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Why Channel 37 Doesn’t Exist
- minikites 6y ago>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.
- is-ought 6y agoIf only people would put on their masks and smell the fresh air, right friend!
- eminence32 6y agoIs 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 6y agoThat’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.
- jschwartzi 6y agoOr the pale imitation of recourse that is a boycott. Try boycotting the company that sells your water.
- hcknwscommenter 6y agoI would suggest that strong government is necessary, but not sufficient.
- causality0 6y agoYou 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 6y agoThat 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 6y agoBecause 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 6y agoThe 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 6y agoNo one is bothering to fix Arecibo...
- causality0 6y ago
- 1MachineElf 6y ago>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 6y ago> 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.
- beefman 6y agoOriginal story: https://tedium.co/2021/03/05/channel-37-radio-telescope-history/ https://tedium.co/2021/03/05/channel-37-radio-telescope-hist...
- beervirus 6y agoThe first sentence of the article links to that.
- psim1 6y agoI 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 6y agoOverlapping 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 6y agosame 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.
- anonymousiam 6y agoThe 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 6y agoNot everyone has an ac chipset.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- orf 6y agotl;dr the band channel 37 would have used overlapped with a radio telescope built after WW2.
- KoftaBob 6y ago"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. "
- tsjq 6y agoThanks for that summary.
- cbanek 6y ago(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.
- BTCOG 6y agoI assume that you are wholly unfamiliar with Vice to be able to say this. Ok, since I constantly get downvotes for no reason. Vice, runs tons of stuff about aliens. They're a meme news outfit that runs shows such as "Fuck, that's delicious" and shows with Action Bronson and friends who get really high and do commentary on episodes of "Ancient Aliens." So again, you have to be totally unfamiliar with Vice, to say "Why aliens?"
- Jtsummers 6y ago> 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).
- tantalor 6y agoIt's never aliens.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ebcode 6y agoUntil it is.
- 908087 6y agoIt's impressive that, as a species, we once chose science over additional infomercials.
- the_mitsuhiko 6y agoEven odder is that central Europe had no channel 1. Everything started offset at channel 2. Additionally in some countries a channel 2A existed.
- hollerith 6y agoThe US, too, had no channel 1. (Source: I'm old enough that my family owned a TV in the 1960s.) And my current cable TV service, from Comcast, also has no channel 1.
- kkielhofner 6y agoWhat's always been interesting to me is the well-known "NY1": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NY1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NY1 Carried on Charter cable systems in NYC, various other systems throughout the country. Sometimes on channel 1, sometimes on other channels on different systems - likely due to technical challenges.
- ac29 6y agoIt did, but the band was reassigned to other uses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_1_(North_American_TV) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_1_(North_American_TV)
- jedberg 6y agoThere 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).
- drmpeg 6y agoAustralia and New Zealand both had channels 0 and 1 for analog television broadcast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_and_New_Zealand_television_frequencies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_and_New_Zealand_tel... During the peak of Solar cycle 22 in 1989-1991, amateur radio operators (including me) on the US west coast used to listen for New Zealand channel 0 audio on 50.75 MHz (also 50.74 and 50.76 MHz). If you could hear the wideband FM audio, it was almost guaranteed you could make SSB or CW contacts with New Zealand hams around 50.11 MHz.
- drorco 6y agoA 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 6y agoThat 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.
- p_l 6y agoExcept you won't get comparable telescopes with what Spacex Starship offers, or any other launch vehicle currently in development. And we have mostly solved atmospheric interference.
- codesnik 6y ago7-8 meter diameter mirror in outer space would be too small? Should be possible to put into orbit in one starship launch. And a system of big mirrors could be probably assembled and aligned together, without gravity and outside vibrations.
- p_l 6y agoTry 39 meters, weighing 400 tons for just the first mirror in sequence of 5, and that's without supports and actuators and everything else.
- beambot 6y agoI assume you're talking about the ELT. It's composed of something like 800 individual segments with their own position-adjusting actuators. I'm not intimately familiar with its construction (and the tolerances!), but I presume it would be possible to launch individual segments for space-based or moon-based construction... The big, monolithic secondary mirror is entirely within Starship's payload volume (4.2m diameter) and mass (3.5 tonnes). Bonus: Space-based radio astronomy will achieve much higher SNR! Edit (since reply is slow): You probably benefit on your mass-related support structure costs due to the lower-gravity (or zero gravity) environments.
- sedatk 6y agoTLDR: Because it was allocated for radio telescopes.
- moosebear847 6y agoAnyone else instinctively click away from Vice articles? After their awesome North Korea reporting it got weird.
- niceairport 6y agoVice has always been hit and miss for me. On one hand you have some really well produced documentaries, such as Hamilton's Pharmacopeia, the great reports on Ukrainian Protests or Xinjiang camps. On the other hand you have stuff like this: https://www.vice.com/en/article/gy8pxm/gluten-free-people-are-getting-laid-way-more-than-the-rest-of-us https://www.vice.com/en/article/gy8pxm/gluten-free-people-ar...
- devmunchies 6y agoi remember 37 being nickelodeon and 44 being cartoon network in the late 90s in central california. Maybe i didn't have analog or something.
- toast0 6y agoBoth of those are cable channels. Cable channels (normally) use different frequencies than broadcast tv. I don't see a similar frequency reservation for cable TV (would be around channel 89), probably because cable TV signals are not intended to radiate.
- pmontra 6y agoI remember that the home computers of the 80s (Commodore, Sinclair, etc) were sending their display signal to channel 36 in Europe. That was an unallocated frequency. I quote the "ZX81 BASIC Programming" manual from Sinclair, page 8: > The ZX81 operates on channel 36 UTF I wonder if they had a different version of the display adapter for the USA or it didn't matter. After all we disconnected the antenna cable and connected the computer to that input. We could use any channel, not necessarily an empty one.
- Mountain_Skies 6y agoIn the US you usually had a choice between channel 3 or 4. Both channels were in use across the country but no market had both in use so you could always switch to the other if there was a broadcast on one.
- theginger 6y agoThis now makes me want to go and rewatch all TV I have ever watched to see if I missed that a show had a channel 37 news channel or some other subtle reference to this.