My parents used to have a TV like that. It was a 13in color TV made in the late 80s. It was bought from either Sears or Kmart, can't remember which one. It was labelled with channels 2 through 13 horizontally across the bottom with a red LED indicator above each channel that would light up when you tuned to it. It even had a remote control that could tune through your preset channels. You could flip down a door on this front panel and inside was a small tuning wheel for each channel along with an even smaller UHF/VHF selector switch for each channel. Inside the door was a small double ended plastic tool that you would use to operate the UHF/VHF switches and tuning wheels. It was annoying to tune in a new channel because you had no idea where you were tuned in the band, you just had to keep scrolling the tuning wheel until you found something. We had it hooked to cable TV in the basement for a while even though it couldn't tune all of the cable TV frequencies. If I recall it could tune everything on cable up until around channel 35 and then from around channel 60 and up. Eventually we paired it with a broken VCR so that we could use the VCR's TV tuner and composite video input with that TV. My parents got rid of it sometime in the late 2000s when they upgraded their living room TV to an LCD and moved their old CRT down in the basement to replace it.
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Old TV Sets Where Each "Number" Had A VHF/UHF Dial
- Thread starter Markxxx
- Start date
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
That's consistent with what I said back in post #10 ... mid- and super-band cable channels A through W "decoded" on set-top converters or cable-ready sets as channels 14 through 36. The higher channels you referenced were actually just an effect of the tuner's UHF capabilities ... cable channel 65 (hyperband channel CCC) was at the same approximate frequency as UHF channel 14).
I recall our first TV was a Zenith console, where a large circular dial tuned VHF channels 2-13 as well as five or six UHF positions--labeled U1, U2, U3, etc--in which you could 'set' a specific UHF channel by using a small, white fine tuning-style knob in the cabinet door behind the big dial. There were gauges for each of the "U" spots with a small indicator to show where you were between 14 and 83. You could even switch out the plastic Ux numbers for the UHF channel you tuned into that position so it would light up with the same amber glow as the other channels. It seems the VHF channels could be fine-tuned with the white knob, but I don't think you could set a UHF channel on a VHF spot. In 1984 when we got cable, it spent most of its final years tuned to channel 3 as we had a cable box.
My grandfather had bought me a 13" Curtis Mathes TV, complete with 12 of those little thumb wheels. This was in the mid 1980s. Had to set one channel to VHF 4 for a VCR in greater Hartford. VHF 3 and 4 both worked in southern Maine, but kept the channel 4 setting when I moved there in 1985.
The precise ways cable incongruently overlaps UHF (and FM) is presented quite nicely in this Wikipedia article. It even goes so far as offering STD/HRC/IRC frequency offets.
Pan-American television frequencies - Wikipedia
Also, until seeing this, I did not know the VHF-High broadcast band originally went to channel 18.
That was pre-WWII, before the adoption of the 525-line NTSC standard and the move of FM radio to 88-108 MHz. And the equipment of the time was too unstable to operate at UHF frequencies.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
Here's some more background on how the current channels got to be on their respective frequencies, if any of you are interested further:
uhfhistory.com
History of UHF Television
The precise ways cable incongruently overlaps UHF (and FM) is presented quite nicely in this Wikipedia article. It even goes so far as offering STD/HRC/IRC frequency offets.
Pan-American television frequencies - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Also, until seeing this, I did not know the VHF-High broadcast band originally went to channel 18.
There's no reason in the nature of things that high-VHF had to stop at 216 mHz, and UHF doesn't begin until 300 mHz, which is kind of an arbitrary threshold anyway. There isn't something magical that happens at 300 mHz that makes transmissions beyond that frequency different in nature from those below it. You simply have shorter and shorter wavelengths the higher up you go.
I love historical deep dives like this. Great article!Here's some more background on how the current channels got to be on their respective frequencies, if any of you are interested further:
History of UHF Television
I bought my first color TV in 1979, a 13 inch off-brand from a brand new electronics store "Circuit City". 149.00
It was an open box return (nothing wrong with it) and the channel tabs were already inserted for the Lexington stations (18, 27, 36, and 46, WDKY was still 6 years away.) but for channel 46 they had inserted"41" instead of 46. Came with a simple remote volume up/down, channel up/down.
I still have it and produces a great picture. It's in my workshop with a Zenith DTT 901 digital converter box. All 12 slots are now set to the converter box output (Analog Channel 3)
Perhaps they had originally made an effort to get WDRB and later repurposed that slot to WKLE.
WDRB would have been dodgy anywhere east of Frankfort without something such as a parabolic reflector (and probably even then).