Did TV Engineers Know How Digital TV Would Love UHF and Hate VHF?

[IM42A]

It turns out the U.S. government is one of very few that doesn't own TV stations and never claimed any of those channels ABC avoided.

Europeans typically have no concept of channel numbers, and they are almost never used in marketing, logos, and so on. Everything is referred to by what "program" it is on, and back in analog days, receivers would have a row of preset buttons that could be set as desired, such that (for instance) BBC One could be placed in the first button, BBC Two on the second, and so on. There may still be a mix of VHF and UHF in some countries, but the UK has been all-UHF for a long time. Poland, the European country with which I am the most familiar, had a mix of low-V, high-V, and later UHF, just as in the US. They would also do creative things with vertical and horizontal polarization, and most of their stations ran relatively lower power, such that you could have, for example, a channel 2 in Warsaw and in Lublin, a distance of less than 100 miles (not sure if they had different polarization on those stations).

And then there is the situation in Australia where the major networks were named after their OTA analog channel numbers, at least in the larger cities, and promotion is uniform throughout the country. I'm assuming that affiliates of these networks actually got the desired channels wherever possible (similar to how ABC got channel 7 in several major markets), and at any rate, with digital TV, any station could now elect to have its PSIP data reflect 7, 9, 10, and so on, similar to how translators often show up with the parent station's PSIP channel (albeit with a different subchannel in many cases, such as with the various WSOC O&O translators in west-central NC).

When the transition from analog television to digital began in the early 2000s, TV stations could sort of choose where their new digital signals would transmit, UHF or VHF. In analog days, VHF was far superior to UHF. VHF signals traveled better and were received in more distant parts of the coverage area. And to even attempt to be competitive, UHF transmitters had to have crazy power levels.

A signal on UHF, assigned and situated in such a way that everything neatly falls into place (as much a case of luck of the draw of terrain and so on, as anything else), can be the best signal you ever saw. WUNF-33 Asheville NC comes to mind, it gets deep into upstate SC and I even see it here in Columbia when conditions are just right. And then there are the quirks of being in the right spot and hitting all of the knife edges just so, which is the case with WTOC and me. By all measures, I shouldn't get it at all, but it is there with bells on whenever there is even a modest uptick in propagation conditions, and causes problems with getting WBTV on RF 23. WTOC was sensitive to near-DX propagation even in analog days on RF 11.