Blonde Motorola 12K3 w matching UHF converter

[bandersen]

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Retro-Space...gAAOSwSQFZ5per

I don't think I've ever seen that converter in blonde

[dieseljeep]

I scanned all the ads for the TV's and they're all grossly overpriced!

[David Roper]

Were the Motorola converters available in 1952? They couldn't have been of any use earlier than that. I have a 17K4 with "matching" converter. Was UHF upgrade-when-available a Motorola marketing strategy?

[dieseljeep]

Originally Posted by David Roper

Were the Motorola converters available in 1952? They couldn't have been of any use earlier than that. I have a 17K4 with "matching" converter. Was UHF upgrade-when-available a Motorola marketing strategy?

It might be as early as late 1952. You'd have to look up when the first UHF station went on the air.
Milwaukee was a UHF town from early on. At one time, the only channel, channel 3, which started in 1948 carried NBC, Dumont and CBS programming.
When CBS and ABC wanted to go independant, because of Politics, CBS had to settle for a UHF channel, ABC got channel 12.
Converters, UHF strips and antennas sold like mad. People had to have CBS programming like "I Love Lucy" and few other popular programs.

[Jeffhs]

Some cities, such as Cleveland, did not get UHF TV until the late 1960s, so the UHF converter for that Motorola TV would have been useless in northeastern Ohio until then as I am about to explain. Channel 43 was the first commercial UHF station, followed by 61 (formerly Kaiser Broadcasting, off the air from 1975 to '82 or so, then home shopping, now WQHS Univision) and 55 in Akron; however, the very first UHF channel in Cleveland was PBS (then NET) channel 25, which went on the air in 1965. I lived in a Cleveland suburb at the time (Wickliffe, an eastern suburb 15 miles from Cleveland and about ten miles further southwest from the TV towers in the Cleveland suburb of Parma), and we had the devil of a time receiving that station on our 17-inch Silvertone portable TV with a loop antenna. I could barely make out the station's test pattern through all the snow.

I'll never forget when 43 went on three years later. I was in my basement one afternoon, working on an old TV, IIRC, and had the radio on. Suddenly, an announcement came on: "Attention! Channel 43 is on the air!!" Well, I dropped what I was doing, ran up the basement stairs, and turned the TV on to channel 43. The station was on the air, all right--with a test pattern! The picture was much better than channel 25 had in our area, but that was because 43 had a much stronger signal. The local elementary school, just down the road from me at the time (again, late '60s), had an outdoor amplified all-channel antenna to get channel 25, which was downconverted to channel 4 so as to be watchable on the 21" b&w RCA TVs in the classrooms at the time. The sets all had a card taped to the sides of the cabinets to remind teachers to set the VHF tuner to channel 4, in order to receive then-NET channel 25. The VHF antenna was rarely if ever used, as the TVs were in the classrooms for educational purposes only.

BTW, I looked at the TV Guide listings for the Milwaukee area a few moments before starting to write this, and found that the NBC station serving that city was (and still is) on channel 4--not on a UHF channel. I mention this because of VK member Electronic M's statement that the Milwaukee metro area was "a UHF town from early on", in his words. Milwaukee does have its CBS channel on channel 58 now, but that is only because Fox Broadcasting bought out the city's original VHF CBS affiliate some time ago, forcing the CBS affiliation to move to channel 58.

When were most or all of Milwaukee's other TV stations on UHF channels? If the other network stations were on channels above channel 13, there must have been one heck of a lot of viewer complaints in the '50s-'60s because many, if not most, televisions in use at the time were not set up for UHF reception. This would explain why there was such a run on sales of UHF converters and UHF channel strips (the latter used with '50s-'60s-era Zenith TVs, inserted in the tuner in place of unused VHF channels, to receive the then-new UHF stations) in those days.

[jr_tech]

My Jan 1954 Radio Electronics lists the following channels for Milwaukee:

WCAN, ch 25
WOKY, ch 19
WTMJ, ch 4

In addition, Madison had:
WKOW, ch 27
WMTV, ch 33

And Oshkosh had:
WOSH, ch 48

With the exception of ch 4 in Milwaukee and ch 2 (WBAY) in Green Bay, Wisconsin was mostly a UHF state.

Indiana, where the set and converter are located, had 7 UHF and only one VHF station, according to the Jan 1954 listing. Perhaps that set and converter did not travel far from its "home" location.

jr

[dieseljeep]

Originally Posted by Jeffhs

Some cities, such as Cleveland, did not get UHF TV until the late 1960s, so the UHF converter for that Motorola TV would have been useless in northeastern Ohio until then as I am about to explain. Channel 43 was the first commercial UHF station, followed by 61 (formerly Kaiser Broadcasting, off the air from 1975 to '82 or so, then home shopping, now WQHS Univision) and 55 in Akron; however, the very first UHF channel in Cleveland was PBS (then NET) channel 25, which went on the air in 1965. I lived in a Cleveland suburb at the time (Wickliffe, an eastern suburb 15 miles from Cleveland and about ten miles further southwest from the TV towers in the Cleveland suburb of Parma), and we had the devil of a time receiving that station on our 17-inch Silvertone portable TV with a loop antenna. I could barely make out the station's test pattern through all the snow.

I'll never forget when 43 went on three years later. I was in my basement one afternoon, working on an old TV, IIRC, and had the radio on. Suddenly, an announcement came on: "Attention! Channel 43 is on the air!!" Well, I dropped what I was doing, ran up the basement stairs, and turned the TV on to channel 43. The station was on the air, all right--with a test pattern! The picture was much better than channel 25 had in our area, but that was because 43 had a much stronger signal. The local elementary school, just down the road from me at the time (again, late '60s), had an outdoor amplified all-channel antenna to get channel 25, which was downconverted to channel 4 so as to be watchable on the 21" b&w RCA TVs in the classrooms at the time. The sets all had a card taped to the sides of the cabinets to remind teachers to set the VHF tuner to channel 4, in order to receive then-NET channel 25. The VHF antenna was rarely if ever used, as the TVs were in the classrooms for educational purposes only.

BTW, I looked at the TV Guide listings for the Milwaukee area a few moments before starting to write this, and found that the NBC station serving that city was (and still is) on channel 4--not on a UHF channel. I mention this because of VK member Electronic M's statement that the Milwaukee metro area was "a UHF town from early on", in his words. Milwaukee does have its CBS channel on channel 58 now, but that is only because Fox Broadcasting bought out the city's original VHF CBS affiliate some time ago, forcing the CBS affiliation to move to channel 58.

When were most or all of Milwaukee's other TV stations on UHF channels? If the other network stations were on channels above channel 13, there must have been one heck of a lot of viewer complaints in the '50s-'60s because many, if not most, televisions in use at the time were not set up for UHF reception. This would explain why there was such a run on sales of UHF converters and UHF channel strips (the latter used with '50s-'60s-era Zenith TVs, inserted in the tuner in place of unused VHF channels, to receive the then-new UHF stations) in those days.

Any set that used a Standard Coil tuner could be used with strips made by them. The early sets that had a penthode RF amp, didn't work as well.
Looking at the post after this one shows that channel 12 wasn't on then.
Regarding NBC, channel 4, it was always NBC and owned by the Milwaukee Journal. It originally started out in 1948 on channel 3. The FCC made them change to channel 4 because of co-channel interference with Green Bay and Chicago channel 2. They did allow channel 3 to be used in Madison, Wi.

[jr_tech]

Originally Posted by David Roper

Were the Motorola converters available in 1952? They couldn't have been of any use earlier than that. I have a 17K4 with "matching" converter. Was UHF upgrade-when-available a Motorola marketing strategy?

Tv-boxes site lists the converter as a 1953 model. Since it was likely introduced in late 1952, it was very close to the beginning of commercial UHF broadcasting (Sept 20, 1952- KPTV 27, Portland Oregon).

http://tv-boxes.com/uhf/index.html
jr