It's funny to look back at photos like this when so many of us are familiar with all the buttons, knobs and switches and most recently touch screen controls on radios that have been around for the past few decades at least. That said, if you only wanted/needed AM in the car, this most definitely did the trick!As late as 1990, GM and Ford still had AM-only radios available as a delete option. And in 1985 Chrysler introduced the first AM-only car radio with digital tuning:
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(car radios) FM Required (1973) ?
- Thread starter kfbkfb
- Start date
That's right. I remember that.
AM only radios allowed some stations to at least have the "I only have AM in my work car" audience, some of those being full or partial simulcasts with FM stations.
This ad is not so much saying "Wow! AM radio!" as it is "It's a cheap car, but not so cheap that you have to pay extra for stuff that's standard on real cars."
12.8% financing? Good gawd!
Those interest rates were on their way down. They peaked at or above 16% in the late 70s.
By the way, in 1970, the average new car loan interest rate was 11.5%. Worth noting that the upside was that through the 1960s, standard bank savings accounts paid 7.5-8.5% interest. And savings interest rates went up as the auto loan interest rates did, though not as high and not as long---peaking at 14.5% in 1975.
Single-digit car loan interest rates are pretty much a 90s and later phenomenon.
I had relatives that lived in Peoria, IL. which was another all UHF city. and they had one of those adapters on their set.
In West TN there were no UHF stations until WPTY (now WATN) 24 in Memphis came on in 1978.
In Illinois and Indiana, there was lots of UHF network affiliates outside of Chicago and Indianapolis prior to the All Channel Act going into effect in 1964. Peoria, South Bend, Fort Wayne, Muncie, and Lafayette were all-UHF (the latter two were one-station markets). Rockford, Champaign/Springfield/Decatur, and Evansville were markets with one commercial VHF and the rest UHF (the latter two also had educational stations on VHF). Milwaukee and St. Louis were also one-VHF/several UHF markets in the mid 1950s.
The problem with UHF tuners/converters prior to the 1970s was that they were next to useless. They had a diode mixer, a drifty local oscillator, and maybe an IF amplifier tuned to to the VHF-LO output frequency. Vacuum tubes in the '50s and transistors that barely worked at UHF in the '60s. It was as necessary to have a big UHF antenna then as it is for digital TV today. UHF receiver technology just was not there yet. It was bad enough to get the lower UHF channels; receiving the translators on Channels 70-83 were almost impossible outside of a 5 mile radius, between high frequencies and very low power.
Sacramento had stations going back to the pre-freeze years in the early 50's, and they were local to the whole market which included Modesto. They would not have been rebroadcasting a station from San Francisco as Sacramento is a huge market and has been since that era.
Modesto had a brand new Channel 14 in that era, so that would have been local. Sacramento had 3, 6, 10, 40 and 46 back in 1960.
Sometime in the early 1980s I was doing post-production on some car commercials that had been shot at a local dealer, basic pitchman walk and talk stuff. Part of this involved adding the “disclaimer font” (very small type) giving all the legally required loan finance info.
Interest rate for a car loan at this dealer? 24%. Ouch. This was at a time when home mortgages could be 18% or more.
Typical power for such UHF translators was 100 watts, a puny level for analog TV at 800 MHz. Usually they just covered a small town and nothing beyond.
I recall visiting my grandparents in 1964 when they lived for a short time in western Pennsylvania, not far from Youngstown, Ohio. That was an all UHF market, with the three network affiliates on channels 21, 27 and 33. Their set had (IIRC) a 1950’s era Blonder-Tongue UHF converter that actually worked pretty well…but they also had a tall rooftop antenna. They also got fuzzy but viewable signals from some of the Pittsburgh VHF stations.
The UHF converter looked a lot like this (and perhaps was…): https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/blonder_to_uhf_converter_99_btc_99_b.html
The Sacramento TV market didn't include Modesto until the 1500-foot candelabra in Walnut Grove for 3/10/13 went on the air in 1962. Sacramento didn't even have TV at all until 1953 (KCCC-TV 40, which didn't reach Stockton at all) and didn't start getting VHF signals until 1955 (KCRA 3 and KBET 10). Stockton had KOVR 13 starting in 1954, but because its Mount Diablo signal reached the East Bay, none of the big three networks would affiliate with it to avoid competition with their SF signals. KCRA and KBET/KXTV were both at locations in the foothills that reached Sacramento well but didn't get into Modesto at all or very well into Stockton. There was also KTVU on 36 in Stockton, which lasted from 1953 to 1955.
Point being - if you were trying to watch TV in Stockton or especially Modesto before 1962, you were almost certainly pointing a big rooftop antenna at San Francisco.
Point being - if you were trying to watch TV in Stockton or especially Modesto before 1962, you were almost certainly pointing a big rooftop antenna at San Francisco.
That looks very close to the one we had. Antenna configurations where I grew up were, a VHF antenna pointed to Dayton for 2 and 7, a UHF antenna pointed to Fort Wayne for 15, 21 and 33, and a smaller UHF antenna for WIMA-TV 35, Lima
That’s exactly the model those of us who didn’t spring for cable in Bishop, CA in the 1960s had.
Good point.
My objection to the original post is that it insinuates that SF signals were rebroadcast in Stockton or Modesto ("pumped in") where at that time most reception of non-local signals was done by putting a tower next to the house and stacking some antennas on a pole stuck in a rotor. The poster referred to "1960" by which time the facilities up and down the valley, from Sacramento to Bakersfield, were fairly decent and receivable with the big antenna systems folks had back then.
We had such a system in Omena, MI, in the late 50's to pick up Traverse City (about 25 miles) and Cadillac (about 50 miles to the site). I can recall enduring rather spotty reception of both stations as we watched the 1960 Democrat and Republican conventions, including climbing the tower when the rotor decided not to spin.
This thread illustrates one of the myriad reasons I appreciate Radio Discussions so much. It started out discussing whether or not FM radios were mandated in cars (which turned out to be false), then moved on to a whack of topics including mortgage, auto loan and savings account rates, and then to UHF TV distribution and reception 
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