Televison Signals

You can probably tell your age by how you remember receiving television signals(or not). Today, we made a change that made me reflect on how old I am in terms of television signals. We no longer get a signal over the air rather through the telephone line. I remember not having any television signal in the '40's. Then we got our first black and white television in the early '50's. The screen was small, very snowy and had a lot of ghosts. There were only two VHF stations in our reception area. Then in the '60's we got our first UHF channel and color broadcast. Also, about this time, I read science fiction about communication satellites in geosynchronous orbits.



Not much changed until the early '80's when we got our first C Band satellite dish that received it signal from those geosynchronous satellites. The dish rotated across the "Clark Belt" from one "bird" to the next. They had names like Galaxy1, Satcom4, Anik2, etc. This was the best time of television for me. It was before signal "scrambling" when you only had to invest in the reception equipment. We received all kinds of channels and rarely had any reception issues. Then came scrambling. We went through several iterations. Then we got Ku band which ushered in smaller dishes.



This allowed a stationary dish to get programmimg from more than one nearby satellite and brought in the age of Dish network and Direct TV as competitors of the cable companies.
Now, I am watching digital High Definition Television over telephone wires. The bandwidth of Hog Wallow Switch #2 is increasing. Occasionally, I even watch TV on the internet. As TV signals have evolved, so have the costs. However, the programming hasn't improved as much as the signal that carries it.