"Channel U"

[vakkotaur]

As mentioned earlier, there were only the three networks and their stations in the area when I was a kid. That did not remain the case. Eventually a fourth station appeared, channel 20, carrying PBS programming.

This was at a time when changing the channel meant getting up and turning the channel tuner, which turned with a bit of a clunk... unless you were fortunate and had a fancy set with (probably ultrasonic) remote control. The channel tuner wasn't a single thing, but a pair: One for the VHF channels (2-13) and one for the UHF channels (14-83). To use the UHF tuner, the VHF tuner was set to "U" which was between 13 and 2 as the dial went around, and then the UHF tuner was used.

When all stations were VHF, the UHF tuner didn't matter much. When channel 20 appeared, there was a use for tuning to UHF. As there was only the one UHF station, there wasn't much point in adjusting it, at least once the fine tuning was set right, so the UHF tuner generally was set and then left pretty much alone. The VHF tuner was used, and I recall hearing people (mostly kids, since I was a kid at the time) refer to the PBS station as "channel U" since the VHF tuner was set to 7, 9, 12, maybe 13, and U.[1] While I understood how that happened, it still annoyed me even then. It was channel 20, not U.

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[1] With a good outdoor antenna it was possible to get other channels, though not always very well. These channels were also VHF, most commonly 2, 5, and 11 from Green Bay.

Comments

Kick off your sneakers, sit around for a while

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

o/` We got it all on UHF! o/`

[jcw-da-dmg.livejournal.com]

I grew up in Central Illinois. We had ch. 3 (CBS) out of Champaign, which was our only VHF channel until WILL (12-NET, later PBS) got stronger. During certain strange weather events we got 4,6, & 8 from the Quad Cities, or 13 from Rockford, or occasionally 10 from Terre Haute. Our other channels were 17 (ABC - Decatur), 20 (NBC - Springfield), and the strongest ones from Peoria, 19 (ABC), 31 (CBS) and 43 (later 25, NBC).

The weird thing about ch. 10 (which was the only channel in Terre Haute for a long time, and consequently all we could watch when we visited my uncle Donald) was that it carried both CBS and ABC shows. Later, when Terre Haute got ch. 2, it had NBC and ABC. They didn't get an independent ABC station for years after.

[timmowarner.livejournal.com]

Our big TV when I was a kid had the VHF and the UHF dials, but something I never understood was the VHF dial always turned with the chunky clunk sound, but the UHF dial spun freely. Well, not freely... it was actually pretty stiff, but still, no individual channel clunks. It just turned.

[jmaynard.livejournal.com]

The VHF dial needed to cover two different frequency ranges, and it's easier to just swap entire circuits in and out than try to tune one over that range. The UHF dial covered one (long, but continuous) range, and so it's easier to use a continuous tuning circuit, especially since swapping 70 individual circuits in and out got to be a major pain.

[tilt-longtail.livejournal.com]

I used to be able to turn those dials with my toes!

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Before infra-red remotes became common, my father's solution to remote control was to have the VCR and stereo (the mono audio from the VCR split and patched into a input) next to him and use them to control everything except TV power. It makes sense, you'd have to get up to change tapes (or DVDs now) if it was by the TV.

I'd rather have the real controls than the on-screen-display stuff, but I do understand that with the almost everything on a chip and all the added circuit complexity that can come with that yet maintain reliability, that most controls are now "set and forget." And some (vertical hold, horizontal hold) aren't really needed. Those were there as the simpler circuits drifted some and needed occasional tweaking.