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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.
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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
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