I was wondering, was there a specific reason why manufacturers got away from continuous UHF tuners? I would think the continuous tuner would cost a little less to make. And since they all seemed to switch over to a clicking tuner (or whatever you want to call it), it seems that there must have been a reason for doing it.

Any ideas?

It was mandated by the Guv'ment.
I believe the idea was to make UHF as easy to use as VHF, this is why UHF is so incredibly popular now ;)

Interesting. I wasn't aware that the continuous tuners weren't easy to use. :dunno:

There's something stupid simpler about being able to find a station by "click" instead of tuning in Rangoon with a continuously variable knob. That's like trying to crack a safe! LOL

I can understand the thinking behind this, but guess there's a psychological block on most people's part as the second tuner no matter how easy to use will always have a second class status of sorts..........and the FCC's major screw up in the 50's (freeze and subsequent reassignment of freqs) didn't help the situation either. As a matter of fact, many blame this on the demise of the Dumont network.

Anthony

Originally posted by heathkit tv
As a matter of fact, many blame this on the demise of the Dumont network.

Anthony

The Dumont network is dead ? I gotta get out more often.

Originally posted by Eric H
It was mandated by the Guv'ment.
I believe the idea was to make UHF as easy to use as VHF, this is why UHF is so incredibly popular now ;)

If the FCC was able to recognize that the UHF viewing experience would be improved by banning continuous tune UHF tuners, why did they see fit to torture the listeners of FM radio by allowing continuous tune tuners to continue to plague the audio world? Or continuous tune AM radios, or shortwave radios, or... you get the idea.

In other words, you got an pointers to articles about this government ruling on user interfaces? I'm surprised they haven't outlawed slide switches in favor of toggle switches.

Seems that most people decided that having to set the VHF dial to "UHF" and then twist the UHF knob was too much bother. Many non-techinal people can never figure it out. My mom's like that. Or that most people would likely find a TV show of some interest on VHF before getting to the UHF position. If there were only one UHF channel in town, it might fare better if most TV sets' UHF dial was "preset" by the TV service guy when the set was delivered and set up. I have a 80's RCA set that has on its dial all 12 VHF channels and 6 UHF preset channels. But you need to preset the little thumb wheels to get the local UHF stations into the presets.

Nowadays with modern tuners you just key in the channel numbers on the remote.

The detents on the UHF dials seemed to be a lame attempt to get people to think UHF tuning was just like VHF tuning. All it was was a gear like thing, that pressed against a spring, attached to the tuning shaft You still had to set the VHF knob to "UHF" first.

Kinda like the detents one sometimes found on a mid price stereo set's volume control. It was to give the impression that it was a special kind of volume control beyond being a simple pot.

Kinda funny to think that they ended up going back to continuous tuners later in the 80's thru today for little portable sets. My Toshiba 5" color set from 1982 has continuous tuning for both vhf and uhf. Last year, i bought a little red 4" b&w set cause it was cheap and kinda cute. It too has continuous vhf and uhf.

Of course, I'm sure they do this for the small portables to keep them small as possible.

Originally posted by House de Kris
If the FCC was able to recognize that the UHF viewing experience would be improved by banning continuous tune UHF tuners, why did they see fit to torture the listeners of FM radio by allowing continuous tune tuners to continue to plague the audio world? Or continuous tune AM radios, or shortwave radios, or... you get the idea.

In other words, you got an pointers to articles about this government ruling on user interfaces? I'm surprised they haven't outlawed slide switches in favor of toggle switches.

Aye, and there you have your first and best indicator of the Feds at work wasting our tax dollars.

Anthony

Originally posted by wa2ise



The detents on the UHF dials seemed to be a lame attempt to get people to think UHF tuning was just like VHF tuning. All it was was a gear like thing, that pressed against a spring, attached to the tuning shaft You still had to set the VHF knob to "UHF" first.


Zenith and RCA (there may have been others as well) had one-knob electronic tuning on their sets from the '80s until digital random-access electronic tuners now used in all late-model sets were introduced. The one-knob system tuned all 12 VHF channels plus six user-selectable UHF channels. The UHF channels were preset using a fine-tuning knob, often hidden behind a panel on the front of the set (as in Zenith and RCA sets), which the user (or a service person) pushed in and turned until the desired UHF channel appeared on the TV screen. The preset channel was identified on the illuminated channel indicator drum by means of plastic number tabs inserted in place of the U1 through U6 tabs provided with the set as it came from the factory.

Viewers who found the setup procedure too complicated and did not want to pay a service person to do it for them often just left the U1-U6 tabs on the drum, simply remembering what channel was where on the dial (for example, U1 was, say, channel 14, U2 was 27, U3 was 36, etc).

Of course, an even simpler way to get around the setup problem (if the viewer had cable, as most people do these days) would be to use a cable box, all of which have outputs on either channel 3 or 4. (Some pre-digital-era cable converters of '70s vintage, such as Panasonic, had a fixed output on channel 2; my barber has one on the TV in his shop--the only cable box, I might add, I have ever seen in my life with channel 2 output.) Set the TV's VHF tuner to whichever channel the box's output is on and the problem of channel setup is eliminated, as the channels are selected using the cable box, all of which nowadays have remotes. (The cable box I use on my living-room set is arranged so that it can only be controlled by the remote--there are no buttons, switches, etc. on the box itself, as it is one of those very new Motorola digital computerized systems--but that's another story.)

Many people, including a lot of us here in the AK forums, use this dodge even today to convert very old VHF-only TVs to receive UHF and cable channels, although the same effect can be had by using a VCR to tune the cable stations (as Bryan and several others here have done). This dodge also saves the viewer money, as by using a VCR for channel tuning there is no cable box and, therefore, no rental fee from the cable company.

There are a couple of drawbacks to this, however, in that the VCR approach does not allow for remote volume control or TV on/off, not to mention that this will not allow reception of cable channels above 125, scrambled movie channels, or digital stations (you must still use a converter to receive anything other than standard broadcast and cable channels).

If you are willing to put up with these shortcomings, the use of a VCR rather than a standard cable box is a cheap (literally) workaround for getting UHF and standard cable channels, plus remote channel selection, on older VHF-only or non-cable-ready TVs.

I personally use a cable box with volume and mute. They aren't that hard to find, or expensive on ebay. Some even decode stereo and have built in amplifiers to drive a set of speakers. An added bonus is that it eliminates adjacent channel interference which is often a problem when connecting cable directly to an old TV. With the excessive number of ads on TV these days, a mute button is a necessity!

Note that cable channels 65 to 94 and 100 to 125 can be received with the UHF tuner if it has one.

...I tried that a while ago, and most of those upper cable channels used to be scrambled channels (before all that went to digital cable). Some of my TVs I could fine tune it and on 2 or 3 of those scrambled channels I was able to watch perfectly unscrambled. I think one was HBO and the other was AMC.

The way I tune my TVs now is I have a central DVD/VCR combo unit on channel 3 going to a video distribution amp, which feeds all my TVs. It works excellent, and its cool watching all those TVs at once :D

My grandparents had a TV that had continiuus tuning on VHF, albeit in two bands (2-6, 7-13). Think it was a Stromberg Carlson B&W set. They lived in the NYC TV market, which has active channels 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13. Lots of dial twiddling...