Now more than ever, it seems that America's coastal/northern and inland/southern cultures and attitudes are so far apart as to be nearly irreconcilable. Would moving the nightly network news and morning and late night shows to Tulsa or Birmingham help close the gap?
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All our TV stations are off the air
- Thread starter gar hi
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Now more than ever, it seems that America's coastal/northern and inland/southern cultures and attitudes are so far apart as to be nearly irreconcilable. Would moving the nightly network news and morning and late night shows to Tulsa or Birmingham help close the gap?
Yep. New York stations had full 15 khz sound from way back. The further you got from New York, the more network TV sound was like AM radio. This persisted until around 1978 or so.
The networks would still have their Washington offices, and probably ones in NYC and LA for the financial center and entertainment center respectively. All that would change would be technical ops, and the anchors would move there.
I suspect that after the pandemic is over, we will see a lot less "central office" stuff in every business. Some will work from home, others will be in less expensive and congested cities. It will hurt LA and Chicago and NYC and help places like Atlanta and Austin and Nashville.
I realize now that the problem wasn't the TV repack, but I mentioned it because of seeing things about stations being down or on lower power during it, but is that actually still going on? It went smoothly with no problems to my knowledge for the Memphis and Jackson, TN area stations in my area that had to move, which weren't many.
When I visited relatives in Nashville in the 70's I could tell that they had better quality sound than the Memphis area stations, but I didn't know how much of that was actual sound quality at the stations, because my relatives had TVs with better sound, or a combination of both.
The TV audio left New York on 5kHz equalized circuits. The longer the lines, the higher the noise level from the telco equalized circuits.
The frequency response remained pretty much consistent from coast to coast.
The frequency response remained pretty much consistent from coast to coast.
I was in Honolulu during the Moon landing. Knowing that radio from the mainland was going to be scarce (and none of the radio stations in Honolulu invested in an undersea audio link) I packed my Zenith Trans-Oceanic. VOA had every transmitter going on every frequency they could. SW came through. Didn't miss a thing.
Another interesting thing I remember was there were times when the Baltimore and Washington stations would come in strong and interfere with the New York stations on the same channels.
During prime time shows at night on channel 2, for example, there would be a slight echo effect in the sound when the New York station and Baltimore station were mixing with each other.
WMAR channel 2 in Baltimore was a CBS affiliate at the time like WCBS channel 2 in New York.
And thanks for all the interesting replies.
I've learned so much about the early days of TV that I never knew about!
I just missed the satellite link because I left the end of the end of my junior year in high school. Spring 1965. I do remember the talk that it was coming, but I don't recall any particulars. The closest thing to live network TV that I remember was KGMB-TV running a tape of Walter Cronkite's CBS News broadcast flown in from Los Angeles. Assuming the plane made it in on time....which usually it did. As a practical matter, that meant "Uncle Walter" usually showed up on your TV at around 12:30AM.
As for live radio from the mainland, that was pretty much limited to KGU (760) carrying the TOH hourly newscasts from NBC. I also remember live San Francisco Giants broadcasts on KGU, as well as live NBC coverage of the 1964 Presidential Election. All of these via phone lines of rather poor audio quality.
I'm sure the "lay of the land" in the days before satellite feeds changed periodically before the year I spent at McKinley High School in Honolulu, but that was the scene as I remember it from a distance of more than half a century.
(Also a correction from my first post.... I referred to the Honolulu NBC-TV affilliate as KALA Ch2, I should have said KONA. I seem to remember that one KONA's rebroadcasters serving the other islands might have used the KALA calls. (Channel 7 on Maui?) But I'm not sure about that.
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I remember hearing "actualities" in English being broadcast on Deutsche Welle, the West German SW service, in the late '60s. The program was introduced as "Newsfeed! Actuality news for American radio!" and consisted of about a dozen brief reports from DW correspondents, preceded by each segment's time and outcue info (the last few words). I wonder just how many American broadcasters recorded and used these items.
All thanks to AT&T Long Lines. It fed network TV audio on circuits just like network radio used. In 1978, the sound was finally married to the picture and the quality could improve. In 1979, NPR went to a satellite feed that eliminated any noise level. Someone at NPR in Washington, D.C., sounded like they were in the same room in Washington State. The other networks followed.
Or, for the benefit of this group, you never realize how much you appreciate radio until you don’t have it!
I know on the Big Island, other than translators, most of the TV stations come from a single site. If a consolidated site had major tower or electrical work, all stations would have to go dark OTA.
Does the single site cover all of the big island? I was on the big island for a few days during the week between Christmas and New Years 1964. On the Kona cost, which is the opposite side of the island (and the mountain) from where gar is. TV there, came from the Maui relays of the Honolulu stations. And you had to peer through varying degrees of snow to see it.
There are actually two sites, one on the Kailua KONA side and one looking toward Hilo. They're tied together with microwave links.
I remember in our area (Not in Hawaii) stations going off. I called to find out and they said they were still on cable/satellite, but be week before returning due to the repack or something. They also said it's possible in the future broadcast stations may be only via cable/sat or the mobile and not off the air. I couldn't find much info on that part or the station person didn't have a clue.
That is just a prediction. About as definite as a county fair fortune teller!
For the moment, it is necessary for TV stations to use over the air facilities as a significant percentage of homes do not have cable, satellite of a preferred internet video provider. In particular, many of the homes that don't have those services are lower income and can't/shouldn't be required to pay for services for what they can get "free" today off the air.
There are three different transmitter sites in and around Hilo for all the stations I get on this side of the island.
And I believe there are one or two transmitter sites on the Kona side but I don't think they get nearly the same large variety of stations over there.
But those viewers are worth less to advertisers than people who can afford to pay for TV, so it's certainly possible that broadcasters will abandon OTA to improve the bottom line, reduce expenses and slash payroll (all of which will get Wall Street drooling) unless there's a government mandate to continue to provide programming for poorer folks, isn't it?
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