that horrible BEEP

[A. Joseph Ross]

On 21 Jan 2008 at 0:36, Garrett Wollman wrote:

> 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.  

The original allocations didn't take into account the need for more 
than one or two stations in a market.  With four, and then three, 
networks, and the example of radio to go by, one would have thought 
the FCC to be less short-sighted in its channel assignments, but 
then again, they were government bureaucrats.

I remember the change from channel 11 to 10 in Providence before we 
moved to Albany.  The newspapers in Boston, then and now, listed the 
Providence channel with the TV listings, and I was used to seeing NBC 
shows as being on 4 and 11.  Then it became 4 and 10.  I turned our 
TV to channel 10 to see if I could get it, but I could only get some 
faint sound.  Well, we did have a Muntz, after all.  I heard from 
others that the nice thing about the Providence channel was that it 
didn't pre-empt Howdy Doody for baseball games.

> 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.
 
As I recall, the Albany area did get some more UHF stations later, 
beginning with a PBS outlet.  Given the existence of the Fox and 
other newer networks, I would assume they got some more stations 
there.

-- 
A. Joseph Ross, J.D.                           617.367.0468
 92 State Street, Suite 700                   Fax 617.507.7856
Boston, MA 02109-2004           	         http://www.attorneyross.com