I might ramble a bit here, so I started a new topic.<P>I remember a several UHF tv stations that went under in the 50's and 60's.<P>The first was KVVG channel 27 in Tulare. They actually squandered a lot of money on the facilities, maybe because they figured they couldn't lose. The inablility to get a network affiliation in those days was a killer, and probably their undoing. The only story I remember about them was the hideous way everybody looked in green makeup, necessitated by the lack of camera sensitivity to other colors.<P>There was channel 53, KBID in Fresno, that came and went in the blink of an eye. The story was there was some kind of discrepancy in their license.<P>The best stories are about channel 43 in Visalia and channel 21 in Hanford, but I have to run now. I'll continue this in part II later.<P>------------------<BR>

PART II<P>In the early 1960's the owner of the remnants of the defunct KSAN-TV, channel 32, in San Francisco, decided to move the equipment down to Visalia and set up on channel 43. The call letters were KICU, later to be used by channel 36 in San Jose. The station ID went something like "I see the time in Porterville is 4:30 and I see you!". The equipment was out of date and the weak link was in fact the suitcase Raytheon studio to transmitter link. There was no audio limiting, and it was annoying to listen to the audio splatter when the level went too high. The film chain used an Iconoscope tube that really belonged in a museum. It was hard to get good crisp video on all the old films that they ran. They did succeed in getting a ratings blip with the old best of Groucho series that they ran. The thing that they did right was to get a couple of brand new Ampex video tape machines, putting one on a broken down Greyhound bus to use as a remote studio. <P>The finances were always a kind of shell game. GE repossesed their Klystrons at least a couple of times, and Ampex ripped out the Studio VCR and drove away the greyhound bus in lieu of dismantling the thing (VCR's in those days were not trivial, there waw a large tape transport unit with monitors, and a couple of tube filled racks of equipment to go with it). The owner miraculously got everything back each time. When I did some work for them and drew a paycheck, I noticed that the bank's name had been changed with a sticky label, and I was told to cash it somewhere that people didn't know me. <P>I remember one time that the airconditioning broke down. It was generally unreliable, and not that effective when it did work. It was 110 degrees in the valley heat and the room was filled with racks of tube equipment, raising the temperature even higher. It was quite a shock to see the entire crew, including the announcer, sitting there in their underwear, drinking beer. <P>I don't know how they managed to keep that station on the air, but they did for several years. Eventually they put channel 32 back on the air in San Francisco and relayed the programming off the air from Visalia. I never saw that signal, but it couldn't have been great. The real genius of the plan though was creating something of significant value, namely a spot on the tv dial in a major city. Metromedia jumped in and paid more money than you could imagine for the whole operation. Channel 43 immediately went dark and Metromedia put a modern facility in place of the token channel 32 relay. Unfortunately, as you may know, this effort was a failure, and 32 is now a public tv station (there is quite a story behind that too). <P>I think that is enough for now. If anybody is interested, I'll post a part III later on.<P>------------------<BR>

I'm watching this space!<P>------------------<BR>

I remember Channel 43 as a kid. It used to come on the air for only a few hours a day, as I recall. Seems like it was only in the evening, maybe 4:30 or so. They had some sort of cartoon series that I loved as a kid. It was obviously cheaply made and primitive, even in those times, but a to three young kids (my brothers and I), with limited viewing options, it was good stuff.<P>Keep up the sagas, Ken.<P>Bill<P>------------------<BR>

Part III<P>As a teenager, I was hanging around channel 43's studios, and bucking for any kind of job they might have available. My first job ever was as Director's Assistant for the Fresno West Coast Relays, a regional track meet. The aforementioned Greyhound bus mobile studio was used to record the proceedings to be carried live on 43 and by tape delay later on by both channel 43 and KHJ channel 9 in Los Angeles. I was running around doing every kind of imaginable chore, setting up the equipment, rounding up officials for information, and so on. I liked to have died carrying those cameras to the top of the stadium and boosting them up a ladder and through the access hole to the roof (one of the tallest stadiums I had ever seen). The most important duty, and it took priority over anything else I was doing at the time, was hauling buckets of water and boosting them over my head to fill the swamp cooler hanging on the side of the bus. I had to always be conscious of the water level in the cooler, and never let it run dry (the glories of being in the entertainment business!). OK, here comes the best part of this story. The Director sat in the bus issuing commands, and running the audio console if his assistant was doing more important things like lugging water for the swamp cooler. Now realize this was my first job ever, and I had never run any equipment like this before. The broadcast was starting and the director had already started the tape intro, since his assistant was you know where. I then sat down to the console for the first time ever, and tried to figure out what all those knobs and switches were for. The command came from the director to fade the intro, and panic set in. How the heck was I supposed to do that??? The command came again, and the director was losing his cool (no, the swamp cooler wasn't running dry yet). I saw the off switch on the tape deck, and hit it as fast as I could. As soon as I heard the awfull lurch of the dying audio come through the speaker, and watched the director turn down the pot after the fact, I figured my career was over. If I could have shrunk and fallen through a crack in the floor, I would have. I checked the rebroadcast later on and it was complete with the butchered intro music. I just hope KHJ was able to do some editing, and a million people in Los Angeles weren't wondering who the idiot was behind the controls. Well, I learned fast, and was apparently forgiven. The rest of the two day job was fairly uneventful, and I don't remember much else until the anguish that went on trying to get the bus started again. Spraying ether directly into the carburetor was the only thing that worked, and it still took about a half hour of fighting the stubborn engine to get that beast back to life.<P>------------------<BR>

Those are modern tape decks compared to the ones that KICU 43 had. <P>I remember in the early days of CHRS, we went over to Sacramento to pick up the old 1930's era KQW transmitter. The guy that had it was an engineer for one of the Sacramento stations, and he had set up one of the old Ampex video tape decks in his garage. The thing was maintained and working! That was really a labor of love. I also remember that he had an old 1920's broadcast audio console sitting out in the weather in his back yard. Many times I've thought about that console, and regretted that I didn't inquire about it. I didn't think I had room for it at the time, but it was certainly worth saving.<P>------------------<BR><p>[This message has been edited by Ken Miller (edited 09-15-2000).]

Hi Alan,<BR> Those do look like modern recorders, they even look like they use transistors. <BR>When I started at Channel 7 in Melbourne they had two VTRs. They were the early B&W RCA models (TVR1?). I never worked in VTR but did go in there from time to time. They used tubes (I've got a 6336A that I think was a servo tube from one) and were rack mounted, in several racks for each machine. There were no refinements such as auto skew or scalloping (tape to head position), dropout compensator, editing, etc. To do an edit either a crash edit was used, creating a massive loss of lock and hold while everthing stabilized or if a clean edit HAD to be done it was a mechanical tape splice. The edge of the tape was coated with Edivue magnetic ink that marked the control track pulses and it was spliced under a microscope to align the pulses and ensure a smooth edit. This was done as little as possible. Videotape at that time was the holy of holy's.<BR>I later looked after a basic Ampex VR1100 at the University I worked at.<BR>That's getting closer to the era of Alan's photo.<BR>Notice the 2" wide tape, these machines operated on Ampex's original 4 head system that scanned across the tape with about 15 tracks per field. The modern helical scanning was invented by Toshiba in about 1960.<BR> Don Black.<P>------------------<BR>

The VTRs in that photo are Ampex VR-2000 high-band machines, which were introduced in spring 1964 (the first production units went to the BBC). They were solid-state, though I've heard that they *might* have used Nuvistor tubes in the low-noise preamps (as did the prototype high-band VR-1000s that CBS tested shortly before the 2000 came out).<P>Getting back to shoestring TV, we had a couple of examples of that in Louisville years ago. Our first UHF station, WKLO-TV, went on the air in October 1953 but only lasted until April 1954; in the last few months of its life it only broadcast what it got from ABC and Du Mont, going off the air during local programming periods. (One problem that they had was that some ABC programming was not available to them because sponsors refused to buy time on a UHF station -- a few ABC shows were still seen here on the NBC affiliate for this reason!).<P>The second example was WDRB, now our Fox station but in 1971 a new operation that couldn't even afford Superman reruns! Shocking as it may seem, they had only one camera for their first few years. (That was a top-of-the-line RCA TK-44B, however. I guess we were fortunate that they didn't buy two or three of the cheapie cameras that were around then from outfits like IVC, the ones used in colleges and at some small stations and cable companies.)<P>And we mustn't forget WBNA, a religious station (now a PAX station) that has lived by the skin of its teeth for fourteen years now. In the late 1980s their klystron tube failed; they had no spare, and they were off the air for *five months* before they could obtain another tube! Fortunately for them, the local cable company ran a line out to their studio to carry their programming while the transmitter was down.<P>------------------<BR>Ed Ellers, KD4AWQ