Whatever happened to Channel 1? | Hacker News Reader

Whatever happened to Channel 1?

tech-notes.tv

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Another historical note, within a locality it was almost always the case that only every other broadcast channel was used, e.g. 2-4-6-8... or 3-5-7-9... to reduce interference from adjacent channels.

That's why old VCRs, DVD players, home computers, and other devices that used an RF modulator to connect to a TV display could typically be set to transmit on channel 3 or channel 4, because one of those was almost always unused in a given area.

The Kansas City area has channel 4 (WDAF) and channel 5 (KCTV).

I thought for a moment this was about the propaganda "Channel 1" I was forced to watch every morning in home class in my Texan middle-school.

Propaganda?

Maybe not so much propaganda as being fairly heavy on advertising.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_One_News#Controversy

Though I would not be surprised to learn that it has the same sort of biased reporting we see in other news media.

Yeah. There were always a lot of commercials, but they were always enjoyable commercials. If you're going to eat up air time with commercials, at least make them entertaining. Middle school me loved most their selection - especially a specific soda's advertising campaign.

> If you're going to eat up air time with commercials

You mean education time, right? You're using up classroom time to watch commercials.

I don't understand how enjoyable they were is relevant. Of course a bunch of eight year olds getting sold sugary drinks to enjoyed them more than learning, that doesn't remotely address why it is wrong.

I'm not trying to address whether or not advertising belongs at all. I'm speaking from the viewpoint of a child aged 10-13.

Targeted advertising back then (can't speak for that same age group today) was largely boring. They may have moved units by showing us how fun their toys were or how deliciously awesome their products tasted, but they were still just filler between programming in our eyes. The commercials for Channel One were largely entertaining.

Yes, they pushed a product in hopes of us getting our parents to line their pockets during education time. I don't think that anyone can deny that that's pretty scummy. Point is that at least their scummy practices were entertaining. Silver lining and all that junk.

> Though I would not be surprised to learn that it has the same sort of biased reporting we see in other news media.

I remember it as not being very biased, just watered down, often with some kind of "teen" angle.

Channel 1 was basically a vehicle to deliver captive audiences of teenage schoolchildren directly to advertisers. They bribed schools with TVs and justified the programming with the minimum proportion of educational news content, so they could use school to force feed teenagers Clearasil ads. The news content was just the sugar coating on the pill to make it palatable to schools and teachers.

IIRC, Anderson Cooper (of CNN) got his start there in the 90s.

Yep, Anderson Cooper constantly talking about his flak jacket and Lisa Ling. And the force feeding worked. I still remember the damn Pepsi Clear commercials and some big vote for a new m&m's color. ugh.

You are probably right about the forced advertising but I have mostly positive memories of Channel 1. I actually think those programs/TVs probably help peak a lot of kid's interest in media. The school I went to had their own news broadcast that came on every Friday. It was entirely produced by the students and everyone really enjoyed it. A good friend of mine was a part of that program and went on to become a TV camera man. It wasn't all bad and we probably could have used some Clearasil.

Sort of. Daily news lite, pronouncements from the principal, appeals to school spirit and patriotism, pledge of allegiance, school accomplishments, etc.

Oh, right, it ran after the school's local news for us, I'm mis-remembering. Fun stuff, though. Texas!

Advertising you're required to watch, woven into a "Daily News for Young People" program. The schools likely constrain how interesting the subject matter can be, so you probably get a lot of "Hey, kids are doing interesting things" mixed in with dry news.

Never saw it, but I can imagine it feeling like propaganda.

Really, the title is just a teaser. I thought this was a rewarding read and I just learned a hell of a lot about the history of radio.

I don't suppose anyone has any book recommendations on the subject besides the ones mentioned in the article?

Agreed. I found the breakdown of how the NTSC standards were formed very interesting.

Not all the channels were usable in one area. Tuners were not very good at rejecting harmonics back then.

Today, we have phones with four or five radio receivers and three transmitters operating without interference. It's amazing that works. Receivers are far, far better than they were in the tube era.

> Receivers are far, far better than they were in the tube era.

Only two "far"s? That's a significant understatement :P

For something like this, I think SI prefixes would be useful. "Kilofar" or "megafar" might be appropriate here.

Surprisingly, a lot of that improvement comes from miniaturization and from better capacitors. The tubes themselves weren't really bad but they were power hungry and physically large. The capacitors, however, in the 1960s were terrible.

Doesn't a more sensitive receiver make the harmonic issue worse? In one case it fades out into background in the other you precisely measure it!

It's not that modern receivers are more sensitive, but that they are more selective. Harmonic or "image" rejection can achieve 20 to 60 dB in commercial applications today. The first and last sections of this paper may help explain: http://www.plextekrfi.com/images/pdfs/RF_mixer_design.pdf

A long, long time ago when there were only 4 channels to watch on our B&W TV, I asked my dad this question. He said something about it interfering with radio traffic but his apocryphal speculation was that it was so that no one network would get to be "#1".

Australia even had channel 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATV_(Australia)

As did Public Enemy:

http://genius.com/Public-enemy-she-watch-channel-zero-lyrics

The FCC seemed extremely responsive and considerate back then. I wonder how long things would have taken now-a-days to get consensus and authorizations

WWII had a big influence on making the public a stomach more direct orders and not complain as much.

Over 10 years to get their bands?

Project idea: Make a television system from vacuum tubes that broadcasts in the unlicensed home bands (2.4GHz & 5GHz). It could be either digital or analog, but it needs to use vacuum tubes. I'd like to see if such technologies would have been possible back in the 40's. Bonus points if they could transmit hi-def signals (1+ megapixels)

You "might" be able to do transmissions that high with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krytron

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As the article mentions, Amateur Radio Operators have been active in Amateur TV (ATV) since day one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_television

The Hams don't use the Commercial TV frequencies of course, but transmit on the Amateur bands.

See the Wikipedia article for frequencies used (including the bands that you mentioned).

And yes, years ago the Hams built their own gear using vacuum tubes. These days they are building Digital and HD TV.

Do a search on "Amateur TV", it's still a big part of the hobby.

If you hunt around, you will find many books and constructional articles on ATV.

Oh, and to build your own Amateur TV station you'll need the appropriate grade of Ham license.

Although I can't find it in his online bio former FCC commissioner James Quello was an early television pioneer at Michigan State University in the early thirties.

The campus ham station, W8SH, has pictures in their archives of Quello's setup which could only transmit pictures the length of the engineering lab.

I always wondered why cable networks couldn't have a Channel 1, even though it wasn't allowed on broadcast. After all, there's no other radio traffic in a coax cable to compete with.

I suppose it could have posed a problem if there was any RF leakage from the cable network.

Probably because by time cable came out, TVs were not manufactured that could tune to channel 1.

You didn't select cable channels with the tuner, though. My recollection is that you attached the cable box to the TV, tuned the TV to whatever channel was used to display hardline input, then selected channels on the cable box.

Eventually cable-ready TVs came out with the cable selector built-in, but they still weren't using the radio tuning mechanism to select hardline cable channels.

> You didn't select cable channels with the tuner,

That heavily depended upon what the CATV provider did in your area. In many areas, TV channels 2-13 were transmitted verbatim on the coax, and could be tuned by a NTSC TV just by hooking up the coax (usually via an impedance matching transformer) to the antenna inputs of the TV.

This, of course, did create a 'leakage' problem. If the coax leaked somewhere, people without cable got ghosting. But worse, if the TV picked up some of the over the air signal (quite common actually) that was on the identical frequency, you got ghosting even with CATV.

CATV started as a long-distance antenna for communities where signal was bad or impossible to receive (hilly areas, etc).

The addition of premium channels, etc came much later.

They sometimes did. It just wasn't super-common because people expected the single digits to be populated by broadcast channels (in fact, they often moved UHF channels to single digits so they'd all be in a continuous block).

When I was little, the local cable company in Dallas used Channel 1 as a tutorial channel where they looped videos showing how to operate the cable box and its remote. They eventually killed that, though, and just left Channel 1 empty.

In other localities, they have actual programming on Channel 1. For example, NYC had the news channel NY1 on Channel 1 until 2010.

When I was growing up channel 1 (on the cable box) was used for pay-per-view.

channel 1 in the United Kingdom

a.k.a. BBC One (http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcone).

For the sort of "channels" discussed in the article, the UK hasn't used a channel 1[1] for TV since 1985, as VHF was only used for the older 405 line TV system. Newer 625 line analogue TV[2] was and digital terrestrial TV is UHF only in the UK, and UHF channels are numbered from 21.

For convenience most TVs mapped the channels onto buttons 1/2/3/4 for analogue but behind the scenes they would be something like channels 27/29/31/33. Modern DTT channel numbers are also completely separate from what radio channel each TV channel is actually being carried on.

[1] The definition of "channel 1" is different in different countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_channel_frequencies

[2] BBC2 was UHF / 625 only at launch in 1964, BBC1 and ITV started in 1969 when they introduced colour. Analogue ended late 2012.

Indeed, if you're in the UK and you set up a new analogue TV (a few years ago when the transmitters still ran) or a new digital TV (still possible now obviously), the first thing it does is scan the entire UHF and VHF bands detecting channels, assigning them channel numbers in the order it finds them (analogue) or by some other algorithm I don't know (digital - it's not as simple as just a fixed number).

Not criticising your facts but [2] would be better rewritten as:

>BBC1 and ITV started in 1969 when they introduced colour.

>BBC1 and ITV started broadcasting on UHF/625 in 1969 when they introduced colour.

Also, my own 2c, BBC1 and ITV continued broadcasting on VHF/405 simultaneously until 1985.

Answer starts in the last section.

1946-1948 Manufacturers quickly began producing television receivers, transmitters, antennas, etc. New television stations were built all over the United States. The FCC had identified the top 140 metropolitan cities and assigned each at least one channel; a total of 400 were to be allotted. The FCC received many more applications than it had available channels. In an effort to provide with as many channels as possible, the FCC routinely threw away the "safety factor" of mileage between licensed transmitters.

But problems began to appear. So, even with just 50 stations on the air, interference problems were beginning to appear. Meanwhile, the FCC had reduced the minimum distance between stations using the same channel to just 80 miles. An engineering study released by the FCC warned of interference problems if immediate action wasn't taken. That lead to an FCC report issued on may 5, 1949, that rules that television could no longer share its frequencies with fixed and mobile services, and that the 72 to 76 MHz band could be used for fixed radio services only.

But where could the mobile services be located if they could no longer share the television allocations, and could no longer be used for use the 72 to 76 MHz band? There was only one place to go -- the television industry would have to give up another television channel. But which channel would that be? The American Radio Relay League (an association of amateur radio operators) urged that Channel 2 be deleted so that the second harmonics of the 28-29.7 MHz amateur radio band would not interfere with television reception. The television industry, although not pleased about losing yet another television channel, agreed that 12 clear channels were preferable to 12 shared channels. If they had to lose a channel, they preferred that it be Channel 1, because its absence would have the least impact on commercial television.

The FCC went along with the television industry's position, and on June 14, 1948, Channel 1 was deleted from the allocation plan. Channel 1"s frequencies were assigned to the land and mobile services. At the same time, the FCC decided not to renumber the channels -- that is what happened to Channel 1.

Apologies - I fat-fingered a mobile downvote instead of the upvote you deserved. Aargh.

I don't know if I would say a quote of the last section 'deserves' an upvote.

tl;dr as more spectrum was used in the late 1940s a channel had to be freed up to deal with interference issues so they picked channel 1 and simply choose not to renumber.

You'd think the article would explore why they didn't renumber, but nope.

Legacy hardware and possible consumer confusion seem like the most likely speculation.

Probably because if you had an old set and were watching on Ch2 but your neighbor was watching the same thing on Ch1 on a new set, that could have been a bit confusing at the dawn of television.

Or, watch ABC news on Ch2 on old sets, but Ch1 on new sets...., wait, do I have an old set or a new set?

you tl;dr people are doing the lord's work. thank you

So instead of reading. --> fast paced audio.

I can read faster than any human can speak intelligibly. Also, it's much easier to skip ahead with text.

I would assume they didn't renumber because TV was becoming popular at this point and it would be a hassle.

Great share. Important data transmissions.

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