Why so few TV stations on channel 6?

[K.M. Richards]

The VHF spectrum goes 2-3-4 (54-72 MHz), a 4 MHz space, then 5-6 (76-88 MHz). Between 6 and 7 is an 86 MHz gap that includes FM broadcast, aircraft and public service frequencies, and the 2 meter ham band. Then comes 7-8-9-10-11-12-13 (174-216 MHz).

It's that big gap that made it possible for markets that couldn't do the 2-4-5-7-9-11-13 "perfect" set to come closer by allocating 6 instead of 5 where the co-channel spacing to other channel 5 allocations was not possible, but the shorter adjacent-channel spacing between 5 and 6 was.

 

[Mark Roberts]

Well, that market is a little odd geographically with the Sandia mountain range being between the two cities. Does make it easier to put all the television stations in one place, though.

Sandia Crest is a lot closer to Albuquerque than to Santa Fe. Santa Fe is the largest other population center in the area besides Albuquerque, so it made some sense to use a site more to the north than to the south. The site was Andrew Hebenstreit's idea for KGGM-TV; not only did he get KOB to buy into it, the two stations cooperated in the development of what they called "Broadcast Plaza" at 14th & Coal SW. To this day, the KOB and KRQE studios are across the street from each other.

It's not clear to me whether there was a road already existing to the Crest when KGGM started building out in 1953 after a lot of planning. A three-phase electric distribution line had to be run up there from Alameda.

Never did understand why it took so long for channel 2 to get on the air there.

In a word, economics. The network affiliations in the market were all taken by 1953, so any new station would have had to have been an independent. Not many cities could support an independent. In the 1960s, the Albuquerque metro was probably around the size of Des Moines; at least that's what I remember, though growth had been rapid since the 1930s. Until about ten years ago, Albuquerque's growth seemed unstoppable. Moreover, when KSAF finally went on the air, it made a play to be a Santa Fe-focused station, including local news. That lasted less than a year, though the station itself kept going as a more traditional independent. Keep in mind that Santa Fe has around one-seventh of the population of Albuquerque and Rio Rancho (the latter two combined), and viewer habits had already settled into watching 4, 7, or 13.

 

[K.M. Richards]

Thank you, Mark, for that detailed reply (which I will not quote since this post will land directly underneath it anyway). It does fill in a lot of holes in my knowledge ... especially since most of what I know about Sandia Crest is that KRKE and the rest of the cluster have their FM facilities up there.

 

[Mark Roberts]

You may also be interested in this: I'm pretty sure that the first FM up there was KRST, put on the air by KRZY(AM) in 1965. I was living in Albuquerque then, but I don't remember anything about it since we didn't have an FM radio at the time. Until then, the Albuquerque FMs had towers in the city proper, starting with KHFM in 1954 (not to mention KANW which was earlier but was only used for educational broadcasts back then).

It's quite a site. I got to go up there during a visit in 1982 before most things were fenced off.

 

[IM42A]

And, to finally answer the original question: For all of the reasons given by various contributors above, it was considered to be an unwritten rule at the FCC in those early days to have the maximum allowable allocations in the biggest cities. In most cases, that was 2-4-5-7-9-11-13 (or a variation on same), because adjacent channels could not be used in the same geographic area; the extra gap between channels 4 and 5 allowed for seven allocations in the larger metros.

But in actual practice, only New York and Los Angeles had that exact "perfect" set of allocations. Everywhere else, something got in the way. In San Francisco, to take one example, channel 13 was allocated to Stockton back when KOVR was straddling that market and Sacramento, and when they finally moved east to secure a network affiliation with ABC, the allocation "officially" moved out of S.F.

Chicago couldn't use 13 either, because its assignment to Rockford was too close and had existed there as a channel 12 allocation since the original 1945 table. Since that was its lone allocation and 12 was too close to 11 in Chicago, Rockford got 13 (although in the 1949 proposal, it was replaced by two UHF channels, then was put back in 1951).

There were lots of such exceptions, which is also why UHF became a necessity for television service to get to most of America.

Though they are separate markets, Washington and Baltimore together also had the 2-4-5-7-9-11-13 set of allocations. The other city's VHF stations were easily received in both cities with a halfway decent antenna.