OTA channel 37

[HoytKlagwell]

Feel free to delete or move. Found this to be a good read.

Why Channel 37 Doesn’t Exist (And What It Has to Do With Aliens)

Since the advent of analog TVs, channel 37 has always been static. Here's why.

www.vice.com

 

[RFI-EMI-GUY]

I keep my TV set to channel 37 waiting for instructions.

 

[slicerwizard]

Give the channel to Ligado Networks / LightSquared; they promise there won't be any issues...

 

[mmckenna]

Give the channel to Ligado Networks / LightSquared; they promise there won't be any issues...

Looking for the 'like' button.

 

[bharvey2]

Wasn't Dr. Gene Scott on Channel 37 in the 70's/80's ? (In the SF Bay Area)

 

[mmckenna]

Wasn't Dr. Gene Scott on Channel 37 in the 70's/80's ? (In the SF Bay Area)

I don't remember a channel 37 in the bay area. There was channel 36 independent out of San Jose, and Channel 38 somewhere up the peninsula. I do recall Dr. Gene Scott on the air, usually lounging in his chair. Only saw him when scanning channels, though, probably looking for cartoons.

 

[bharvey2]

I don't remember a channel 37 in the bay area. There was channel 36 independent out of San Jose, and Channel 38 somewhere up the peninsula. I do recall Dr. Gene Scott on the air, usually lounging in his chair. Only saw him when scanning channels, though, probably looking for cartoons.

He may very well been on channel 38. I was thinking Salinas but I think 36 may have had a transmitter down there. I do recall working at a place while going to college. We did production line work and if we got behind our goal, we'd put Dr. Gene Scott on in order to repent of our poor performance. When things were going well we'd watch Rocky and Bullwinkle.

 

[mmckenna]

He may very well been on channel 38. I was thinking Salinas but I think 36 may have had a transmitter down there.

36 has it's transmitter over above Fremont on Monument Peak. My brother in law used to have a site just up the ridge from them.

38 was owned by his group at one point:

KCNS - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I do recall working at a place while going to college. We did production line work and if we got behind our goal, we'd put Dr. Gene Scott on in order to repent of our poor performance. When things were going well we'd watch Rocky and Bullwinkle.

Cruel and unusual punishment. I wonder if OSHA has a rule about that.

Rocky and Bullwinkle, now we're talking.[/QUOTE]

 

[bharvey2]

I'm probably mixing up Salinas with another station or maybe they had a translator their at some point? Who knows, that was a while ago. In the late 60's my dad got a portable TV for the folks room. It had UHF. The other one in the living room didn't. They were hand-me-downs for a while and were VHF only. No color TV until 1970 or so and we were no longer taunted by the "In Color" banner pane when Batman or Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea came on. Anyway, as the new portable TV had UHF (but alas, still and B&W model) I could rotate the dial looking for new stations. This was several years before Sutro tower came into being so channels were hard to come by. We did have Carol Doda and "The perfect 36" and a one or two others. I guess channel 37 was "out of the picture".

As far as OSHA and the unusual punishment, given the time and that everyone in that shop were idiotic college students (or thereabouts), stupidity and tomfoolery ran rampant. The equivalent OSHA response these days would be death by firing squad. (I'd give details but I'm not sure what the Statute of Limitations is on some of the activities in which we engaged)

 

[mmckenna]

Growing up in San Jose, it seemed like we had a lot of channels, even back in the 1970's. We could get channe 3, 10 and 13 out of Sacramento, sometimes Channel 6. Not perfectly, but enough to watch. All the stuff out of San Francisco, and some stuff out of Salinas, also.

Of course as kids, it was all channel 44 and channel 2 after school, that's where all the cartoons were.

Round about the early 80's, my brother built one of the bootleg HBO dishes. We had a neighbor that was an EMI/RFI engineer and helped my brother. They printed up the circuit board for the down coverter and used an old variable power supply for the tuning. Our neighbor had some guy up in Oakland that made woks and they just adjusted the machine to make parabolic reflectors. For a while we got HBO for free when it was transmitted over the air on microwave. Of course one day we got a letter telling us it was illegal and to stop doing it. We ignored it and finally they went scrambled or switched to the cable system.

We were pretty amazed by a neighbor who had cable TV. Back then it was Gil Cable. They had an A and a B feeder, so some channels were on the A feed and some on the B feed. You had to have a coax switch on top of the TV to select. I think there was something like 16 channels per feed.

I moved closer to Monterey, and I can get stuff out of San Jose sometimes, but a lot of digital channels down here. With the sub channels, there's a pretty good selection. We gave up our satellite TV years ago and just use the antenna up in the attic. Between that and internet, no need for anything else.