How I Became a Satellite Guy (Part 1)
I will admit it I am a gadget nerd. I have every modern electronic gadget known to man. I was a gadget nerd before it was cool to be a gadget nerd.
When I grew up as I kid I was always interested in electronics and television. My favorite toys as a kid were my Radio Shack 101 Electronics kit and my short-wave radio. I loved the short-wave radio because I could listen to voices from around the world. How cool was it that during the cold war I could hear voices coming from Radio Moscow.
Then one hot day in the summer I remember something magic happened at my house. We had just had dinner and there was a knock on the door. My parents went and answered the door and it was a salesman telling us that cable television was now available in our neighborhood. Where we lived it was a valley, even with a big out door antenna we could barely pick up anything so my parents were hot to sign up. Soon the cable trucks came into our neighborhood and strung up their cables and we had cable television.
The cable box they gave us was a Jerold box that was a box with a long cord hooked up to another box. It had 13 buttons on it and a dial so you could switch levels on the box allowing the box to tune up to 36 channels. Changing channels involved pressing one of the channel buttons down, and I can still remember the sound it made when changing channels… CLICK!
When we got cable there was no such thing as HBO. We had only 13 channels, the movie channel we had was called Q. Many of the 13 channels were just color bars most of the day. I remember keeping the color bars on at times, as sometimes I would see a wild feed being broadcast on that channel that was not advertised.
I remember they had one channel labeled as Kids, and twice a day the color bars would go away and a show named Calliope came one. The show was hosted by a character names “Gene” who was a still drawing (he wasn’t animated). Every few moments they would show a different picture of Gene on the screen that would talk about things and then introduce a cartoon. Soon that channel expanded and became known as what we know today as USA Network.
I remember Q went away and was replaced by a new service called “Home Box Office” another movie channel also came and it was called Prizm. For some reason Prizm didn’t last too long as it soon became Sports Channel.
As a kid I was in awe that I was able to watch all these cool things.
I also remember another station that was on cable; this one however got me in trouble. The station was called Escapade and aired every night starting at 8pm. Being one who liked to tinker I figured out how to tune in this scrambled channel on my television, this was done by using the fine tuning knob on the cable box and the fine tuning knob on the TV set. If you tuned both knobs correctly you could unscramble the wavy picture in black and white. Then one night my mother caught me and took away my nighttime cable viewing privileges as she walked in and on the screen was a naked woman in glorious wavy black and white. (Hey I was a growing boy) Escapade eventually became Playboy TV.
I was lucky where I lived, we had a public access television station and as I kid I would go to the studio of the cable company and help out. I might have been young but I quickly learned how to run a television camera. When I first started helping out there a few guys doing a nightly sports highlight show. The show started getting popular and eventually these guys were hogging up the studio so that it was hard for others to get in and shoot their shows. One day the cable company manager had an idea and offered to rent a channel to these guys for their sports show. That my friends was the birth of a channel we all know today as ESPN.
When I turned 16 years old I was hired by United Cable Television to be a playback operator for the very same public access studio that ESPN was born in. I use to love going to work, and at night sitting in the headend watching all the lights blink. One night an engineer showed me how to pick up signals from the satellite dish. I was able to tune in channels that were not carried by our cable company. I thought this was the coolest thing EVER. I use to love going to work and staying there long after I was off the clock sitting in the headend and scanning the skies on the satellite dish.
Unfortunately the building we were in became too small for the cable company so the headend, the dishes were all gone, yet the public access studio remained. I really missed them when they moved out. After a few years our public access studio was to move a legacy was over.
I still often drive by 319 Cooke Street in Plainville, Connecticut and admire the building where I once worked. Now in the building is a company that makes screws. There is zero indication whatsoever of all the history that went down there. I would love to see something put on the property to let the world know that this was the birthplace of ESPN.
Ahh those were the good old days… Tomorrow we will continue and you will learn the story of how I became a satellite guy. Thanks for reading!
(If you have any good classic cable TV memories please leave them in the comments section!)
ronit commented:
Setelite guy sounds intresting.
k commented:
heh, I rememeber WHT, it was actually one of the failed attempts to create subscription over the air television to compete with the rise of cable. After it was a massive failure, channel 68 become an affiliate of Home Shopping Network and was purchased by USA, (and in the 90s they started to mix in reruns of Monday Night Raw and Sunday Night Heat late at night), it later became one of the flagship Telefutura stations when USA spunoff HSN into its own company, and then sold the television station group to Univision.
AJB commented:
I remember back in 1980 in Long Island, NY, my family got something called WHT. It was channel 68, and with this special box, we got movie channels at night. During the day, the channel was free, and we got endless episodes of Speed Racer. By 1982, they added Cablevision on our neighborhood (my parents still have Cablevision to this day), and I used to stay up late to watch Australian Rules Football on ESPN (I used to love Aussie football). We had the box with 12 buttons, and 3 rows. So, row 1 was channels 2-13, row 2 was 14-25, and row 3 was 26-37.
It's amazing to think now I have DirecTV with diplexers, multiple dishes, RF repeaters, and 5 DVR's.
AJB commented:
I remember back in 1980 in Long Island, NY, my family got something called WHT. It was channel 68, and with this special box, we got movie channels at night. During the day, the channel was free, and we got endless episodes of Speed Racer. By 1982, they added Cablevision on our neighborhood (my parents still have Cablevision to this day), and I used to stay up late to watch Australian Rules Football on ESPN (I used to love Aussie football). We had the box with 12 buttons, and 3 rows. So, row 1 was channels 2-13, row 2 was 14-25, and row 3 was 26-37.
It's amazing to think now I have DirecTV with diplexers, multiple dishes, RF repeaters, and 5 DVR's.
BC commented:
We lived out in the country so satellite was the only option. In the early 80's we had what had to be one of the first generation consumer satellite setups. My dad would have us go out to the big dish and physically hand crank the pulleys to turn the dish to a different satellite. We eventually got a newer model that had a motor on it to turn the satellite, that was a welcome addition. I remember watching Super Dave Osborne on HBO.
Ganthet commented:
I remember the door-to-door cable salesman coming to our home way back when. In one of those weird crystal-clear childhood memories I recall my parents sitting at the kitchen table with the guy discussing the wonders of cable TV. Then they discussed it with the neighbors and decided we'd do it together.
Our fist box looked like one of those old address caddies with the sliding arrow on the side. The slider went from 1 to 50 (I think). I was so annoying because it was incredibly easy to bump the slider 10 channels down the line.
TroyT commented:
In the early 70s the city of Lincoln, Nebraska actually owned all of the local utilities and they offered cable tv. Since most of the local TV stations came from Omaha (60 miles away) cable TV was pretty much just for reception but they did take advantage of some of the empty VHF channels to give cable customers something "extra." They offered a time and temperature channel. It was literally a wall of analog displays and a camera slowly panned back and forth past them... time, temperature, humidity, etc. The second channel was a commercial free channel that offered whatever public domain movies and tv shows they could find... the little rascals, some really old cartoons, etc. Later in the 70s they offered a premium movie channel called Showcase. This was the first time you actually needed a cable box. It was a simply switch to engage or disengage the movie channel. What was interesting is right about that time the electronic tuning TVs started to come out. It didn't take long for everyone to figure out that by simply "mistuning" channel 6 or 7 you could get the movies for free. The channel was channel was quickly scrambled.
Neutron commented:
We had that same box. If I remember right it was wood grain. :) Growing up my parents had that box and we had HBO, Showtime, and Disney when it was a premium channel. :)
free hbo commented:
i remember using the tuning knob to see the tyson fight when he lost the belt on hbo, that was classic :)
old cableguy commented:
brand was jerrold not jerold. it was a 12 button box (3 x 12 = 36) model JRX-3-DIC
k commented:
heh, I remember that model of a cable box. My cable company was still using them in the 90s as a cheap alternative to give to people who didn't subscribe to premium channels but still needed a box for their older TVs. The mechanism that holds the button down ended up breaking on ours, so we ended up needing to use a folded piece of paper to hold down the buttons. The Prism brand actually lasted well into the 90's in Philly. There was Sports Channel Philly owned by Cablevision and delivered via satllite and then PRISM which was had sports and movies delivered via fiber owned by Comcast. Sports Channel Philly was about to become Fox Sports Philly in the 90s when Cablevision made a deal with Fox to switch most of their Sports Channel stations and make Fox Sports a national brand, when Comcast snatched the rights to most of the games away from Cablevision, which forced Sports Channel Philly to shutter and used PRISM's fiber feeds to launch CSN Philly in place of Sports Channel, giving them the loophole to blackout all satellite viewers of local sports games in Philly. Comcast gave PRISM's former channel slot to Encore's new channel called Starz, also known as Encore 8 at the time. Funny thing is, one of the local cable companies here in the Poconos was still using the off frequency method to "scramble" Hot Net as recently as 2006. Since it was somewhere between channel 97 and 98, and slightly outside the limit of most auto fine tuning functions built into modern TVs, you couldn't use a finetuning knob to get it, but with a PC tuner card it was as easy as turning off the preset channel tables and doing a scan by frequency.
