History of UHF Television: TV Above Channel 13 (2024)

In Spain in 'ancient' times it used to be UHF/VHF channels. Two of them. First, THe only channel, a la BBC, but from a dictatorship, TVE, Television Española, and later, TVE2, in a different band (I think it requiered a separate antenna and/or tuner) which was depicted as more culture bound (the regime opened up a little in the early 70's) and with less hour per day that the main channels.

The new channel appeared when my parents were kids, around the late 60's.

But, for incredible stuff happening in the 90's, I remember watching the MTV illegally in very early 00's due to a semi-pirate really local TV channel. They used to broadcast chiptune videos at late night too, it was really weird. Even some early Flash videos and animations too.

Good times to own a TV tuner in your PC among the teletext when you had to go to a cybercafé to basically work offline and batch-send/downloaded everything within an hour while you chatted with your friends and some potential GF. If you knew how to pirate the Nagravision cypher from paid TV channels (something lame to decode with an Athlon in real time) you often could watch (and dump) movies with, well, VHS quality (MPEG2 was just a thing for cable TV and DVDs) but at least after the long rip (13h per hour, and then the encoding to XVID/DIVx) you could watch a good movie months after being displayed in the theaters.

Here in the UK, TV was broadcast on UHF and VHF up until the mid-80s. Where I grew up in the north-west of Scotland it was pretty much only ever UHF - salt spray and 140mph winds tended to take out the long dangly "Band I" VHF aerials for 50MHz-ish.

But over here in the drier and less windy north-east, there are still combination Band I/III aerials on a lot of houses. They must be at least 40 years old now, and mostly still hold up. The UHF aerials you buy today last a couple of years before the plastic bits go brittle and they fall apart.

Oh, and I know where there are at least three places that still have BSB Squarial.

It was fun when the weather was good (some high clouds, no rain, no fog, preferably warmer weather) to receive the BBC across the north sea on the higher channels, quite fun to watch when there was nothing in the Dutch channels (we had no cable connection, physically none). The french1 was only possible with reflections so very noisy. Canal+ was also sometimes interesting but that was scrambled.

Dutch VHF was patchy due some kind of interference I recall, but the channels were mirrored in UHF.

That web site is focused on analogue-era UHF-band TV in the U.S.A. with rare mentions of the many Canadian UHF-band channels that were receivable along the northern border back then.

I immediately looked for any channel 37 assignments and found just one, which was assigned but never used. 37 was intentionally kept clear by international convention as a safe band for radio astronomy.

"channels above 13 almost no one could receive"

This is a weird assertion. In major cities, as far as I know, everyone could receive them. And out in the boonies (rural Indiana, for example) there were ONLY UHF channels.