Rich;

Television is the opiate of the masses! :)

What about the television antenna manufacturers? Good bye old antenna hello new! Outdoor antennas will now be smaller due to the increased frequencies that will be used.

I would expect that television sales will increase when the new rules go into place. This will increase our deficit with China even further! :)

In 1948 television came to San Francisco. I was six years old and my father had a television/radio sales and repair shop, the biggest in San Francisco! When I finished engineering college I went to work for Ampex and enjoyed working with the many innovators who worked at that company, on video and audio projects.

Frequency allocations for the radio spectrum have an interesting history. Back in the late 1940’s ABC was told by a "government insider" that all frequencies below channel 7 would be eliminated.

ABC went out of its way to purchase licenses for channel 7 throughout the nation. The proposed change did not go into effect. The spectrum between channel 6 and seven has a large frequency gap. This gap is filled by other radio services such as the radio amateur 2 meter band.

There is no television channel 1. The reason is that the spectrum which was given to channel 1 (50 to 56 mhz) allowed long distance transmission. A channel 1 television station could be seen for hundreds of miles on a flat trajectory, reducing the potential number of licenses.

Radio amateurs were given the spectrum from 50 to 54 mhz, called the Six Meter Band. Amateurs working on Six Meters often interfered with channel 2 television receivers, which casues friction between the general public and radio amateurs. :)

Today with cable TV none of this matters.

Tom