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80s Watch Culture

The UHF Dial: Where the Weird Cheap Wonderful TV Lived

The second dial on an American television set existed because Congress passed a law in 1962 ordering manufacturers to install it. Before that law, the share of new sets that could tune those channels at all had collapsed to about one in eighteen. The stations up there lost money so consistently that they accounted for sixty percent of the entire television industry's losses across a four-year stretch.

UHF was the upper band of American broadcast television, channels 14 to 83. Its signals carried less well than VHF and needed far more transmitter power, so its stations were mostly independents rather than network affiliates, which is why the band filled with cartoons, old movies, wrestling and syndicated reruns. Sets were only required to receive UHF from April 30, 1964, under the All-Channel Receiver Act of 1962. In 1986 the Fox network was built on those stations.

Why there was a second band at all

Broadcast television ran out of room almost immediately. VHF channels have to be spaced apart to avoid interference, and the Federal Communications Commission's rules were strict: two VHF stations on the same channel had to be at least 160 miles apart, and two on adjacent channels at least 60 miles apart. In most large American markets every usable VHF allocation was spoken for by the mid-1950s.

UHF was the answer to that arithmetic. It opened a large block of new channel numbers, and when the FCC's licensing freeze ended in 1952 a backlog of applicants was pushed into it. The first commercial UHF station on the air was KPTV, channel 27, in Portland, Oregon, on September 18, 1952.

The band solved the shortage on paper. In practice it created a two-tier system that lasted for decades.

The physics that made UHF the worse half of the dial

The disadvantage was real and measurable, not a matter of reputation.

UHF frequencies are subject to constant low-level noise, which on an analog set appeared as snow across the picture. VHF suffered a different problem, impulse noise, which produced a sharp blip and then left the picture clear. The consequence, stated plainly in the technical record, is that at the same received power a UHF analog signal looked worse than a VHF one, often significantly worse.

Broadcasters could compensate only by shouting louder. To give UHF stations roughly the same ground coverage as VHF, about 60 miles, the FCC let them run vastly more power. Low-VHF stations on channels 2 to 6 were capped at 100 kilowatts and high-VHF stations on channels 7 to 13 at 316 kilowatts, while a UHF station could be licensed for up to 5 megawatts. That is more than ten times the low-VHF limit, and it meant higher electricity bills and much more expensive transmitting equipment for the stations least able to afford either.

Early receivers made it worse. The first UHF tuners had poor image-frequency rejection and poor adjacent-channel selectivity, problems severe enough that UHF stations in one area were typically assigned at least six channels apart from each other. The workarounds became known as the UHF taboos, and their effect was that a metropolitan area could support only moderately more UHF stations than VHF ones despite having far more channel numbers available.

The law that put the channels on every set

The commercial result was carnage. Of the 82 new UHF stations broadcasting in June 1954, only 24 were still on the air a year later. Most of the 165 UHF stations that launched between 1952 and 1959 did not survive. UHF stations lost $10.5 million in 1953, and sixty percent of all television industry losses between 1953 and 1956 came from the UHF band.

A feedback loop drove it. Set manufacturers treated UHF tuners as an extra-cost option, so few sets had them; because few sets had them, advertisers spent their money on VHF; because advertisers avoided UHF, its stations could not afford to compete. The share of new sets factory-equipped to receive the whole dial fell through the 1950s, and by 1961 it had reached a low of 5.5 percent while 83 commercial UHF stations were still trying to operate.

Congress broke the loop by statute. The All-Channel Receiver Act, Public Law 87-529, amended the Communications Act of 1934 to give the FCC authority over television receiving equipment, and the resulting rules required every new television set sold in the United States to receive channels 14 through 83. The requirement took effect on April 30, 1964.

It worked slowly. By 1971 there were still only about 170 full-service UHF stations nationwide. What the law had done was guarantee that when those stations did arrive, the audience could at least find them.

What the dial actually carried

The programming followed directly from the economics.

Network affiliation went to VHF wherever VHF existed, because that is where the audience and the advertisers were, and UHF stations that did hold a major-network affiliation frequently lost it as soon as a viable VHF station appeared in the same market. What was left on UHF, in most large population centers, were educational stations and independents.

An independent station has no network feed. It has to fill its own broadcast day, every day, out of whatever it can buy or already owns. That is the entire explanation for the character of the UHF dial: syndicated reruns, cartoon blocks, old movie packages, wrestling, local kids shows with a local host. It was not a programming philosophy. It was the cheapest way to fill airtime that a station with a small audience and an expensive transmitter could afford.

The reputation that attached to the band, in the words of the historical record, was one of local ownership, nonprofessional operations, small audiences and weak signal propagation. By 1989 the phenomenon was familiar enough to carry a feature film built entirely around parodying it.

The FCC spent decades propping the band up. A UHF television impact policy, in force from 1960 to 1988, allowed applications for new VHF stations to be opposed where licensing one might bankrupt an existing UHF broadcaster. A secondary affiliation rule, from 1971 to 1995, stopped a network from placing programming on VHF stations in a market without first offering it to the UHF independent.

1986, when the weak half of the dial became a network

The payoff arrived in the middle of the decade, and it arrived because those independent stations existed.

On August 4, 1986, United Press International reported that Fox Broadcasting Co. had signed 79 independent television stations covering nearly 80 percent of the American market, all of them agreeing to carry its programming. Fox president Jamie Kellner announced the deals, and the network's opening program was The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers in October, with prime-time programming to follow at five hours across two nights a week from March 1987.

The stations were taking a real risk. "These stations are giving up two nights of programming without knowing what we will put in there. They trust the programming will be good," Fox spokesman Michael Binkow told UPI. Fox chairman Barry Diller described the agreements as "a long-term economic and programming partnership between Fox and our affiliated stations."

The UPI report closes with the line that ties the whole history together: "Many of the 79 stations are UHF outlets."

A fourth national network became possible in 1986 because a 1962 statute had put those channel numbers on every set in the country, and because two decades of unprofitable independent stations had accumulated up there where the networks were not. Univision and Telemundo followed on the same foundation in 1986 and 1987.

The honest bottom line

UHF was the worse half of the television dial by every measurable standard: a fuzzier picture at the same signal strength, transmitters that cost a fortune to run, tuners that had to be forced onto manufacturers by act of Congress, and stations that lost money for a generation. The programming was cheap because cheap was all the economics allowed, and a fair amount of it was genuinely bad. What that accident of spectrum policy produced, though, was the only part of American television not answering to three networks: a band full of independents filling airtime with cartoons, old films and local oddities, and eventually the launchpad for the first new network in thirty years. The weird stuff was up there because nothing else could survive up there.

Sources

More 80s kids TV lives at /80s-kids-tv/. Related: the USA Cartoon Express lineup in 1985 and after school TV in fall 1987.

Frequently asked

What was UHF television?

UHF, or ultra high frequency, was the upper band of American analog broadcast television, covering channels 14 through 83. It was opened in the 1950s because VHF channels 2 through 13 had run out in most large markets under the FCC's interference spacing rules.

Why was UHF reception so much worse than VHF?

UHF frequencies carry constant low-level noise that showed up as snow, so at the same received power a UHF picture looked worse than a VHF one. Early UHF tuners also had poor selectivity. To match VHF coverage of about 60 miles, UHF stations were allowed up to 5 megawatts of power against 100 kilowatts for channels 2 to 6.

When did TVs start having UHF tuners?

Sets sold in the United States were required to receive channels 14 to 83 from April 30, 1964, under the All-Channel Receiver Act of 1962. Before that, tuners were an extra-cost option, and by 1961 only 5.5 percent of new sets could receive the band.

Why were cartoons and old movies always on UHF?

Because UHF stations were mostly independents with no network feed. They had to fill an entire broadcast day themselves, and syndicated reruns, cartoon packages, old films and wrestling were the cheapest available way to do it.

What happened to UHF channels?

The band was gradually reduced, and after the digital television transition of 2009 most stations moved to digital assignments. Today more stations broadcast on physical UHF channels than on VHF, reversing the original hierarchy entirely.

Was Fox a UHF network?

Fox launched in 1986 by signing 79 independent stations, and UPI reported at the time that many of them were UHF outlets. Univision and Telemundo were built on the same independent and UHF station base in 1986 and 1987.