Would an old tube UHF to VHF converter work on HDTV?

[Jeffhs]

I grew up in an area of northeastern Ohio that was a "near fringe" area for Cleveland television reception; most everyone in my neighborhood had an outdoor antenna, the type with two sections--one for each range of channels (2 through 6 and seven through thirteen). At the time (early '60s) Cleveland had three network stations, channels 3, 5 and eight, no UHF until 1965. The first UHF station in Cleveland was NET (National Educational Television, now PBS) channel 25. The reception of this station in our area was terrible unless an outdoor antenna was used; the station boasted an ERP (effective radiated power) output of just one million watts at the time, so the area in which the station could be seen clearly with an indoor antenna was basically the city of Cleveland itself and its close-in suburbs (which obviously did not include our area).

Cleveland did not get its first commercial UHF television station until 1968. The first commercial channel in our area above channel 8 was channel 43, which at the time had a 2.5-million-watt signal (it is now running 5 million watts, the maximum allowed for U.S. UHF stations). Channel 61 followed shortly thereafter, then in 1985, 17 years later, channel 55 arrived.

I'll never forget the day channel 43 signed on the air for the first time. I was in the basement working on an old radio or TV (don't remember which anymore), with a radio on a local top-40 station, when all of a sudden an announcer broke in and said (in paraphrase), "Drop everything, Cleveland! Channel 43 is on the air!" I ran upstairs, turned on the TV in the living room, tuned it to channel 43, and watched. The station was on the air, all right--broadcasting a test pattern!

The idea of putting up a tower with a high-power deep-fringe TV antenna atop it to get television reception from major cities (and even smaller towns some distance from the cities) may have been well understood (and the practice was commonplace) in the '50s, but is foreign to most people today, with most areas now having cable and/or satellite service. This is now even pretty much unheard of in areas all but cut off from broadcast TV by virtue of distance or terrain features, due to the availability in most areas of DBS (direct broadcast satellite) service. In fact, I don't know why anyone would use large TV antennas on towers these days except for TV DXing purposes.

There are some places in this country where over-the-air TV reception is spotty at best. In late 1999, I moved from my boyhood home in suburban Cleveland to a small town 35 miles from the city. TV reception here is absolutely terrible without cable; in fact, the only station I can get here on an antenna with a picture good enough to watch is channel 19, the CBS affiliate in Cleveland. (A friend of mine who used to live in this area had the same problem.) In addition, the NBC affiliate on channel 3 does not reach here at all using an antenna, and the others are fair to poor at best. Therefore, most folks here, myself included, have Time-Warner cable service, although a few have Dish Network satellite. The few antennas I see in town are either falling apart or have long since been taken down and forgotten. One exception (maybe the only exception) is the bowling alley across the street from my apartment; they still have a high-power antenna on a rotor (no cable, that I am aware of anyway) serving at least one set in the building. I don't know if they will still be using that antenna after the digital transition next year or not, or whether they will eventually get cable. My best guess is the latter, as analog OTA TV reception is terrible here, which means digital signals may well be non-existent. The digital subchannel of the NBC affiliate, for example, may not be seen here OTA, only on cable.

BTW, the irony of all this is that, while the OTA TV reception in this village is awful, the FM radio reception, using ordinary, very simple indoor antennas, is excellent. I get all the Cleveland stations plus stations from another city 35 miles east of here, on every one of my radios, including my vintage sets. I have heard that some folks here have problems receiving certain FM stations on car stereos, but that is understandable given the fact that FM signals are not as strong here as they are closer to Cleveland and the vagaries of reception of Cleveland FM on a car antenna in this area. The fact that television channel 3 doesn't reach here should be an indicator that certain local FM stations may be heard poorly or not at all. I don't know where the channel 3 transmitter tower is, but if there are any local FMs near it, their signals may not reach here (on a car stereo using a typical, short car antenna) either, or if they do get here, the reception may be spotty at best.