Quote:
Originally Posted by John Hafer
Old TV Nut, these were taken off WSYR-TV Ch. 3 in Syracuse New York
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I went to Syracuse University and graduated 1978 BSEE, and back then there was only 4 broadcast stations in town, 3 VHF (WSYR one of them) and 1 UHF (the educational PBS outlet). Seemed rather sparse compared to New York City. Local TV news sports segments would report on high school football (in New York City they never did that!). And back then the local NBC channel didn't carry Saturday Night Live (must have been too risqué for them...
There was a small college CATV system "Synapse" back then, but my dorm wasn't on it (seemed that they'd have to route the cable underground along a steam tunnel or such, and that would violate some silly law about franchises or such (and they used to worry about silliness like that then). Not that it mattered that much, it would have only fed one TV in a main lounge in the entire dorm anyway. And the extra channels were just some bad locally produced programs from the local broadcast journalism school, a division of SU. Just as well that TV in Syracuse was boring, I spent the time studying anyway.
During my senior year, someone on campus put up a pirate TV station one weekend on channel 7, called "Lucky 7". A brief mention of this made the New York Times, possibly the first pirate TV station ever done. Local paper said they built the transmitter from parts from an old guitar amp (the output tubes probably would work well on VHF). This was back when VCRs first hit the market, and some of the shows were Star trek shows and such. Also some material that wouldn't meet FCC decency rules...