth it as it was always fuzzy no matter what you did as they often used former Band I/III VHF sites, since converted to Band II FM radio-only, which by that point lacked the power availability...
How many different stations were there? Checking Wikipedia shows that UHF channels in the UK ranged from 21-69, somewhat similar to the US scheme of 14-69. The stepping between channels is bigger, too; 8MHz vs 6MHz. I'm surprised that there were ghosting issues if there were that many channels with that much space between them.
@@BigCJ Officially, we had 5 channels (BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel 4 & Channel 5) before the digital switchover, but, different regions of the UK had their "opt-out" systems, so they could broadcast local news after the national news had been on as well as local programming or have a different schedule to other regions, so they had to avoid overlap between regions with enough separation between them by having region 'A' in say the 21-32 range, then region 'B' in 56-69 range, then region 'C' further afield can then use the 21-32 range (this being a rough estimate, actual numbers differed), it wasn't perfect as some of the UK's topography allowed for signls from further afield to break through and cause ghosting (same channel, but with a delay making a very odd visual effect!), and in some cases even aid in having two different regions available to you to watch, so you could have say ITV Tyne Tees on one channel, and ITV Yorkshire on another owing to different frequencies used...
I see. So it's not a problem of different overlapping signals on the same frequency. I don't know why I thought that's what you meant, but think I get it now. You experienced all manner of delays and visual artifacting, yes? Here in the US, depending on how far from the transmitter you are, weak analog signals would get just get fuzzier, lose all color, or drop out entirely. I don't think I've ever seen the phenomena you describe except on digital TV! And signal overlap between markets is still a thing today, I myself have seen it! The local PBS station 30mi away not coming in? Switch to the one 75mi away in the mountains and it comes in clear as a bell for some reason.
"If you were unlucky enough to live in Philly or Cleveland..." That sentence works, regardless of whether you're talking about TV reception, or just generally.
At 8:55 one technical reason to not use channel 2 would be that the modulation on channel 2 would spill into the 6 meter ham band, And hams are very protective of their radio spectrum turf
And Hartford, CT...We had a broadcast channel 3 and it was very powerful, so much so, the local cable company put Channel 3 onto channel 2, because ingress would always screw up the picture on Channel 3 over the cable system if the connections weren't perfect...so they stuck the prevue channel there, since no one was watching it long enough to complain about ingress.
and in Stamford CT, we would watch ch 3 for CBS programming because WCBS ch 2 would leak into the cable system even that far away and interfere with itself.
Yup...I remember WFSB, then CBS, being on 3. Funny most VCR and games I had were 2 or 3 till Nintendo arrived and it was 3 or 4 which I thought was odd.
Thanks for this education, so much I didn't know. It blows my mind how complicated old tech was. I mean it's just insane how we figured all this stuff out so long ago.
It used to be hard to get good reception from video game consoles in my town on channel 3 and 4. It was okay up until about 1983 or so, as there was nothing broadcasting on those channels. However, the French CBC was broadcasting on Channel 2, and their signal was so strong, it bled over onto Channel 3. So Channel 4 was the best option. But in about 1983, they added CBS and PBS to our cable (prior to that, we only got ABC and NBC via a microwave broadcast from Bangor, Maine.) The CBS station was added to Channel 4, and it was so strong, it bled onto Channel 3, as well. I'm betting the cables that the cable companies used at the time didn't have the best shielding. At that time, before VCRs and other devices that connected to a television, were in common use, interference from the cable television wasn't that big of a concern.
GREAT JOB on this video. so many cool details. im 52 so this is nostalgic. but showing stuff like Youngstown OH on a old TV guide page was a nice touch. you put a lot of work into this
I grew up halfway between Philly and NYC. Both 3 and 4 could be tuned. In fact, almost all VHF channels had a signal. 8 was the only exception IIRC 2&10 (CBS), 3&4(NBC), 6&7(ABC) were the major networks 5,9 & 11 were independent. 12 & 13 were PBS
@@aaronbredon2948 yes it depended where you were and was different everywhere plus there was a big switchup of networks at one point. Channel 3 was KYW (cbs) so we had to use chan4
Fascinating 80s stuff. I remember those hatches on the top of our VCR with all the dials, where I lived in Canada we never had any VHF channels that I can recall.. I have one fond memory in 1983 watching a culture club concert that was simulcasted on the FM stereo radio. I remember being blown away by the stereo audio with a standard TV signal. How far we have come in 40 years.
I actually stopped using this method long before most people did. One thing you forgot to mention is that this method would not give you stereo sound. I remember in 1997 I got a HiFi Stereo VCR and I remember I wasn't getting stereo and it said in the manual that the only way to get stereo sound was to use RCA cables. A lot of people still used the RF modulator method up until HD came along, I think just because it was more convenient than RCAs. Because if you had a cable box, you actually had to have the VCR ON in order to use the cable box. In the early days, it was the opposite for many people. And then cable boxes started using RCAs too, and the same thing would be true there. Even the cable technicians could not understand how I had my setup hooked up.
Had a similar experience in the early days of HD television. Some early HD TVs had YPbPr component input, but no HDMI, or the sole HDMI port was being used by a gaming console, I told the cable TV install technicians they could use component for HD video in those cases, they couldn't believe until I showed them. Nowadays TVs will either have to analog input or just a single composite input, and two or three HDMI ports, but HDMI switches are inexpensive now.
@@vwestlife I presume it was the kind that actually used RCA inputs? Interesting, since I thought all stereo TVs had RCA inputs already, and thus wouldn't need a modulator. Back in the day, I hooked my N64 with one of those RCA input modulators. But I decided I wanted stereo sound, and we had this old stereo with RCA inputs. So I put the stereo on top of my TV. It was a weird stereo, in that it was sorta a boombox, but the speakers had wires and could be separated out.
And some are actually still on the air today. FrankenFMs were granted an exception by the FCC to continue transmitting an analog FM audio signal alongside their digital TV signal.
As someone who grew up in Chicago and remembers flicking the 3-4 switch on video game consoles and vcrs "just because", it's wild to learn it actually made a difference for other people.
I do remember when the analog TV in the U.S. got shut down, most of the people were hooking up the converter boxes to their analog tuner-only TVs via coax even though they had newer CRTs with RCA/component inputs or even flat panels without a digital tuner! I wondered why, but at the beginning you explained why… It’s the same thing here, there are people hooking up the set top boxes to the flat panel TVs via RCA cables (we call them “tulips”) even though most of the STBs today have an HDMI output, Oh, my life…
Hi - Based in Australia,we had our analogue tv until 2010-2013 depending on state and region Most households when digital came out used the adapter box, but i only recall seeing them with the 3 x rca connectors ( playstation cables ) This was very common until analogue was killed of and most of my parents and other elderly kept this setup until the tv or digital box died a natural death Anyone recall the "tv rabitt" is was a for of small transmitted, you plugged it in the back of your vhs / beta played and pressed lay, it sent the signal as a air-transmitted signal to other rooms in the home - anyone recall what channel it used
Kid of the 80s…Never knew I would be so interested by an answer to a question I never asked. On the surface and presentation, this should have be boring but I was entertained. Thank you for the trip down memory lane.
Interesting that you showed a rare VHF "Sup-R-Mod II". Nearly all of the manufactured units transmitted on UHF channel 33. The VHF ones were extremely rare.
The original PlayStation also supported RF (Radio Frequency) functions. This was achieved through the use of an RF adapter, which allowed the console to connect to older televisions that did not have composite video inputs.
This thing about TV channels always confused me, mostly because i've been a kid in the 90s, and was lucky enough to have tv with programmable channels, also because the various channels weren't exactly broadcasted on the same frequency in all of Italy. Basically it was the norm to program each channel to the actual number of the TV station: Rai Uno was CH1, Rai Due CH2, Rai Tre CH3, Canale 5 CH5, and so on. Our Sony TV was also quite confusing, because to program each channel you just pressed a button that did autoscan and just stopped when it found the carrier, but no actual sign on the screen or LED display to tell you what channel/frequency you were using! When one uncle that lived in Germany gifted me a Philips Videopac G7000 (the Magnavox Odyssey 2 in the US) it transmitted on RF only, to find the frequency it took well over 30 minutes to scan all the frequencies and in the end we had to disconnect the main TV antenna because the signal of the console was so weak it would be easily overpowered by any transmission! It didn't help that pretty much everybody in Italy also used an antenna amplifier because over-the-air transmission was done with sparsely placed transmitters even hundreds of kilometers away. Even today with DVB-T2 we still get our channels from the same transmitter position placed 50km away. My parents did tell me that back when they had a TV in the early 70s they had just 2 selectable state channels with buttons, and the "third" channel was just a knob to vary the frequency manually to any other VHF (and probably UHF) frequency.
Here in Australia, channels 3, 4 and 5 were allocated right in the middle of what became the FM radio band - so quite a few stations outside the capital cities had to move to UHF. We also had Channel 0 (usually pronounced like the letter) - which was used by two completely separate networks for different reasons - Channel 10 in Melbourne and Brisbane had to use 0 because regional stations had already taken 10, and SBS broadcast on both VHF 0 and UHF 28 for the first few years because many still only had VHF antennas, so everyone could spend the night watching risqué foreign films. We also had channels 5A (now for satellite downlink) and 9A (now for DAB+ radio). One thing that hasn't changed is our shortsightedness when it comes to technology (with the exception of mobile phones).
I grew up in Melbourne and I don't recall ever using channel 0 on our old dial-tuner TVs to watch channel 10. It was always on... channel 10. You mentioned regional stations, and I was living in the city, so perhaps the change was only in regional broadcast areas. I do recall from holiday trips that regional affiliates sometimes used different channels, like "Channel 7" basically became "Prime" and it was actually on channel 4 or something. The game consoles that I used at the time mostly gave the option of outputting to channel 0 or channel 1, and I usually used 0 with no problems.
@@Nezuji The frequency change happened on 20 January 1980, way before my time. I've only really read about the change and saw the Channel 0 idents on YT. Brisbane changed a number of years later - 10 September 1988.
In the UK, we only had three channels until 1982, when Channel 4 arrived and four until 1997 when Channel 5 came along. The bizarre thing was televisions on sale would proudly advertise how many channels they stored yet they were never used because when satellite and terrestrial digital arrived, people needed boxes. Those tended to be manually tuned to channel 6.
TVs in the US during the 1990s did the same thing, they would advertise their tuners as having "181 channels" (not sure why it was always that number). Most basic unscrambled cable service realistically had about 60 to 70 channels at maximum. If you wanted all the channels the cable company had to offer, you needed to lease a box from them.
In our area, both channels 3 and 4 were taken. That got interesting when using Broadcast TV, though after cable it was fine as the local RF signal completely overrode the cable company's broadcast. Still, would've been nice to have that UHF channel 14. None of our UHF broadcasts were strong enough so we could've just put the dial on UHF and used our VCR that way. We got lucky with some devices having channel 2, which was unoccupied, but that wasn't a guarantee and so you can imagine how we had to hunt for alternative RF adapters that were compatible with various things. Fun times. Sometimes I long for the days of those simple problems compared to centralized systems we cannot fix or adapt at all.
WCIA 3 broadcast VHF Channel 3 throughout Central and Eastern Illinois since 1953. Most of their reach throughout Central Illinois was due to a rebroadcast signal on UHF WCFN Channel 49 that started in the 1960s.
@@thomasvlaskampiii6850Yup, I grew up watching WCIA 3 and knew all to well about using ch.4 instead of ch.3. Realized later on that most people used ch.3 for their RF modulator because channel 3 was uncommon over the air station. Years later while going to college, I worked at WCIA as a studio tech. In master control they had an off air monitor just for WCFN 49 out of Springfield for confidence. It had a grainy picture because it was so far away; they had top mounted UHF antennas on their tower out back just to pick it up. On a cloudy day sometimes you might see 49 in your home, but it was rare. Along with WRSP 55 out of Springfield. A station only available on cable locally. Was so happy when they launched it's sister station WCCU 27 that could be picked up. Right before FOX network started regular weekend broadcasts.
I was wondering about some of the topics you covered. excellent video, Recently found I have a soft spot for RF after messing around with some RF only sets and devices. As a Clevelander I'll be sure to set my modulators to 4 from now on to keep our heritage alive!
Very interesting video on the American system. Here in the UK VHF and UHF were 2 completely incompatible systems so all VCRs and Games consoles had to be UHF usually CH 36/37 for colour tv.
Fun fact about the toploader NES, the original Japanese Famicom was exclusively RF out while the original international NES supported composite video. However, the international toploading NES redesign cut composite support, probably to save on production costs. The Japanese Famicom redesign, on the other hand, known as the AV Famicom, added composite video as an additional feature.
In the early 80s for a while our CATV box and VCR used the same channel (4) which worked great, since you just turned the VCR on and off and the TV worked like an auto-input-switching monitor: with both the TV and VCR set to 4 you never had to touch either tuner. Then the cable company box was "upgraded" to output on channel 2, so whenever you turned on the VCR, "clunk clunk" the TV dial from 2 over to 4 and then back again when you turned it off...
7:55 I was watching the "Spats Bear" channel video with the small TV you commented on, and that set differed from the norm for portables by having TV tuning knobs seperate from radio dial. The lowest cost set up would be VHFlo/VHFhi/UHF/AM/FM all on one linear dial. Which made me think today if any set combined the adjacent VHFlo & FM bands. So here you have it. Since it was a TV audio only receiver, it had no CRT to disable by going into FM. This radio squashes the entire FM band into a very small space making tuning hard and frequency identification downright impossible.
Those VCRs usually didn't have the numbers in the windows when you bought them. They were all blank and you'd tune each local station you could get. Any space could be VHF or UHF. My area has 3, 8, 20, 22, 30, 40, 61. Once you had them tuned you'd put the labels in each window to label the ones you had set. I remember my parents getting a tv with that type of tuner and it was so hard for them to find the channels then figure out what channel they were. They didn't have Bugs on the screen so you'd have to wait for a station ID during commercials
@@KRAWofficial that’s neat information. I was born in 84 so I guess by the time I was old enough to understand TV stations they changed. I grew up right across the river from Wilmington in the town Bruce Willis grew up in. We never had cable until I was an adult so I still remember: 3 - CBS 6 - ABC 10- NBC 12- PBS 17 - was something else became CW? 23- NJN 29- Fox 35- always something weird 40- TBN 48- can’t remember what it was called but they had music videos Friday nights 57- WPSG 61- WPPX Wilmington
@@TechTimeWithEric WPHL Channel 17 was a WB affiliate until September 2006, after that it became a MyNetworkTV affiliate until September 1st, 2023 (when WPHL 17 became a CW station and WPSG 57 became an independent station again).
I grew up in rural southern Indiana where two of our main stations were WTTV 4 out of Indy (RIP Cowboy Bob) and WAVE 3 out of Louisville. We would change the RF switch and channel based upon which way the antenna wasn't turned at the time. Fond memories.
In my area of Springfield MO, we had to use channel 4. Channel 3 was taken. Now that analog TV is out we can use either. It was amusing trying to use channel 3 to play Nintendo.
5:00 I used to use one of those thin, screwless, coaxial cables used to connect a VCR to a television. I used it to connect my Verizon FiOS® cable box to the wall. There were a few channels that wouldn't come in unless I moved the cable just right. It was hanging among other cables behind the television. So yeah, there's a reason that proper cables are as thick and inflexible as they are, but I didn't care because I preferred the convenience of the thin flexible cable that could be unplugged without screwing. 😊
Channels 3 and 4 were close enough in frequency that they could interfere with each other, so as a rule the FCC would not license both of them in the same market. That meant that one or the other of them would be available no matter where you were in the US (and it was usually 3 that was open). With respect to picking up TV audio on FM radio: The KQ2 antenna was built on a hill that was probably outside of St. Joseph, MO when it was constructed, but the city expanded and by the time I was in college I had an apartment that was only about half a mile from the base of the tower. I could pick up Channel 2's audio at several points on the FM band (I suspect this was due to unintentional and probably technically illegal leakage of harmonics because KQ2 was not the most professionally run station).
I sometimes still miss being able to listen to channel 6 on an FM radio! When I was a kid growing up in the 80s our local NBC affiliate was on channel 6 (now it's virtual 6, digital UHF 17.) Back then Saturday morning cartoons were a big deal. One of the ways my dad could get me to leave the house with him on Saturday mornings was to agree to listen to channel 6 on the radio in his work truck while we were out. That way I could at least listen to my favorite cartoons while we ran errands. Listening to channel 6 on a FM radio was also the best way at the time to listen to music in stereo for shows like Friday Night Videos or Saturday Night Live before stereo TVs became common and before local cable TV offered stereo capable cable boxes. I can also still remember watching & listening to Super Bowl XX in 86 in glorious stereo via the FM simulcast piped in from my parents giant Montgomery Wards console stereo. It normally sat in a different room in the house but for that Super Bowl it had been temporarily moved into the living room alongside the still fairly new 25 inch console TV. At that point that TV was one of the largest sets I had ever seen! Those were the days! :)
Yep, old Atari units are kinda funky. I've got two Atari 2600s, the heavy sixer only outputs on Ch. 3, whereas the light sixer has a channel switch recessed into the bottom that has to be flipped with a screwdriver. Your choices, as the manual stated, were "Channel A" (2) or "Channel B" (3, default setting). Funnily enough, when I was young, we had a station very close to us broadcasting on channel 3. Never had a problem with interference using channel 3 to play the family Super Nintendo, even up through the digital transition.
I have SDI output on one of my DVD players. There were mod available to add it. Many folk’s were using it to bypass the onboard video processing on the DVD player and using external video processors instead.
THANK YOU. Let me explain. 3:20 for YEARS, I wondered what those knobs were for under the panel on my dad’s Sony. I never knew because I was only … oh, I guess maybe 11 or 12 when he had that unit. Anyway, even though that is long gone from my life, I always wanted to know what those were for. THANK YOU for ending that mystery. 🤜💥🤛
Important to note for NA regions, that DTV physical channels, which most often different from the virtual channel number, a TV will show after tuned to, broadcast just off set of the frequency, used for the audio of analog TV broadcasts on that channel, so if using an RF adapter for a game console today, on an old analog RF input only device, and getting strange audio artifacts on one channel, check to see if any DTV channels in your area are physically broadcasting on 3 or 4, plus it possible DTV physical broadcasts on 2 or 5, could cause co channel interference too on 3 or 4
In Australia, Nintendo always used low VHF, I think they used Channel 1, because ABC TV was on channel 2, and I can remember tuning our family TV to get the N64 to work and the N64 would be on a channel below the ABC. I think most other products used UHF, certainly the Sega Master System and Commodore 64C I had used UHF, I don't know what channel they used. Now I think I understand why the picture quality on my Commodore 64C was so poor and the audio was so badly affected by buzz and hum and other unpleasant noises, I don't think the cable I used was good enough or shielded well enough to prevent interference. I initially thought it was due to a broken/poorly designed RF modulator in the unit. I'm out of my depth here because I never really knew what frequencies televisions used in Australia. We only had 2 broadcast TV stations on UHF here, SBS on channel 28, and channel 31.
I mean, looking at the chart, if everybody used channel 2, and any place using channel 3 wasn’t using 4, then 3 and 4 are the go-to options. There didn’t appear to be any major cities using both, so you were safe anywhere with the option to use one or the other.
The RF connector was the only way the oldest consoles connected, like the Atari 2600, ColecoVision, IntelliVision, etc. It would connect to a TV/Game switch. In fact the oldest ones had those "Y" connectors that had to screw in on the back of the TV.
1:40 Channel 69 Allentown PA, just north of Philly. As the biggest cities grew and new stations signed on in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, VHF filled up first then UHF got busy. Growing up in Philly, we were close enough to NYC to have a lot of channels already taken, and big enough in our own right to still be getting new stations. New licensees for full-power stations had to go high on UHF. By 1980 we in Philly already had 48, with 23/52 being NJ PBS. 57 went live around 1981, and 65 went live not long after in far south Jersey, Vineland. 69 was probably the next available. But if I recall correctly, nobody got a license for a station at 70-83. If another new station came, it would have been in that block. The FCC began dismantling UHF in 1983 and in 2017 everything above channel 37 got the ax.
You forgot to mention channel 61 (licensed to Wilmington, DE, which became a PAX/Ion station), and channel 62 (originally licensed to Atlantic City, NJ, now licensed to Mount Laurel, NJ as a Telemundo affiliate).
Channel 14 in Maryland is Public Access. PAC allows the greater Eastren Shore to receive updates in our communities. Travel outside to Baltimore, and they use channel 13. Channel 13 is WZBL News . Channel 1 is now reserved for Xfinity ppv. TV Channel 200 range is no longer used and was switched to the 800 range
![Seungmin "그렇게, 천천히, 우리(As we are)" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kAzmhLHePqU/mqdefault.jpg)
"it all comes together on 69 news"
Oh come on..
Nice
lmao
Or _in,_ if you're both really nice. :-)
That's there actual slogan they do news for The Lehigh Valley where I live Lehigh and Northampton counties and a Bucks edition for the Bucks county viewers with a different news crew the ad he showed was the Allentown, PA Lehigh Valley team. They also own network in Philly called ME 2 they are sponsors of PPL Center and Dorney Park and have a weather cam on top of domenatior
Oooo 69 nice
Yep, as a clevelander, every handmedown video game console with an RF modulator was tuned to channel 4 when I got it. I never really gave this any thought until now.
I always switched it to 3, no issues whatsoever. hehe
I remember using channel 4 in NC, south of Raleigh. The signal was slightly cleaner, despite there being an existing channel 4 broadcaster, WUNC, in the broadcast area. There was a channel 3 broadcaster, WWAY, further away from me and closer to the coast.
Grew up in Cleveland myself - a couple times over the years, friends have questioned me why I flipped things to channel 4 out of habit. It’s because I didn’t want NBC News overlaid over my game of Sonic The Hedgehog!
@@matthewlwoodThat could have been to maybe channel 3 broadcasting at much higher power, and also there the complicated aspect to polarization of radio waves, which could differ between TV channels, but I always used channel 3, since being in Western NC, there was out of Greenville SC, WYFF NBC 4
@@ennexthefox why “NBC News”. WKYC was departing from a quasi O&O to an affiliate they aired more than just news. Like friends, ER, Seinfeld, etc.
"25 or 6 2 4" with the Chicago CD was a very nice touch 😊
I never understood that song but now I do. Thanks VWestlife!
As a massive fan of Chicago, that was the best part of the video!!
25 (mins) or 6 (minutes) to 4 (am)? It was a question you ask yourself when you’ve lost track of time…high off your face.
great song too!!!
We saw what you did there, 25 or 6 2 4!
Clicked on this video just because it was a topic I'd never seen covered before, and was surprised at the quality. Well researched, receipts shown, well written, clearly spoken, and a few jokes without getting too wacky and keeping to the point. Very good video! All we need now is to get you a bit of a better mic lol
But they lied. Nintendo is not forced to only be channel 3 as you can switch it too channel 4.
And now i Know how that dude was listening to Seinfeld on WCSH in his car when I was in Maine that one time.
They broadcasted the audio from WCSH TV on 87.7 FM. I thought it was pretty neat. You can hear news/weather reports while driving.
I grew up in Maine in the 90’s and knew of WCSH broadcasting on radio. Many of our cars bottomed out at 87.9 (digital tuning radios) and I never understood why they’d put it on a low frequency. It wasn’t until adult years I realized it was the same audio transmission for the TV and learned this “feature” was a free side effect of this overlap.
In southern NH, didn't get WCSH on cable, but could sometimes get it over the air, and it came in better audio-only on 87.7. Sometimes WCSH and WLNE Providence would both be battling it out LOL
This is because Channel 6 already has an allocated FM frequency/carrier (87.75), which is why you can listen in on 87.7. It’s not a rebroadcast, but the audio is from the TV signal itself.
Before digital TV we used to have VHF and UHF audio receivers, so you could listen to your shows at work
3:25 Manually tuning in channels on the VCR. God I remember that, and even though I was only a kid, I was the only one in the household that understood how this worked. Worse yet, the Cable channels weren't entirely in order. It would go through channels 2-6, 14 to 22?, 7-13, then 23 forward. Yeah, explain that to your mother LOL!
Cable also used channels 1 and 4A (the gap between 4 and 5).
@@dougbrowning82 In Australia we had channels from 0 to 11 and there was a 5 and 5A in there as well.
Some older manual TV's could tune in some of the old analog cellular bands.... fun times listening to random convos. lol
I had a Quasar TV with the same tuning system way back in the day.
@@steviebboy69 but only 2/7/9/10 worked until uhf came - that was doubled up on 0 i think for a few years ( sbs was unique as it was both uhf and vhf )
UHF started transmission in 1980
Side note my C64 in the day worked OK, but it worked better when you wrapped the co-axial lead in silver foil( hmm or was it the standard older style tv flat twin ribbon VHF )
We discussed it back in the day at work, then one day some one bought in their C64 and sony colour tv, turn it on and setup a game, if was ok - lets call it 10% grainy - then while the game is running on the title screen or the game running, wrap 2 or 3 layers aluminum cooking foil on the tv out wire and bam - a better picture
Thanks to licensing agreement limiting SDI to pro-grade equipment, blade runner has never ever been pirated even once
tankfully you can get around hdcp and use hdmi to sdi converters.
It's funny because last week I was on vacation and picked my copy for $1. Then my HDMI cable failed... If only I pirated it and had a coax, I would have been OK.
Why were they worried about pirating specifically just Blade Runner? And how does SDI allow you tp pirate a movie? It's just a cable.
@@vdochevHow would a dvd break your HDMI cable?
@@aethelred9781bazinga
This is hands down, one of the most fascinating videos ive watched in awhile. Tv channel 6 bleeding into fm radio blew my mind. I didn't even know what i didn't know. Im gonna sub. This dude earned it with this one.
And as you alluded to, the interference of non shielded machines like the original Apple II, especially affects those low VHF channels like 2, 3 and 4. So the modulator that chose to use 32-34 was a nice touch to avoid interference and it was a shame it wasn't adopted as a universal standard in North America.
There's actually a channel 31 where I live, the local Fox affiliate. So I'm kinda glad we didn't.
@@shmehfleh3115 I don't think they use the same frequencies.
My dad had a TRS 80 coco and would wrap the expansion cards in aluminum foil to block a lot of the interference put off by them that would mess with the picture.
@@christo930If it was Channel 31 back in the analog NTSC days then yes I believe it would have broadcasted on the same frequency as an RF modulator that used Ch. 31. Now that the digital TV (ATSC) switchover has occurred, this Ch. 31 might still be tunable by entering Ch. 31 on the remote of a digital ATSC TV or tuner/converter box awhile actually being broadcast on a different frequency.
This is all done via virtual channel assignments where what was analog UHF Ch. 31 back in the analog days now can be assigned to any frequency on digital ATSC tuners while the TV viewers can continue to just enter 31 on their remote as they always did. The TV handles actually tuning to the right frequency based on data sent by the TV station when you initially scan for TV stations. The TV stores the real channel location it’s broadcasted on and the virtual channel number the viewers used to tune in the channel. So Ch. 31 might actually be Ch. 13, but the TV is told to assign it virtual ch. 31.
This means that even if the FCC moves channel from 13 to say 26, for example, the viewer can always tune in the Ch. 31 and get the channel provided the rescan their channel after the frequency moved (or spectrum repacking as it officially called). This is much like a shortcut or alias in Windows, Mac, or Linux where the user needn’t know where the actually file or program/app is stored as the shortcut/alias handles that for them.
@@shmehfleh3115 I think that's why they have selectors
The VHF/UHF situation was very confusing for a Brit coming to the US without anyone to explain it, and the 3-4 modulator split was also confusing. Thanks for clearing it up!
The lack of SCART support must have been heartbreaking.
I have at least one TV, bought here in the U.K, which scans through the entire VHF band (and of course doesn't find anything) each time you tell it to do a retune.
My Nintendo came with a channel selector built in. Does not require any splitter. And is not confusing at all. If you can work a TV you can work a splitter.
Fun fact: on Soviet televisions, instead of VHF and UHF, they usually used names based on wavelengths - meter waves and decimeter waves.
AFAIK, Soviet radios also commonly had tuning scales marked in wavelengths, even for the FM band, and even though contemporary tuners from other Eastern Bloc countries were all marked in frequencies.
In Soviet Russia, television broadcasts you!
@@lazm3518 Another joke about TV that was common in the USSR/Russia.
- Can I watch TV?
- Yes, of course. Just don't turn it on.
Kinda surprised the Soviets ended up with a split TV band plan like the States rather than just a contiguous block, always figured that split was just a quirk of how it evolved here.
In Soviet Russia, you don't watch TV..... the TV is watching you (KGB/FSB). lol
10:13 Youngstown resident here, all of those 3 TV stations are not only still on, but on the same channel. Insanely cool to see that still usable.
I was also delighted by the Y-town shoutout.
West central Ashtabula county fella up here. I get Youngstown, Cleveland and Erie.. But Youngstown is, by far, the strongest. Fun fact, 27/33 is physically channel 31 now (WKBN/WYTV share their channel), and 21 is now physically 33.. WYFX (not listed) is physically channel 32 (and is on the WYTV/WKBN tower). (Cue "the more you know" music)
3 was never a "nonstation" channel. Just not many people are able to see channel 3 but their TVs still have it. The way you are wording everything it seems you are one of the few that actually has a station on channel 3.
Interesting info about 87.7FM, had no idea it was a byproduct of TV airwaves and not a deliberate secondary broadcast. I remember getting excited that we could listen to the Simpsons in the car from GlobalTV, channel 6 out of Toronto
Same for WPVI channel 6 in Philly, a full power station.
I was on vacation in Orlando when I first heard this magic.
It's 1988 and we're sitting in my car in Montreal. We're saying goodbye to a friend who's moving. We were parked by the bus stop, waiting for the last bus, all feeling a bit melancholy but trying to be cheerful. We partook of a goodbye joint and, after a while, just scanned the radio. 87.7 FM was playing CBC channel 6's audio. It was after 11 pm, and the station ran reruns of "Welcome Back Kotter". We turned our focus and realized it was the episode where Vinnie decides to pretend to be a drug addict to catch a drug dealer who's been visiting the school. We came in just as they were coming up with a plan. Suddenly, John Travolta gives the line, "I know how to act like those drug people, 'Gimme drugs! Gimme drugs!' ". We completely fell apart laughing. There was our childhood, the things we used to find hilarious, almost a closing chapter. It made things easier; the laugh will always be well remembered...as will 87.7 FM.
@@dtvjhoSpent many hours listening to WPVI 6abc TV on 87.7FM
@@tsufordmanWKMG now, but in the 80s and 90s it was WCPX, the local CBS affiliate.
I remember watching Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes after school at 4pm and tuning my stereo to pick up the audio. The “bass boost” was all the way up to push that ever-present background hum of the Enterprise.
Didn’t know until now that it was a common feature for that wavelength.
The 25 or 6 to 4 reference was top tier! Excellent job. 😂
Channel 36 wasn’t a UK only thing for RF modulators, but it was used basically in all of Europe.
The VHF bands in Europe for television were a mess. When television was first introduced in the 1930s, every country had their own television system and their own frequency plans for TV channels, the UK used 405 lines, Germany used 441 lines, and later France 819 lines. Then after WW2, the 625-line system was introduced, which eventually became a standard, but the frequencies were still a mess. Western Europe and Eastern Europe used very different frequencies for VHF. They even had separate bands for FM radio, with Eastern Europe using 66-74 MHz, and Western Europe using the more familiar range of 87.5-108 MHz.
With the introduction of UHF frequencies, all countries agreed on using the very same frequencies for TV channels, with channels 21-69 having the same frequency anywhere in Europe.
Except for channel 36, which was used for radio astronomy, therefore no transmitters were allowed to operate on channel 36. And since UHF was adopted earlier in Europe, with high power networks broadcasting on UHF even from the early 1960s, there were a lot more TV sets that supported UHF compared to the US, so it was an obvious choice for RF modulators to use channel 36.
Yep, we had a video rental chain called Channel36
I also read that when Channel 5 was preparing to launch in the UK in the 90s, the operators of the upcoming channel were required to launch a massive retuning program since the frequencies for Channel 5 were also used by consumer VCRs as well, and the new Channel 5 could have caused interference with said VCRs. During pre-launch test broadcasts, the possibility was interference was mentioned and viewers had to call a number on the screen if their VCRs or other equipment suffered interference and to schedule a time for the affected equipment to be retuned.
I don't agree with you about the reason for higher popularity of UHF in Europe than in the US. Some European countries didn't have a nationwide UHF network until the 1970s, and UHF converter boxes for VHF-only TVs were also sold in Europe.
Television in Europe was in most cases a government monopoly, so the priority was to cover most of the country as opposed to offering additional channels in the larger cities. As a consequence, the VHF bands became congested even though most Europeans could only receive one channel.
When European countries launched their second and third television channels, as the VHF bands were congested, they could only go to the "new" UHF band.
In the US on the other hand, most television was commercial, and the bigger cities had multiple channels on VHF, so UHF was used less intensively than in Europe, and the viewers had fewer reasons to buy a UHF-capable TV or converter.
Another advantage of the standardization of Channel 36 (and I think, later on, more channels in the high 30's), it was possible to design VCR's and other equipment that didn't need a TV/VCR switch like all VCR's in the USA. All VCR's just mix the incoming antenna or cable signal with their own modulated signal and send that to the output. You can tune your TV to any live TV channel(*) you want to watch or you can tune to channel 36 to watch the VCR. And if you have a second VCR or a video game or a computer, you just adjust their modulators to use channel 37 or 38 or 39 and daisy-chain your cable or antenna through all of them.
(*) Of course most TV's in Europe didn't have channels but presets but that's another story.
@@JacGoudsmit i've come across some vcrs here in the uk that defaulted to ch.52 !
Wow, great video. I'm 45 years old and just now put together some things I had wondered about as a kid, like why you could listen to some tv channels on the radio. I thought they just broadcasted for the radio for whatever reason and never really thought that they were all radio waves. I never knew that each channel on a TV corresponded to a radio frequency, but it makes sense.
What I find curious, though, is for home consoles like the NES we always used channel 3, but our local TV stations were 3, 6, and 12. I don't remember ever having any interference, but we also had cable at that point and probably didn't have antennas hooked up.
NES when turned on it can take over the channel it is set for use. It didn't take me to turn 45 years old to figure these things out. You just have to start messing with the tech. Or read the instructions. You can also take over radio signals. I did when I was only 6 years old. It is not hard and old news.
You looked old when I read 45 before I realized I'm on my 43.
I remember using channel 4 as preferred in my area for my VCR, SNES and N64 since channel 3 was taken. Getting a TV with not only one but two composite inputs and one S-video input made AV quality for my SNES and N64 much better. I never went back to RF since.
oooo 25 or 6 to 4 was sneaky. great video!
In Europe we didn't typically use channel numbers (in the radio tech meaning of this term) in daily conversations. Our TVs had presets like HiFi component radio tuners - and they had them since the 70s, sometimes even late 60s. We'd tune the available stations to those and never remember the physical channel numbers. There was no "standard" preset assignment, but a common pattern was: the state-operated channels first (and they were typically numbered on air as well), then a local public channel, then commercial channels, ordered roughly by their launch date. Those were initally hard press buttons, then soft touch controls, and eventually keypad entry from a remote - the OSD would display the preset number, NOT the channel number.
In those remote+OSD times, most TVs would allow setting up "preset number 0", and that would be typically tuned to the VCR's modulator if a composite connection was not used. On older TVs with individual button presets, the VCR would be tuned to the last available preset or something like that - and as far as physical frequencies go, it was commonly on UHF, adjustable in the range of channels 30-39 or something like that, with channel 35 a common default (note that channel numbers don't align between Europe and US).
But since the mid-90s, pretty much everything used SCART anyway.
EDIT: And nowadays in the digital age, the preset numbers are typically provided by the cable/satellite company, or the organization that oversees terrestrial licenses. But still, they commonly start at 1, are more-or-less continuous, they have nothing to do with physical channels, state-owned channels are usually at the start of the list and for other channels the preset number usually also has nothing to do with on-air branding either. Those numbers are not consistent between providers, either.
And before hard-press buttons there were 12-way rotary switches with fixed channel settings, were they not? German makers switched from rotaries to pushbuttons as early as mid-1960s, although the small-tube portables used rotaries through the 1970s.
@@jmi5969 Yes, the earliest European TV tuners (and the dials that protruded from them) looked and operated much like their US counterparts. We just switched to push-buttons programmed to presets early on. By the way, in the days before computer control and OSDs, programming those presets looked much like the thing Kevin showed at 3:23. I guess that VCR model could have shared the tuner design between regions.
And as to why we adopted presets - I think it has a lot to do with the popularity of the UHF band in Europe. In the earliest days of TV, most European countries only had one state-operated channel and that was it. When the "second channels" started rolling out across the continent, in a lot of areas they broadcast on UHF. UHF converter boxes like the ones Kevin shows at 2:42 were often called "channel 2 adapters" over here ("channel 2" referring to the second channel of the state broadcaster, not physical channel 2). Some countries like UK and France even used UHF pretty much exclusively, because VHF was used only for the legacy black-and-white-only, incompatible signals (405 and 819-line systems, respectively). In the 90s and early 2000s, you'd usually receive at most 2 channels on VHF and all the rest on UHF, and tuning on UHF with a dial when there are multiple stations there is just a pain - that's my guess as to why presets became the norm.
Exactly, when a TV gets setup all the available channels gets stored into the TV's memory and the only used reference is which channel is stored to which (preset) number. Older TVs usually only can store 0-99 presets (channels).
In my area (Veneto), there was a local channel called "Canale 68", which had its main analogue transmitter (and later, digital SFN network until those channels were removed from TV use) on channel 68. Maybe it was an holdover from the days before presets.
@@zsombor_99 My parents used to own a TV from the early 90s that only had presets 1 through 39, and the remote had separate buttons for 10, 20 and 30 (so you'd key just 3 for channel 3, and 10-then-3 for channel 13). But that was before the advent of Hyperband on cable which actually allowed for around 100 channels to be received simultaneously.
Hartford, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, and Shreveport were additional examples of additional markets where 2 or 4 was used for this purpose.
RF modulators for the European market could usually be tuned to any UHF channel, with 36 or 37 being the default. In the largest cities in Italy, the UHF band was so crammed you'd have been lucky to find any vacant channel to use! SCART was the most common AV connection anyway, being pretty much everywhere by the early 90s, with RF used as a last resort.
I guess UHF was used over here because colour TVs in the UK couldn't tune VHF channels at all. The band was relegated to the legacy 405 line B&W system and abandoned in 1985, with France doing the same a year later.
Ireland used VHF TV PAL-I until the late 80s, but remained on one transmitter on the border
@@RyanGonTV I guess in Ireland people would want to watch channels from both countries, and allocating them would need more frequencies. When I went to Dublin I was quite surprised to find that buttons 1 to 4 on the hotel TV were BBC1, BBC2, ITV, and Channel 4.
@@MrDuncl Not really, the main problem was FM frequencies than TV here…
I feel like this needs to have the Angry Video Game Nerd tagged. AVGN, where you at?
When Channel 5 TV went live here in the UK in 1997 it used UHF CH36 as that was the only channel available that wouldn't cause co-channel interference issues between transmitters. Even then it had to be transmitted at reduced power. As CH36 was used by most VCRs you had the option of an 'engineer' visiting your home to re-tune your VCR to another channel so it wouldn't interfere.
On the south coast we never got analogue channel 5 as it would have interfered with France. The allocation of four TV channels over the entire UHF band took a lot of planning. The Mendip transmitter was right at the top of the band while Rowridge was right at the bottom. With analogue TV receiving two transmitters at once would have given you severe ghosting at best.
I don’t comment on videos very often but you’re a genius. I love your videos. I learned so much in this episode. Can’t wait for your next one.
Broadcast industry used BNC connectors for analog composite for decades, When Sony invented the D1 digital video system back in early 80's the choice of SDI was based on a smart and genius way from Sony to save companies who were switching to digital a lot of money from not having to recable their studios, Such high quality cables cost a lot of money plus the labor and down time to retrofit a studio. So Sony designed the SDI and put a serializer chip before the SDI out and another deserializer chip in the receiving device to send digital video frames, audio and other data such as teletext, caption, aspect ratio and other proprietary data in a single wire.
wish that would have been the case in the non-broadcast video world. Much of the computer display world used VGA and the RGB5 video standard (red green blue horizontal, vertical) Large crosspoint switchers and many other components were all built to this. You can actually deliver 1080p over it too. It would go over 100ft without boosters. Many installed AV systems used RGB5. HDMI however wouldn't travel that distance, and so we had a whole host of digital video over CAT6 cable come out in the 20teens. Each one having good points and bad points. *NOBODY* made an HDMI to RGB5 converter to use existing cable infrastructure though. We ended up having to rip out thousands of feet of expensive RGB5 cable and install shielded CAT6 for digital video formats
@@audvidgeek or use hdmi to sdi converters.
Most of the industry is moving to IP based systems over fibre, but a lot of applications still use SDI. Dejero was still using it exclusively up until very recently. We also use it for long runs. You can buy SDI-to-HDMI converter boxes for this. So if you want to run a monitor up to say a commentator booth, that's the easiest way to do it. And like you said, BNC cables support analogue video. So you just need a dirt cheap BNC-to-RCA adapter, since applications like a return feed for your hosts don't need to be high def. IDK if it's better than HDMI for home use, since you're not usually doing long runs. What we really missed out on in North America though was SCART. Europe had RGB output and audio in one cable long before component came along. I suppose it wasn't used here to maintain backwards compatibility, since RCA was the default for audio since the 30s. It's the same reason why broadcast HDTV is still 1080i, even though every TV made in the last 15 years supports a 1080p signal. So it still works with early CRT based HDTVs that only supported 1080i.
@@juri14111996 That’s not the point, it’s the lack of consumer SDI monitors not HDMI monitors.
I see a lot of passive hdmi to vga adapters. Since that isnt physically possible, my guess is for those already wired projectors in conference rooms (run hdmi over the existing vga cable). There may not be rgb5 to hdmi, but there is rgb5 to vga, and then vga to hdmi @@audvidgeek
It should be noted that the FCC assigned channels to markets so that two adjacent channels wouldn't be used to avoid interference. The exception is with 4 & 5 because there is a 4 MHz gap in the end of channel 4 and the start of channel 5, so though the channel number is adjacent they can both be used in the same TV market.
They also made sure nearby TV markets didn't have overlap on assigned channels. I grew up in the LA market and we had/have 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13, whereas San Diego had 6, 8, and 10 and Santa Barbara had 3, 6, and 12. Of course, all three markets had UHF channels, as well.
Some more exceptions include 6 & 7 and 13 & 14, because of even larger gaps in between those channels.
What’s interesting about Channel 6 in San Diego was that it was actually licensed to Tijuana, Mexico, yet targeted San Diego until its English-language operations were shut down in 2017. It also had a callsign of XETV, as Mexican callsigns all begin with X.
Came in expecting to post this, leaving satisfied that somebody already had so I didn't have to! 😊
I'm guessing tuners were less precise in the early days, then? Because obviously interference between channel 4 and your VCR sending on channel 3 was no longer an issue by the time VCRs came along.
My local news station/ABC affiliate was on channel 3, so I and everyone else I knew was on channel 4 until connecting via RCA became more common. I only realized that 3 was more common elsewhere when I went to visit my dad in Utah, where 3 was unoccupied. I tried switching ours to 3 for a bit and that was a fun lesson on RF interference when my mom couldn't watch Lois & Clark while I was playing on the Sega Genesis!
Around here ABC is channel 4, nothing is on channel 3. We had channels on 4,5,7,9,10,11 and 13. As well as whatever UHF channels existed. (I can't say that I ever really used those as there didn't seem to be much on.
Lois and Clark? That was one hell of a flashback to 1996! 🤣🤣🤣
Yeah our big CBS channel in Wisconsin was channel 3 so I always used 4 as well.
The only abc 3 stations I can think of are in Pensacola Florida or in Wilmington North Carolina.
@@stevensuarez4843 Yup, I misremembered for my local station, it was a CBS affiliate, so my mom was probably watching Diagnosis: Murder, rather than Lois & Clark. In my defense, I was a young girl and am now in my 30s so it's been a while!
the original north american NES actually supported composite video, being the only input on it (though nintendo offered a RF modulator). what's interesting is that the famicom (the japanese nes) was RF only, but japan's version of the top loader was composite only (and thus was called "AV famicom"), weird that its US counterpart was RF only (basically going a step back).
The original US "toaster" Nintendos actually offer RF out on the back and composite video out on the side(for some godforsaken reason).
Nintendo included an RF switchbox, but the modulator was integral to the system. (This was also true of the US Super Nintendo, as well as Sega's Master System and Genesis, and I believe even NEC's TurboGrafX.)
There was also Sharp's Twin Famicom (basically, a Famicom and a FDS in the same case) that had composite output out of the box, but what's interesting is that it has a DIN connector on the back for an optional RF modulator.
When I'll add a NESRGB mod board in my Twin Fami (AN-500R) I'll repurpose the DIN jack to output RGB.
It was possible to have it modified by Nintendo, such units are really rare since only a few called Nintendo for that
@@Alexis_du_60 Which is odd, actually. The TwinFami's 8-pin DIN connector is kinda overkill for an RF modulator. Composite video, mono audio, voltage, and ground is only four pins. Three if we use the DIN shell for ground.
@@CptJistuce Indeed, from what I read, some Twins had half of the metal pins ommited despite the connector having the spots for the unused pins.
I grew up in Tampa with WEDU on Channel 3 but we used it anyway for our NES. It’s the PBS station and not a super strong signal, so there wasn’t any interference. Plus if we were playing when we shouldn’t have been, we didn’t want the static noise from Channel 4 to give us away.
Such an impressively well researched topic and video. Well done, sir.
I freaking love these history style videos of yours. ❤
This explains something I've long since wondered abt. When I was a kid my Grandmother bought me a Nintendo used on channel 3, not long afterwards my Grandfather bought a rather large a powerful antenna for his television in his room. It had to actually be plugged into the wall 1 plug powered a motor that would turn and tune the antenna 1 was a booster and he could pick up far away channels. Not long afterwards I discovered if the Nintendo was on and I didn't matter if it was hooked to a television or not , you could watch the Nintendo on his television as long as it was turned to channel 3. Not long afterwards I discovered I could watch the neighbors Nintendo as well and any thing else they where using channels 3 or 4 for.
The old days were really cool in their own special way.
@@xenos_n.is that how you could get the PB channel with a lot of static & lines but still make out some of it? Lol.
A fun fact about the use of CH36 in the UK, when Channel 5, the 5th terrestrial (I.E. not cable or satellite) channel first started test-broadcasting, people found they couldn't use their VCRs over RF properly any more, as, in a number of regions, Channel 5 used the CH36 frequency, so at their own cost, they had to send out fleets of "engineers" to adjust the potentiometer on the back of peoples' VCRs (you could adjust between CH32 to 40) and re-tune their TVs for them both to return VCR operation and to add the fuzzy, low-power mess that was Channel 5... :P
Wouldn't it have been cheaper and easier to just change the frequency of the station than to send men out to fiddle with every TV and VCR in the entire country? Or was that not possible for some reason?
@@BigCJ It was basically a case of "not enough room", as the UK has different regions which use their own transmitter sites, they have to avoid overlap between regions that could cause interference and 'ghosting' (where one signal overlays itself on another), and of course, 36 was about the only "clear" channel they had in the majority of the UK, but at the expense of having to advise people to adjust the modulators on VCRs or send someone out to do it, it was an absolute farce really, and given the low-power nature of Channel 5 in general, it wasn't really worth it as it was always fuzzy no matter what you did as they often used former Band I/III VHF sites, since converted to Band II FM radio-only, which by that point lacked the power availability...
How many different stations were there? Checking Wikipedia shows that UHF channels in the UK ranged from 21-69, somewhat similar to the US scheme of 14-69. The stepping between channels is bigger, too; 8MHz vs 6MHz. I'm surprised that there were ghosting issues if there were that many channels with that much space between them.
@@BigCJ Officially, we had 5 channels (BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel 4 & Channel 5) before the digital switchover, but, different regions of the UK had their "opt-out" systems, so they could broadcast local news after the national news had been on as well as local programming or have a different schedule to other regions, so they had to avoid overlap between regions with enough separation between them by having region 'A' in say the 21-32 range, then region 'B' in 56-69 range, then region 'C' further afield can then use the 21-32 range (this being a rough estimate, actual numbers differed), it wasn't perfect as some of the UK's topography allowed for signls from further afield to break through and cause ghosting (same channel, but with a delay making a very odd visual effect!), and in some cases even aid in having two different regions available to you to watch, so you could have say ITV Tyne Tees on one channel, and ITV Yorkshire on another owing to different frequencies used...
I see. So it's not a problem of different overlapping signals on the same frequency. I don't know why I thought that's what you meant, but think I get it now. You experienced all manner of delays and visual artifacting, yes? Here in the US, depending on how far from the transmitter you are, weak analog signals would get just get fuzzier, lose all color, or drop out entirely. I don't think I've ever seen the phenomena you describe except on digital TV!
And signal overlap between markets is still a thing today, I myself have seen it! The local PBS station 30mi away not coming in? Switch to the one 75mi away in the mountains and it comes in clear as a bell for some reason.
"If you were unlucky enough to live in Philly or Cleveland..."
That sentence works, regardless of whether you're talking about TV reception, or just generally.
🤣🤣🤣
I also spit my coffee out dog stop it 😂😂
I felt like I got flashbanged by seeing 69 News, an actually local news channel here, in a random RUclips video lmao
At 8:55 one technical reason to not use channel 2 would be that the modulation on channel 2 would spill into the 6 meter ham band, And hams are very protective of their radio spectrum turf
Mmmmm, 6 meter haaaammmm...
And Hartford, CT...We had a broadcast channel 3 and it was very powerful, so much so, the local cable company put Channel 3 onto channel 2, because ingress would always screw up the picture on Channel 3 over the cable system if the connections weren't perfect...so they stuck the prevue channel there, since no one was watching it long enough to complain about ingress.
and in Stamford CT, we would watch ch 3 for CBS programming because WCBS ch 2 would leak into the cable system even that far away and interfere with itself.
That would be WFSB.
Yup...I remember WFSB, then CBS, being on 3.
Funny most VCR and games I had were 2 or 3 till Nintendo arrived and it was 3 or 4 which I thought was odd.
@@timothyp3378 It still is CBS.
Same with channel 11 here, except the cable co gave zero about it.
Thanks for this education, so much I didn't know. It blows my mind how complicated old tech was. I mean it's just insane how we figured all this stuff out so long ago.
It used to be hard to get good reception from video game consoles in my town on channel 3 and 4. It was okay up until about 1983 or so, as there was nothing broadcasting on those channels. However, the French CBC was broadcasting on Channel 2, and their signal was so strong, it bled over onto Channel 3. So Channel 4 was the best option. But in about 1983, they added CBS and PBS to our cable (prior to that, we only got ABC and NBC via a microwave broadcast from Bangor, Maine.) The CBS station was added to Channel 4, and it was so strong, it bled onto Channel 3, as well.
I'm betting the cables that the cable companies used at the time didn't have the best shielding. At that time, before VCRs and other devices that connected to a television, were in common use, interference from the cable television wasn't that big of a concern.
I figured out how to put a choke, basically a filter, on the line from the RF output to the TV. It helped a fair amount.
I used to work at channel 3 in Cleveland, and wish I knew this back then lol, imma have to share this with my friends who still are there
What a blessing to simply press the "AV" button on the old CROWN TV my grandparents had if I played the MasterSystem over their house :)
Great video. Perfect tone and presentation. Thanks.
Truly fascinating subject thank you for sharing this information
GREAT JOB on this video. so many cool details. im 52 so this is nostalgic. but showing stuff like Youngstown OH on a old TV guide page was a nice touch. you put a lot of work into this
saw your title and thought "we had to use chan4 in philly, too!" and then saw your chart. And i even got your "25 or 6 to 4" chicago reference
You can use 3 and 4. Just not at the same time.
I grew up halfway between Philly and NYC. Both 3 and 4 could be tuned.
In fact, almost all VHF channels had a signal. 8 was the only exception IIRC
2&10 (CBS), 3&4(NBC), 6&7(ABC) were the major networks
5,9 & 11 were independent.
12 & 13 were PBS
@@aaronbredon2948 yes it depended where you were and was different everywhere plus there was a big switchup of networks at one point. Channel 3 was KYW (cbs) so we had to use chan4
Fascinating 80s stuff. I remember those hatches on the top of our VCR with all the dials, where I lived in Canada we never had any VHF channels that I can recall..
I have one fond memory in 1983 watching a culture club concert that was simulcasted on the FM stereo radio.
I remember being blown away by the stereo audio with a standard TV signal. How far we have come in 40 years.
I actually stopped using this method long before most people did. One thing you forgot to mention is that this method would not give you stereo sound. I remember in 1997 I got a HiFi Stereo VCR and I remember I wasn't getting stereo and it said in the manual that the only way to get stereo sound was to use RCA cables. A lot of people still used the RF modulator method up until HD came along, I think just because it was more convenient than RCAs. Because if you had a cable box, you actually had to have the VCR ON in order to use the cable box. In the early days, it was the opposite for many people. And then cable boxes started using RCAs too, and the same thing would be true there. Even the cable technicians could not understand how I had my setup hooked up.
I did this with my sega genesis, which could use the same DIN cable from a commodore 64, which even gave you a chroma output.
Had a similar experience in the early days of HD television. Some early HD TVs had YPbPr component input, but no HDMI, or the sole HDMI port was being used by a gaming console, I told the cable TV install technicians they could use component for HD video in those cases, they couldn't believe until I showed them. Nowadays TVs will either have to analog input or just a single composite input, and two or three HDMI ports, but HDMI switches are inexpensive now.
A few RF modulators did give you MTS stereo sound. I have one by Radio Shack which does it.
@@vwestlife I presume it was the kind that actually used RCA inputs? Interesting, since I thought all stereo TVs had RCA inputs already, and thus wouldn't need a modulator.
Back in the day, I hooked my N64 with one of those RCA input modulators. But I decided I wanted stereo sound, and we had this old stereo with RCA inputs. So I put the stereo on top of my TV.
It was a weird stereo, in that it was sorta a boombox, but the speakers had wires and could be separated out.
I’m glad you mentioned Franken FM’s. Some still existed past the analog TV shutdown in 09. Some were around all the way until 2021
And some are actually still on the air today. FrankenFMs were granted an exception by the FCC to continue transmitting an analog FM audio signal alongside their digital TV signal.
🎵Do the Mario! Swings your arms from side to side, come and do the mario!🎵
Swing your arms*
@@GummyBoi autocorrect strikes again... couldn't imagine what it was thinking...
Why anyone would not be doing the Mario is beyond me
As someone who grew up in Chicago and remembers flicking the 3-4 switch on video game consoles and vcrs "just because", it's wild to learn it actually made a difference for other people.
I do remember when the analog TV in the U.S. got shut down, most of the people were hooking up the converter boxes to their analog tuner-only TVs via coax even though they had newer CRTs with RCA/component inputs or even flat panels without a digital tuner! I wondered why, but at the beginning you explained why…
It’s the same thing here, there are people hooking up the set top boxes to the flat panel TVs via RCA cables (we call them “tulips”) even though most of the STBs today have an HDMI output, Oh, my life…
Hi - Based in Australia,we had our analogue tv until 2010-2013 depending on state and region
Most households when digital came out used the adapter box, but i only recall seeing them with the 3 x rca connectors ( playstation cables )
This was very common until analogue was killed of and most of my parents and other elderly kept this setup until the tv or digital box died a natural death
Anyone recall the "tv rabitt" is was a for of small transmitted, you plugged it in the back of your vhs / beta played and pressed lay, it sent the signal as a air-transmitted signal to other rooms in the home - anyone recall what channel it used
My friends house was struck by lightening and his Series X was fried through the HDMI, RCA would never do that
Kid of the 80s…Never knew I would be so interested by an answer to a question I never asked. On the surface and presentation, this should have be boring but I was entertained. Thank you for the trip down memory lane.
Interesting that you showed a rare VHF "Sup-R-Mod II". Nearly all of the manufactured units transmitted on UHF channel 33. The VHF ones were extremely rare.
Oddly enough, I have wondered this. Thank you for this excellent video!
The VHF TV split made Television antennas GREAT for FM broadcast radio antennas.
The original PlayStation also supported RF (Radio Frequency) functions. This was achieved through the use of an RF adapter, which allowed the console to connect to older televisions that did not have composite video inputs.
We had channel 6 in New Orleans and yes, you could listen to the audio on 87mhz. We had channel 4 so we set our game consoles on ch 3.
Shreveport has a channel 3 so I used mine on channel 4
Excellent explanation! Much appreciated
This thing about TV channels always confused me, mostly because i've been a kid in the 90s, and was lucky enough to have tv with programmable channels, also because the various channels weren't exactly broadcasted on the same frequency in all of Italy.
Basically it was the norm to program each channel to the actual number of the TV station: Rai Uno was CH1, Rai Due CH2, Rai Tre CH3, Canale 5 CH5, and so on. Our Sony TV was also quite confusing, because to program each channel you just pressed a button that did autoscan and just stopped when it found the carrier, but no actual sign on the screen or LED display to tell you what channel/frequency you were using!
When one uncle that lived in Germany gifted me a Philips Videopac G7000 (the Magnavox Odyssey 2 in the US) it transmitted on RF only, to find the frequency it took well over 30 minutes to scan all the frequencies and in the end we had to disconnect the main TV antenna because the signal of the console was so weak it would be easily overpowered by any transmission! It didn't help that pretty much everybody in Italy also used an antenna amplifier because over-the-air transmission was done with sparsely placed transmitters even hundreds of kilometers away.
Even today with DVB-T2 we still get our channels from the same transmitter position placed 50km away.
My parents did tell me that back when they had a TV in the early 70s they had just 2 selectable state channels with buttons, and the "third" channel was just a knob to vary the frequency manually to any other VHF (and probably UHF) frequency.
i have been avoiding watching yet another video on rf modulators but this was shockingly good
Here in Australia, channels 3, 4 and 5 were allocated right in the middle of what became the FM radio band - so quite a few stations outside the capital cities had to move to UHF. We also had Channel 0 (usually pronounced like the letter) - which was used by two completely separate networks for different reasons - Channel 10 in Melbourne and Brisbane had to use 0 because regional stations had already taken 10, and SBS broadcast on both VHF 0 and UHF 28 for the first few years because many still only had VHF antennas, so everyone could spend the night watching risqué foreign films. We also had channels 5A (now for satellite downlink) and 9A (now for DAB+ radio).
One thing that hasn't changed is our shortsightedness when it comes to technology (with the exception of mobile phones).
I grew up in Melbourne and I don't recall ever using channel 0 on our old dial-tuner TVs to watch channel 10. It was always on... channel 10. You mentioned regional stations, and I was living in the city, so perhaps the change was only in regional broadcast areas. I do recall from holiday trips that regional affiliates sometimes used different channels, like "Channel 7" basically became "Prime" and it was actually on channel 4 or something.
The game consoles that I used at the time mostly gave the option of outputting to channel 0 or channel 1, and I usually used 0 with no problems.
@@Nezuji The frequency change happened on 20 January 1980, way before my time. I've only really read about the change and saw the Channel 0 idents on YT.
Brisbane changed a number of years later - 10 September 1988.
OMG! You and I grew up with the same exact television set! That thing was a beast! I haven't seen one for decades. Thanks for the video!
In the UK, we only had three channels until 1982, when Channel 4 arrived and four until 1997 when Channel 5 came along. The bizarre thing was televisions on sale would proudly advertise how many channels they stored yet they were never used because when satellite and terrestrial digital arrived, people needed boxes. Those tended to be manually tuned to channel 6.
TVs in the US during the 1990s did the same thing, they would advertise their tuners as having "181 channels" (not sure why it was always that number). Most basic unscrambled cable service realistically had about 60 to 70 channels at maximum. If you wanted all the channels the cable company had to offer, you needed to lease a box from them.
I have wondered why ch 3 or 4 for 35 years now and you have finally answered that I thank you
In our area, both channels 3 and 4 were taken. That got interesting when using Broadcast TV, though after cable it was fine as the local RF signal completely overrode the cable company's broadcast. Still, would've been nice to have that UHF channel 14. None of our UHF broadcasts were strong enough so we could've just put the dial on UHF and used our VCR that way. We got lucky with some devices having channel 2, which was unoccupied, but that wasn't a guarantee and so you can imagine how we had to hunt for alternative RF adapters that were compatible with various things. Fun times. Sometimes I long for the days of those simple problems compared to centralized systems we cannot fix or adapt at all.
This is one of the videos I dreamed was available, and here it is. This is like a college intro course. I need more!
10:50 Note to self: Go fish up a bunch of SDI equipment
Having lived in both Cleveland and Youngstown markets, I appreciate the thoroughness
Im 37. I grew up with rabbit ears, and RF cables for my genesis, ps1, snes, etc...
I did not know 99%of this video. Very informative, thanks
WCIA 3 broadcast VHF Channel 3 throughout Central and Eastern Illinois since 1953. Most of their reach throughout Central Illinois was due to a rebroadcast signal on UHF WCFN Channel 49 that started in the 1960s.
I grew up in South Western Indiana, and I could pick up WCIA on a cloudy day. I actually know a couple people that work there now
@@thomasvlaskampiii6850Yup, I grew up watching WCIA 3 and knew all to well about using ch.4 instead of ch.3. Realized later on that most people used ch.3 for their RF modulator because channel 3 was uncommon over the air station. Years later while going to college, I worked at WCIA as a studio tech. In master control they had an off air monitor just for WCFN 49 out of Springfield for confidence. It had a grainy picture because it was so far away; they had top mounted UHF antennas on their tower out back just to pick it up. On a cloudy day sometimes you might see 49 in your home, but it was rare. Along with WRSP 55 out of Springfield. A station only available on cable locally. Was so happy when they launched it's sister station WCCU 27 that could be picked up. Right before FOX network started regular weekend broadcasts.
I was wondering about some of the topics you covered. excellent video, Recently found I have a soft spot for RF after messing around with some RF only sets and devices. As a Clevelander I'll be sure to set my modulators to 4 from now on to keep our heritage alive!
5:22 that’s what she said
lmao good one
Thank you for making this a duck hunt Sunday sir, god bless you. Firing up my crt now!
Very interesting video on the American system. Here in the UK VHF and UHF were 2 completely incompatible systems so all VCRs and Games consoles had to be UHF usually CH 36/37 for colour tv.
Please note america, coloUr has a u in it .. If ya gonna do english do it right
What are you talking about? In the UK it's COLOUR as I have spelt it.
Just ignore this guy. Both ways of spelling color are fine.
Daniel Webster simplified American spelling in 1828, and the Brits are still having a hard time getting over it, almost 200 years later!
@@leewatts1570we do, we had wars in 1776 and 1812 where we decided the UK sucks at everything.
Fun fact about the toploader NES, the original Japanese Famicom was exclusively RF out while the original international NES supported composite video. However, the international toploading NES redesign cut composite support, probably to save on production costs. The Japanese Famicom redesign, on the other hand, known as the AV Famicom, added composite video as an additional feature.
In the early 80s for a while our CATV box and VCR used the same channel (4) which worked great, since you just turned the VCR on and off and the TV worked like an auto-input-switching monitor: with both the TV and VCR set to 4 you never had to touch either tuner. Then the cable company box was "upgraded" to output on channel 2, so whenever you turned on the VCR, "clunk clunk" the TV dial from 2 over to 4 and then back again when you turned it off...
This is super interesting, but seeing all these old pictures really gets my nostalgia going!
7:55 I was watching the "Spats Bear" channel video with the small TV you commented on, and that set differed from the norm for portables by having TV tuning knobs seperate from radio dial. The lowest cost set up would be VHFlo/VHFhi/UHF/AM/FM all on one linear dial. Which made me think today if any set combined the adjacent VHFlo & FM bands. So here you have it. Since it was a TV audio only receiver, it had no CRT to disable by going into FM. This radio squashes the entire FM band into a very small space making tuning hard and frequency identification downright impossible.
Because it's a GPX!!
@@versedbridge4007 😂😂😂
Those VCRs usually didn't have the numbers in the windows when you bought them. They were all blank and you'd tune each local station you could get. Any space could be VHF or UHF. My area has 3, 8, 20, 22, 30, 40, 61. Once you had them tuned you'd put the labels in each window to label the ones you had set. I remember my parents getting a tv with that type of tuner and it was so hard for them to find the channels then figure out what channel they were. They didn't have Bugs on the screen so you'd have to wait for a station ID during commercials
I’m glad you mentioned Philadelphia. I grew up in South Jersey where we had CBS 3 so we always had to use channel 4
@@TechTimeWithEric Before 1995, KYW 3 was an NBC affiliate and WCAU (Channel 10) was the CBS station.
@@KRAWofficial that’s neat information. I was born in 84 so I guess by the time I was old enough to understand TV stations they changed. I grew up right across the river from Wilmington in the town Bruce Willis grew up in. We never had cable until I was an adult so I still remember:
3 - CBS
6 - ABC
10- NBC
12- PBS
17 - was something else became CW?
23- NJN
29- Fox
35- always something weird
40- TBN
48- can’t remember what it was called but they had music videos Friday nights
57- WPSG
61- WPPX Wilmington
@@TechTimeWithEric WPHL Channel 17 was a WB affiliate until September 2006, after that it became a MyNetworkTV affiliate until September 1st, 2023 (when WPHL 17 became a CW station and WPSG 57 became an independent station again).
@@TechTimeWithEric Channel 48’s call sign was WGTW, channel 35’s call sign was WYBE.
@@TechTimeWithEric P.S. I was born in ‘97 in the actual City of Philadelphia
I grew up in rural southern Indiana where two of our main stations were WTTV 4 out of Indy (RIP Cowboy Bob) and WAVE 3 out of Louisville. We would change the RF switch and channel based upon which way the antenna wasn't turned at the time. Fond memories.
In my area of Springfield MO, we had to use channel 4. Channel 3 was taken. Now that analog TV is out we can use either. It was amusing trying to use channel 3 to play Nintendo.
Good old KYTV. Another Ch. 4 user here.
Loving the shout out of my hometown news station!!
5:00 I used to use one of those thin, screwless, coaxial cables used to connect a VCR to a television.
I used it to connect my Verizon FiOS® cable box to the wall. There were a few channels that wouldn't come in unless I moved the cable just right. It was hanging among other cables behind the television.
So yeah, there's a reason that proper cables are as thick and inflexible as they are, but I didn't care because I preferred the convenience of the thin flexible cable that could be unplugged without screwing. 😊
Channels 3 and 4 were close enough in frequency that they could interfere with each other, so as a rule the FCC would not license both of them in the same market. That meant that one or the other of them would be available no matter where you were in the US (and it was usually 3 that was open). With respect to picking up TV audio on FM radio: The KQ2 antenna was built on a hill that was probably outside of St. Joseph, MO when it was constructed, but the city expanded and by the time I was in college I had an apartment that was only about half a mile from the base of the tower. I could pick up Channel 2's audio at several points on the FM band (I suspect this was due to unintentional and probably technically illegal leakage of harmonics because KQ2 was not the most professionally run station).
Yes thank you for the Chicago pun, made me smile 😀 (I refuse to call that album Chicago 2!)
I sometimes still miss being able to listen to channel 6 on an FM radio! When I was a kid growing up in the 80s our local NBC affiliate was on channel 6 (now it's virtual 6, digital UHF 17.) Back then Saturday morning cartoons were a big deal. One of the ways my dad could get me to leave the house with him on Saturday mornings was to agree to listen to channel 6 on the radio in his work truck while we were out. That way I could at least listen to my favorite cartoons while we ran errands.
Listening to channel 6 on a FM radio was also the best way at the time to listen to music in stereo for shows like Friday Night Videos or Saturday Night Live before stereo TVs became common and before local cable TV offered stereo capable cable boxes.
I can also still remember watching & listening to Super Bowl XX in 86 in glorious stereo via the FM simulcast piped in from my parents giant Montgomery Wards console stereo. It normally sat in a different room in the house but for that Super Bowl it had been temporarily moved into the living room alongside the still fairly new 25 inch console TV. At that point that TV was one of the largest sets I had ever seen! Those were the days! :)
Yep, old Atari units are kinda funky. I've got two Atari 2600s, the heavy sixer only outputs on Ch. 3, whereas the light sixer has a channel switch recessed into the bottom that has to be flipped with a screwdriver. Your choices, as the manual stated, were "Channel A" (2) or "Channel B" (3, default setting).
Funnily enough, when I was young, we had a station very close to us broadcasting on channel 3. Never had a problem with interference using channel 3 to play the family Super Nintendo, even up through the digital transition.
I grew up during this time and I'm an avid gamer so I was very familiar with "channel 3" but I never knew why, very cool video!
I have SDI output on one of my DVD players. There were mod available to add it. Many folk’s were using it to bypass the onboard video processing on the DVD player and using external video processors instead.
*Folks.
Forks 🍴
I lived in southern NJ, and we used 4 because we got Philadelphia's channels, including 3 (NBC). The NES was the only reason I used an RF switch.
Cleveland (well, a suburb. Close enough) represent!
I was born and raised in Lorain. Where you from?
THANK YOU. Let me explain. 3:20 for YEARS, I wondered what those knobs were for under the panel on my dad’s Sony. I never knew because I was only … oh, I guess maybe 11 or 12 when he had that unit. Anyway, even though that is long gone from my life, I always wanted to know what those were for.
THANK YOU for ending that mystery.
🤜💥🤛
I'm surprised that Panasonic crt tv is still working, what a beaut!
I have the same set, for what they are they are quite reliable sets.
Important to note for NA regions, that DTV physical channels, which most often different from the virtual channel number, a TV will show after tuned to, broadcast just off set of the frequency, used for the audio of analog TV broadcasts on that channel, so if using an RF adapter for a game console today, on an old analog RF input only device, and getting strange audio artifacts on one channel, check to see if any DTV channels in your area are physically broadcasting on 3 or 4, plus it possible DTV physical broadcasts on 2 or 5, could cause co channel interference too on 3 or 4
In Australia, Nintendo always used low VHF, I think they used Channel 1, because ABC TV was on channel 2, and I can remember tuning our family TV to get the N64 to work and the N64 would be on a channel below the ABC. I think most other products used UHF, certainly the Sega Master System and Commodore 64C I had used UHF, I don't know what channel they used. Now I think I understand why the picture quality on my Commodore 64C was so poor and the audio was so badly affected by buzz and hum and other unpleasant noises, I don't think the cable I used was good enough or shielded well enough to prevent interference. I initially thought it was due to a broken/poorly designed RF modulator in the unit. I'm out of my depth here because I never really knew what frequencies televisions used in Australia. We only had 2 broadcast TV stations on UHF here, SBS on channel 28, and channel 31.
For us Americans at the time, If we wanted to play on the SNES, we had to use channel 95 or 96 on the RF side of things
I mean, looking at the chart, if everybody used channel 2, and any place using channel 3 wasn’t using 4, then 3 and 4 are the go-to options. There didn’t appear to be any major cities using both, so you were safe anywhere with the option to use one or the other.
The RF connector was the only way the oldest consoles connected, like the Atari 2600, ColecoVision, IntelliVision, etc. It would connect to a TV/Game switch. In fact the oldest ones had those "Y" connectors that had to screw in on the back of the TV.
Yep. I remember having to screw down the forks on the back of the old tvs.
Well, I don't know what I was expecting. This was really interesting though, considering it was randomly recommended by RUclips.
1:40 Channel 69 Allentown PA, just north of Philly. As the biggest cities grew and new stations signed on in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, VHF filled up first then UHF got busy. Growing up in Philly, we were close enough to NYC to have a lot of channels already taken, and big enough in our own right to still be getting new stations. New licensees for full-power stations had to go high on UHF. By 1980 we in Philly already had 48, with 23/52 being NJ PBS. 57 went live around 1981, and 65 went live not long after in far south Jersey, Vineland. 69 was probably the next available. But if I recall correctly, nobody got a license for a station at 70-83. If another new station came, it would have been in that block. The FCC began dismantling UHF in 1983 and in 2017 everything above channel 37 got the ax.
You forgot to mention channel 61 (licensed to Wilmington, DE, which became a PAX/Ion station), and channel 62 (originally licensed to Atlantic City, NJ, now licensed to Mount Laurel, NJ as a Telemundo affiliate).
Fun fact: Allentown had another TV station with the “WFMZ” call sign that originally transmitted on UHF channel 67 from December 1954 to April 1955.
Channel 14 in Maryland is Public Access. PAC allows the greater Eastren Shore to receive updates in our communities. Travel outside to Baltimore, and they use channel 13. Channel 13 is WZBL News . Channel 1 is now reserved for Xfinity ppv. TV Channel 200 range is no longer used and was switched to the 800 range