> Shortly before CHCH in Hamilton, Canada went on the air, the
> channel 13 allocation was in Hamilton, thus CHCH was
> supposed to take that channel and CKCO in Kitchener was
> supposed to be on channel 11. Of course, those two swapped
> in early 1954, before either went on the air. Had CHCH been
> on channel 13, how would that have affected the allocations
> in New York state? WKTV would've probably kept 13,
> so...what channel would WOKR have received a few years
> later? I ask because of all the shuffling around of
> allocations throughout the region before WOKR went on the
> air, and putting CHCH on 13 as originally planned would have
> added extra confusion.
WOKR would have received NO channel...it never could have signed on at all under the original arrangement, at least not on the VHF band.
You would have had to reshuffle the whole allocation table in the area surrounding Lake Ontario to swap the CHCH and CKCO allocations, and the result would have left Rochester and Albany short one VHF allocation. Channel 11 couldn't have been assigned to Rochester because it's first-adjacent to WHEC-TV, Channel 10, which had already signed on in the fall of 1953 before either CHCH or CKCO were granted their permits. And if Channel 13 hadn't been shifted out of Utica AND Hamilton by 1958, then WNYT, Channel 13 in Albany, would not have been allowed to sign on during 1959, and WOKR (now WHAM-TV) couldn't have signed on in 1962.
Originally the FCC thought a UHF channel would be fine for Rochester's, Syracuse's and Albany's ABC affiliates, but in the days before all-channel TV sets were made mandatory in 1964, virtually no UHF commercial stations were making it in the US except in those cities which had no VHF assignments. And almost no one stepped up to build UHF stations to compete with the two VHF channels all major upstate cities had--2 and 4 in Buffalo, 5 and 10 in Rochester, 3 and 8 in Syracuse, 6 and 10 in Albany/Schenectady. (NBC was the only organization that tried, and it spectacularly failed in running a UHF affiliate in Buffalo, even before a third VHF station, channel 7, was granted to WKBW in 1958 after years of hearings and lawsuits dating back to the 1940s were finally settled.)
The upstate NY/Southern Ontario allocations done by both the FCC and the Canadians in 1952 were a total screwup, shorting communities on both sides of the border in terms of TV allocations. When the mess was finally cleaned up in 1958-59, the shuffle moved a lot of stations but got every market more service than it had from the 1952 table--Toronto got a second VHF channel assignment and a batch of UHF channels it hadn't had before, while Rochester, Syracuse and Albany each got a third VHF channel, and no one lost a channel.
