1952
The radio telescope that became a headache for the television industry
(The telescope was more expensive to maintain than to build, McVittie added.)The area around the 610 MHz band has, over the years, gained a reputation as being important to scientific research because of its placement in the context of two other frequencies important to radio astronomy, 410 MHz and 1.4 GHz.As space and astronomy writer Bob King of Universe Today put it in 2013: “Without it, radio astronomers would lose a key window in an otherwise continuous radio view of the sky. Imagine a 3-panel bay window with the middle pane painted black. Who wants THAT?”Well, we wanted to build this parabolic cylinder. I sent George Swenson on a tour of radio astronomy outfits in the world, Australia, England and so on, and he came back with the idea of the parabolic cylinder, a fixed transit instrument that sweeps out the sky simply by the earth rotating. And we decided for engineering reasons that we could only build a really big one if we had a frequency round about 600 megahertz. Otherwise, the perfection of the reflector, if we went to a shorter wavelength, was not something that you could [do] by the acre, at least not at that time, which was the late 1950s. And so we picked upon this 610 megahertz band as the observing frequency.
18
Why the existence of channel 37 became such a problem for scientists
The FCC disagreed with the university’s assessment, feeling that it was too early to make such a call. But just a couple of years later, stations were starting to call the FCC up for access to that specific station—particularly one directly outside of the antenna’s 600-mile radius, in New Jersey. (According to reports from the era, prospective broadcasters wanted to put a Spanish-language network in the spot.)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. But even with the channel being located hundreds of miles away and targeted at the New York City market, there was concern among scientists that even far-away interference could get in the way of scientific research.Most of our radio astronomy friends said, “Look here, you two, Swenson and McVittie, you are just crazy. Do you mean to say you are asking the American public to give up one television channel for science? Who ever heard of anything so absurd?” So we said, “Well, the channel isn’t being used.” “Yes, that’s true, it’s not being used very much but it is being used in the neighborhood of New York, and places like that.” So I said, “We’re not in the neighborhood of New York.” Anyway, we got laughed at.
- No stations on channel 37 within a 600-mile radius of the antenna until at least 1968, allowing one specific scientist, McVittie, to complete a survey of radio star sources he was doing on the 610 MHz frequency.
- No stations anywhere listed under channel 37 could air anything between midnight and 7 a.m. Keeping in mind time zones, this effectively would give McVittie four hours a night that were open to allowing for such research.
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.
In other words, the commission didn’t necessarily know how putting channel 37 on the dial was going to impact scientific research in the long run, so best not risk it.Ultimately, channel 37 went completely unused throughout the analog era in much of North America as well as most other countries—with a handful of exceptions, particularly in the Caribbean countries of the Dominican Republic and Trinidad and Tobago. (Today, channel 37 technically can appear as an over-the-air digital channel, but it is usually a so-called “virtual channel,” allowing a network to be positioned there no matter its position in the spectrum.)In the end, the scientists won.It is probable that channel 37 operations at Paterson, New Jersey would interfere with observations at Danville to a certain extent. Also, (since interference from different sources would probably not occur simultaneously) the situation would be complicated by interference from other channel 37 stations if authorized. Moreover, any interference which would exist, even though for only a small percentage of time, might occur at critical times in the observing process. To the extent that observation programs would be interfered with, the time of completing them might well be substantially increased, so that a longer period of protection would be required to achieve the same results.