TV Station List - Test Patterns & Logos
January 1951 Radio-Electronics

January 1951 Radio-Electronics [Table of Contents] Wax nostalgic about and learn from the history of early electronics. See articles from Radio-Electronics, published 1930-1988. All copyrights hereby acknowledged.

Anyone out there old enough to remember when you were a kid and managed to be able to stay up late enough, maybe on a Saturday night, to be able to watch the television station sign off the air at night? Here in the U.S., the custom was to announce the end of the programming day, play the National Anthem, and then put up the station logo while broadcasting a single tone. The tone and test patterns were actually used by TV technicians for calibrating instruments for use in servicing sets. In 1951 when this TV Station List appeared in Radio-Electronics magazine, black and white (B&W) was still the standard, so these images are what you would have seen then. I'm not quite that old (born in 1958), but I do recognize the stations we could receive at my parent's home in Mayo, Maryland. Being located between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, a pretty good selection of both VHF and UHF channels were available. The most familiar were WMAR (ch. 2) and WBAL (ch.  11) from Baltimore; and WTTG (ch. 5), WMAL (ch. 7), and WTOP (ch. 9) out of D.C.  Not in the list was WJZ-TV (ch. 13, originally WAAM, which is in the list) in Baltimore, on which I remember seeing Oprah Winfrey on the eleven o-clock news when my parents were watching it (with a smoke-filled living room after an evening of puffing away on their Raleigh and Belair cigarettes - both of them died in their early fifties from smoking-related diseases).

TV Station List

Posted December 18, 2020