[HN Gopher] Why Channel 37 Doesn't Exist
___________________________________________________________________
Why Channel 37 Doesn't Exist
Author : jonathankoren
Score : 58 points
Date : 2021-03-17 07:07 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vice.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vice.com)
| KoftaBob wrote:
| "Channel 37 is an intentionally unused ultra-high frequency (UHF)
| television broadcasting channel in the United States, Canada and
| Mexico and some of Eurasian region. The frequency range allocated
| to this channel is important for radio astronomy, so broadcasting
| is not licensed. "
| sedatk wrote:
| TLDR: Because it was allocated for radio telescopes.
| orf wrote:
| tl;dr the band channel 37 would have used overlapped with a radio
| telescope built after WW2.
| 908087 wrote:
| It's impressive that, as a species, we once chose science over
| additional infomercials.
| cbanek wrote:
| (And What It Has to Do With Aliens)
|
| Hint: nothing.
|
| Why the need to bring aliens into it? I like how this isn't in
| the topic here, because it's really clickbait. I didn't find one
| mention of any talk about aliens in the whole thing. But it is a
| great article about radio astronomy.
| tantalor wrote:
| It's never aliens.
| [deleted]
| Jtsummers wrote:
| > Somehow the news got around that here was this new way of
| listening to _little green men on Mars_. This is what radio
| astronomy seemed to the ordinary public. And the FCC was
| preventing it from being developed in the United States. We got
| rumors, George particularly from friends he knew, that
| gradually a huge accumulation of letters arrived at the FCC,
| protesting against this nonsupport of this new science,
| whatever it was. And that this finally persuaded the FCC that
| they'd better give in. Nobody knows. [emphasis added]
|
| That's the part about aliens. McVittie's perception that the
| popular understanding of radio astronomy (listening to
| Martians) influenced the FCC decision (which, at least
| officially as described in the next quote, was not the case).
| [deleted]
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| Even odder is that central Europe had no channel 1. Everything
| started offset at channel 2. Additionally in some countries a
| channel 2A existed.
| hollerith wrote:
| The US, too, had no channel 1. (And my current cable TV
| service, from Comcast, also has no channel 1.)
| jedberg wrote:
| There was a channel 1 briefly in a few places, but it turns out
| that it wasn't a good spectrum for TV so it looked awful, so no
| one wanted it. They didn't bother to renumber all the channels
| though, so channel 1 just didn't get used (although it's
| available as a virtual channel now).
| beefman wrote:
| Original story: https://tedium.co/2021/03/05/channel-37-radio-
| telescope-hist...
| beervirus wrote:
| The first sentence of the article links to that.
| minikites wrote:
| >The tale of channel 37 reflects one thing: Without resistance, a
| commercial use case will usurp a noncommercial use case for a
| given resource.
|
| Capitalism needs a check in the form of a strong government
| because without one, it will consume every available resource in
| service of privatizing and charging for resources that used to be
| available to all, like an economic plague. The joke can of
| "Perri-Air" from Spaceballs will be our actual future if we don't
| stop it.
| causality0 wrote:
| You could think of it that way. You could also think of it as
| denying hundreds of thousands of Spanish-speaking New Jersey
| residents programming in their native language in exchange for
| the discovery of one new type of Active Galactic Nucleus and
| two supernova remnants, from a telescope that only operated for
| ten years and which the scientific community cared so little
| about they didn't even bother fixing it when it eroded away in
| 1970.
| somehnguy wrote:
| That seems like a particularly inflammatory way of looking at
| it..
|
| Why couldn't they use one of the other channels? Was there no
| demand for such programming? Who was denying those options,
| if anybody?
| causality0 wrote:
| _Because of FCC rules and limitations elsewhere, the city
| of Paterson had no other options to bring a TV station on
| air other than channel 37._
|
| _The fun part about this is that McVittie, who helped to
| set the wheels in motion for the blanket ban of channel 37
| in the U.S., never learned exactly why the FCC made the
| decision to flip its mindset on this issue._
|
| Racism? Against Latinos in 1963? Nah, couldn't be.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| The ban was precipitated by a case that happened to be a
| Spanish language channel, but not all channel 37s would
| have been in Spanish. The result was that a channel was
| barred across the entire country. It's a big leap to say
| that the official rationale is bogus and go to "FCC is
| racist against Latinos and decided to bar the channel for
| everyone".
| quink wrote:
| No one is bothering to fix Arecibo...
| causality0 wrote:
| https://www.elnuevodia.com/english/news/story/8-million-
| appr...
|
| http://www.naic.edu/NGAT/NGAT_WhitePaper_v2_01022021.pdf
| Falling3 wrote:
| Sounds like a beautiful example of a false dichotomy.
| is-ought wrote:
| If only people would put on their masks and smell the fresh
| air, right friend!
| 1MachineElf wrote:
| >it will consume every available resource in service of
| privatizing and charging for resources that _used to be
| available to all_
|
| Minor nit-pick: I don't think the story is a good example of
| your concept here. The radio telescope, regardless of what it
| did for scientists, served fewer people than what commercial
| use of channel 37 would have.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| > The radio telescope, regardless of what it did for
| scientists, served fewer people than what commercial use of
| channel 37 would have.
|
| ...because the results of science never end up benefit normal
| people? Science is forever whereas a television broadcast is
| temporary.
| eminence32 wrote:
| Is a "strong government enough"? To quote the article:
|
| > The FCC's attempt to balance science and commerce was not
| well-accepted by said scientists, who took their story to the
| media.
|
| This suggests to me that the government had enough strength to
| make an enforceable ruling, but very nearly made a ruling that
| would have not prioritized science in the way that the radio
| astronomers would have wanted.
|
| It took something else (public attention, persistent outreach
| by scientists, etc) for the FCC to come to the ruling that it
| ultimately came to.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| That's why democratic government is so powerful.
|
| If the VP for Channel Allocation at Marconi made that
| decision, you would have no recourse at all.
| drorco wrote:
| A more recent similar case would be Starlink. Fast forward a few
| years and the night sky will be filled with satellites disturbing
| astronomers. It would be interesting to see how that one ends up.
| My bet, more outer-space telescopes to compensate for all the new
| disturbance.
| beambot wrote:
| That is the bargain...
|
| IIRC, StarShip will result in something like 1 Million tons of
| annual launch capacity -- 3 orders of magnitude greater than
| today. Commercial applications are required, and satellites
| such as StarLink are a natural start.
|
| Meanwhile, some of that launch capacity can be used to build
| space-based instruments for much cheaper.
|
| Overall, I'd call it a win.
| psim1 wrote:
| I remember an old TV set that had UHF channels from 14 to 83. How
| is the exclusion of a single channel, 37, a problem for TV
| broadcasters?
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Overlapping broadcast areas. It's one less channel to use for
| deconflicting the need for broadcast spectrum and the desire to
| have a broadcast channel while avoiding interference from
| neighbors.
|
| They get at this with the New Jersey case, where in order for
| the station to get a channel it had to be 37. Presumably this
| was because of there being too many other broadcasters in the
| area. It's been a long time since I studied radio so I can't
| recall the specifics, but if there are 70 channels available
| (total) in a specific area perhaps only half or a quarter of
| them might be usable without producing interference with
| others.
|
| EDIT: You also see this play out with conventional AM/FM
| broadcasting. You typically won't find adjacent stations, like
| 91.3 and 91.5, in the same area and when it happens (perhaps
| you're on the edge between the two broadcast areas) you'll hear
| one station bleeding into the other.
| dylan604 wrote:
| same principle applies to WiFi routers. That's why you look
| at other channels being used in your aread, and then pick a
| channel that has the least overlap with your neighbors.
| astrange wrote:
| Isn't being on the same channel as another network actually
| OK-ish with newer standards? The worst is when you
| partially overlap another channel.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| The concept of a "channel" on WiFi bands (particularly
| 2.4GHz) is pretty much done. 802.11ac can use 80MHz of
| spectrum on the 2.4 band, which is pretty much the entire
| set of available channels all at once.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Not everyone has an ac chipset.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| True, but if you live in a congested area, chances are
| good that one of your neighbors does. I have a house in a
| new community of "smart homes" where each home has two AC
| WAPs. Every single 2.4GHz channel has several users. MIMO
| helps, but 5GHz (or the new 6e band) are much more
| preferable.
| ralph84 wrote:
| Unless you are in a rural area, trying to use an 80 MHz
| channel in 2.4 GHz almost guarantees your radio is going
| to spend far more time waiting to transmit because of
| interference than doing anything useful. Finding the
| least congested 20 MHz channel is likely to give higher
| overall throughput.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| FM has a property known as "capture effect". The result is
| that the stronger station will usually "capture" the PLL
| (back when they used PLLs instead of SDRs for FM demod) and
| you will not hear the adjacent station. It can become a
| problem in a mobile environment (car stereo) when the signal
| levels are constantly changing, but "bleeding" is a problem
| usually associated with other modulation types (typically AM
| and SSB).
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-03-17 23:00 UTC)