NYC, LA and SLC Had The Maximum Number of VHF TV Stations

[lanceventa]

Yoiu might want to read THIS

KBDI-TV - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Any source that can be edited by anyone should not be taken as 100% fact.

But in this case you're simply misunderstanding one line in that entry. "KBDI-TV serves as Colorado's secondary public television station to Rocky Mountain PBS" doesn't mead it is a secondary service. It means it's the #2 PBS station in the market.

 

[Route66Fan]

And some were built elsewhere, such as KTWU at Washburn University in Topeka, which was on channel 11. Interesting enough, once translators were transformed into LPTVs, KU built an LPTV on channel 6. @route56 probably knows a lot more about that than I do.

The University of Missouri's KOMU became all-commercial after the FCC turned down an MU proposal to operate half-time commercial and half-time educational. Central Missouri had no noncommercial allocation until 1965. That one almost was lit up in the 1990s when St. Louis's KETC proposed building a satellite station in Columbia, but then the digital transition happened and channel 36 instead became the transitional UHF frequency for...KOMU. The public TV station that finally did arrive in central Missouri was on a commercial allocation, and once had operated commercially. (Edit: I wrote this in a slightly misleading way and need to clarify it. KMOS in Sedalia actually became an educational station in 1979, but did not have a good signal in much of central Missouri until it erected a tall tower near Syracuse, Missouri, in the 2000s.)

As for Broomfield's PBS12, it is definitely a secondary service (in the sense of not having first dibs on PBS programming, not in technical terms). Rocky Mountain PBS (KRMA) is primary, with stations in Denver, Pueblo, Durango, Steamboat Springs, and Grand Junction, plus numerous translators. As far as I can tell, the Broomfield station doesn't have that kind of reach.

(Multiple edits here; sorry, as I was typing the original post, an ocular migraine took hold and I was struggling somewhat just to get the post written.)

I had found out that there was a UHF translator in Columbia, MO (K56AU, Ch. 56.), that off & on, from about 1979-early 80's, rebroadcast KETC, Ch. 9, St. Louis, MO (It was originally supposed to rebroadcast KCPT-TV, Ch. 19, Kansas City, MO, but reception issues forced them to switch to KETC.).

That LPTV was owned by New Wave Corporation, which also owned KOPN-FM & was sold to TBN in 1986 & was shut down in the early 2010's.

 

[Y2kTheNewOldies]

There seems to be a word or two missing.

I know what you mean it's "to sell" in the reprints specifically about how WBKB call letters had moved from Channel 4 to channel 7 in Chicago while CBS was getting ready move WBBM from Channel 4 to Channel 2 in able to make way for WTMJ Milwaukee to air on the Channel 4 signal in the 1950's.

 

[Mark Roberts]

I had found out that there was a UHF translator in Columbia, MO (K56AU, Ch. 56.), that off & on, from about 1979-early 80's, rebroadcast KETC, Ch. 9, St. Louis, MO (It was originally supposed to rebroadcast KCPT-TV, Ch. 19, Kansas City, MO, but reception issues forced them to switch to KETC.).

That LPTV was owned by New Wave Corporation, which also owned KOPN-FM & was sold to TBN in 1986 & was shut down in the early 2010's.

Oh, that saga. I was living in Columbia when most of that happened, actually saw the station's broadcasts the few times it was on the air, and can go into great detail about it. I won't; I can say you have the general outlines mostly correct. K56AU actually began in 1977 with the idea of picking up KCPT off-the-air from the roof of Paquin Tower, where the KOPN antenna was located. But Columbia was too far away for consistent reception of KCPT. So the primary station was switched to KETC, channel 9. This time, a microwave relay was set up between Columbia and a location on the high prairie of western Callaway County, about 20 miles. K56AU came back on the air in 1979. But there were multiple problems. The microwave gear was used, and old, and often the audio and video were not in sync. While the Callaway site was closer to St. Louis than Columbia would have been, there were still co-channel interference issues with Kansas City's KMBC. There were also problems with audio bleeding in from Columbia's KOMU, channel 8. The translator's transmitter also did not work reliably.

New Wave's ultimate plan was to have a full-power station on channel 23, having petitioned the FCC to add that channel to Columbia's allocations at the start of the project. But it just didn't have the financial resources to even get a translator going, much less a full-fledged station.

I'm pretty sure K56AU was off the air by 1980, 1981 at the latest. New Wave sold it to TBN in 1986.

In the meantime, Sedalia's KMOS-TV on channel 6, which had been owned by Jefferson City's KRCG-TV and utilized as a lower-powered satellite station, thereby keeping a third VHF network affiliate out of the market, was donated to Central Missouri State University in 1977. Late in 1979, KMOS came back on the air at full power from a tower north of Sedalia. In theory, it should have been easily received in Columbia. However, in the years that KMOS was at low power, the educational portion of Columbia's FM dial filled up, including KCOU at 88.1. KCOU got there first and, with 430 watts ERP, would cause significant interference to channel 6, and no one could do anything about it. Columbia Cablevision carried the station, but had difficulty getting a good-quality picture.

There's also a tangent regarding the whole history of cable TV in Columbia; I'll just allude to it by saying that availability of PBS programming was a big incentive to get that done, especially considering that Columbia was home to the big state university and two other colleges, but there were powerful local interests working against it, including one of the local newspapers. When Columbia finally got cable TV in 1977, it ended up with a pretty good system, but the path there took at least a decade to travel.

There's also yet another tangent regarding KMOS's own history and its struggles, and still another regarding the reason KOMU was a commercial station owned by a state university, so you can probably determine by now that this was one screwed-up TV market.