Anyone who grew up in the CRT era of TVs remembers that you had to turn the channel to 3 before you turned on the VCR or game console. Otherwise, the picture would not work. Why was this so necessary?
Edit: woah this blew up while I wasn’t looking! Thanks for the replies!
In: Technology
Very similar to those audio device adapters which transmit on particular FM station frequencies, it’s a very very localized pirate radio station.
Except the switchbox was a direct interface to the antenna input, and did not transmit into the air. Channel 3 is a particular frequency and was commonly unused in most places (over the air) so there would be less interference/collision. If you area did have a channel 3 over the air then you had the choice of 4. And no market had channels immediately next to each other due to bleed-over, so if you had a 3 you didn’t have a 4 or if you had a 4 you didn’t have a 3. Usually the channels were 2,5,7,9,11 or such, nicely spread out, many markets didn’t have a 3 OR 4 at all.
Of course when over the air was mostly replaced by cable, there was less need for channel separations. And digital has no neighbor-bleed problem at all.
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