that horrible BEEP

[Garrett Wollman]

<<On Mon, 21 Jan 2008 00:06:32 -0500, "A. Joseph Ross" <joe@attorneyross.com> said:

> WRGB moved from Channel 4 to Channel 6 in January 1954.

The problem was that Schenectady was short-spaced to New York.  Moving
Schenectady's allotment from 4 to 6 required that New Haven move from
6 to 8, which then opened up 6 in New Bedford.  A new, fully-spaced 4
allotment was added in Utica, but with site restrictions that made it
not worth building, and to this day it never has been.  At the same
time, 11 Providence moved to 10, allowing 11 Portsmouth (now Durham)
and 12 Providence to be added.  This was also tied in with a bunch of
other channel moves elsewhere Upstate that eventually allowed 5 and 9
to come on in Toronto.  I've been after Scott to write up an article
about this whole business for the better part of a decade.

> As we were about to move back to the Boston area, the headlines were 
> that the FCC was pushing a plan to have all UHF stations in the 
> Capital area, moving WRGB to channel 47.

This plan was called "de-intermixture", and did actually come to pass
in Albany -- with all the UHF stations moving to VHF rather than the
one VHF moving to UHF.  There were numerous other markets where this
was supposed to happen, and (IIRC) exactly two where it actually did,
but the FCC eventually backed down in the face of tremendous
opposition from the licensed broadcasters.

-GAWollman