What did the N stand for?

[skippercollector]

In the pre-cable 1970s, in the Cincinnati/Dayton weekly TV Guide, there was a channel listed called 4N. It was actually Channel 4 in Indianapolis, WTTV, then an independent station and now the CBS affiliate. With a little finagling, I could pick up the grainy signal on our upstairs television and occasionally watched it. The signal's origin was 100 miles away from me.
TV Guide never explained why this channel was included in the southwest Ohio edition. But what puzzled me was this: What did the "N" stand for?

 

[gr8oldies]

The "N" stood for Indianapolis, and since that edition likely carried 4 from Columbus, that was the distinction. WTTV was carried on a lot of cable systems (as was WXIX) fed by microwave; those were the 2 regional superstations of that day. "I" would have made the channel look like "41".

 

[skippercollector]

Thank you! I've wondered about that for ages!

 

[KeithE4]

In the pre-cable 1970s, in the Cincinnati/Dayton weekly TV Guide, there was a channel listed called 4N. It was actually Channel 4 in Indianapolis, WTTV, then an independent station and now the CBS affiliate. With a little finagling, I could pick up the grainy signal on our upstairs television and occasionally watched it. The signal's origin was 100 miles away from me.
TV Guide never explained why this channel was included in the southwest Ohio edition. But what puzzled me was this: What did the "N" stand for?

It stood for "N-dianapolis," of course.

Your TV guide was probably not "pre-cable" in some towns in the area, although WTTV was viewable in some towns along the Indiana/Ohio border over the air, with a good antenna. We had cable in southern Indiana going back to the early '60s. I have to guess that it was available in parts of Ohio back then as well.

WTTV was a regional cable channel going back to the early '70s, before satellites. The reason, of course, was the IU and Purdue basketball games they aired in that era. WGN Channel 9 Chicago was another one, probably shown in TV Guide as "9C," as opposed to Cincinnati's "9."

 

[PTBoardOp94]

In the pre-cable 1970s, in the Cincinnati/Dayton weekly TV Guide, there was a channel listed called 4N. It was actually Channel 4 in Indianapolis, WTTV, then an independent station and now the CBS affiliate. With a little finagling, I could pick up the grainy signal on our upstairs television and occasionally watched it. The signal's origin was 100 miles away from me.
TV Guide never explained why this channel was included in the southwest Ohio edition.

Presumably the southwest Ohio edition of TV guide was distributed to places in the Cincy market like Versailles and Batesville, IN? These towns should have had decent B-grade coverage from WTTV.

 

[Tim from Springfield IL]

The TV Guide edition in the area I grew up in, the Western Illinois edition, did something similar for these channels (with black on white bullets).

WGN-9 Chicago: "9C" (even after Syndex and the separate Chicago/national versions starting in 1991)
WTTW-11 Chicago (PBS): "11C"
KPLR-11 St. Louis (Ind., later WB): "11S"
KIIN-12 Iowa City (PBS): "12W" (Io-W-a)
WFLD-32 Chicago (Fox): "32C"

And even though KIIN's former analog signal was seen OTA in the western fringe of Illinois, those stations were grouped with the cable channels.

It's possible that the Western Illinois edition might have once referred to WTBS as "17A" (Atlanta, GA), but am not exactly sure about this.

The old statewide TV inserts of the Des Moines Register (in their separate "Eastern Iowa" and "Western Iowa" versions) were prolific in the use of alphanumeric channel designations for many of the non-Des Moines stations. Examples: "8M" (WQAD-8 Moline), "8L" (WKBT-8 LaCrosse, WI) to distinguish from plain "8" (KCCI Des Moines); "7H" (KHQA Hannibal/Quincy), "7W" (KWWL Cedar Rapids/Waterloo). In at least the Eastern Iowa version, the letter designation referred to the first letter of the station's COL. (However, in the Western Iowa version the Register might have distinguished the Omaha stations as "3N", "6N," and "7N" for "Nebraska").