Kenneth, what's the frequency?

06/12/2009

Extra points to anyone who knew that the famous quote in my title was from the infamous mugging of CBS news anchor Dan Rather in 1986 by assailants who kept repeating the phrase while chasing and attacking him. Today though, I’m referring to the end of analog television broadcasting. I’m a dinosaur, born in 1958 so I still remember the transition to color television and the cable TV revolution. Over the air television broadcasting uses a complex process of frequency modulation and combines separate audio, video, color encoding, and digital data (for such things as Closed Captioning and Parental Guidance data) into a very tightly constrained bandwidth. I only recently threw away a television set that still had two large tuning knobs for the channel selection, one for VHF (channel 2-13) and another for UHF (channel 14-69) made obsolete by the growth of cable TV and the need for more channel capacity with the modern cable channel lineups.

I grew up in south Mississippi in a place and time where cable TV wasn’t an option, we didn’t have a local cable provider until 1975. We were at least 75 miles from all the transmitting towers save one, so my dad had resorted to extraordinary means to ensure an acceptable signal to our television sets. He had designed and fabricated a telescoping pole for our antenna and had equipped it with an electric motor that allowed us to rotate the antenna from a remote control unit inside the house. When extended fully the pole elevated the antenna to a lofty 30 feet or so, above rooftop height but allowed the antenna pole to be quickly retracted to only slightly higher than the eave of the house whenever a Gulf storm approached. The two broadcasting towers for the TV stations in Mobile, AL and the one for the Pensacola, FL station were located within three miles of each other on the desolate land near the Alabama-Florida state line so the antenna could be aimed to pick up those three signals perfectly. The fourth station that was readily available just happened to be about 40 miles away in the opposite direction so we could get a perfectly acceptable broadcast signal from that station with the antenna aligned in the opposite direction for the more distant Mobile and Pensacola stations. Sometimes, late at night I would want to watch Star Trek reruns or cheesy sci-fi movies from one of the New Orleans TV stations that were some 90 miles away. This was right at the limit of analog broadcast technology even over flat land and water as those signals were received but late at night when the atmospheric conditions were good enough I could adjust that antenna directional remote control and aim our huge rooftop antenna across the Gulf of Mexico toward New Orleans and pick up their TV signal well enough to be watchable.

Now, with a large flatscreen high-definition TV and digital cable service I marvel at what used to be considered watchable. Whenever we watch some classic television program from the ‘50’s or ‘60’s I always notice how the make-up, sets, and even the acting were tailored for a viewing medium that presented a grayscale image on a 15” diagonal luminous cathode tube with static and imperfections in the conversion from analog frequency modulation to glowing pixels on the cathode tube. I’ll remember the days when that quirky and limited analog broadcast signal was the state of the art, bringing images right into our homes of war, injustice, and suffering but also of great triumph. That antiquated technology allowed me to watch with horror as protestors beaten and firehosed and with awe as Neil Armstrong walked on the moon as it happened, it showed me Olympic events and popular culture in not exactly equal portions. I’m thankful the analog technology existed to bring me so much entertainment and information but I’m not sad to see it replaced by a superior technology.

As Walter Cronkite would say, “And that’s the way it is!”