@Mark Ollig
In the late 1940s, people in many small towns struggled to get good television reception because broadcast towers were too far away, or hills and mountains blocked the signals.
In 1948, John Walson Sr. of Mahanoy City, PA, found a practical way to improve local television reception.
He ran Army-surplus, heavy-duty twin-lead cable from a mountain antenna into town, creating an early cable television system.
The system brought in clear signals from channels 3, 6, and 10 out of Philadelphia and helped him sell more television sets at his appliance store.
“One of the things that got me interested in going into cable TV in a large way was the crowd that gathered in front of my store,” Walson said during a July 21, 1970, oral history interview conducted at his Service Electric Cable TV office, formerly his appliance store.
“When I first put those three channels on, the street was completely blocked with viewers, people watching the pictures in the window,” Walson Sr. said.
In 1948, Ed Parsons of Astoria, OR, built one of the first community antenna television, or CATV, systems in the United States.
At the time, Parsons owned a local radio station and set up a small receiving antenna system atop the Astoria Hotel. He later described it as a system of multiple Yagi antennas.
The Yagi-Uda antenna, developed in Japan in the 1920s by Shintaro Uda and Hidetsugu Yagi, is directional. Its metal elements help focus reception on a single source, making it effective for pulling in weak, distant television signals, such as KRSC-TV in Seattle, about 125 miles away.
“I found a usable signal up on the top of the Astoria Hotel,” Parsons recalled in his June 19, 1986, oral history interview.
Parsons used copper-conductor coaxial cable, amplifiers, and a community antenna to deliver the distant signal to nearby homes. Each household did not need its own antenna because the shared system received the signal and distributed it by cable.
The Minneapolis Times identified very high frequency, or VHF, channels 2, 4, 5, 7, and 9 for the Twin Cities market April 26, 1948.
KSTP-TV, Channel 5, launched the following day and became Minnesota’s first commercial television station.
From 1948 to 1952, the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC, put a pause on approving new television stations to keep up with the industry’s rapid growth.
During this time, channel assignments were shuffled, and some were reserved for educational use.
In the Twin Cities, Channel 7 was dropped from the commercial lineup, Channel 2 was designated for education, and VHF channels 4, 5, 9, and 11 were left for commercial television.
From 1952 to 1983, US ultra-high frequency, or UHF, television operated on channels 14 through 83, spanning the 470 to 890 megahertz, or MHz, band.
In the early 1980s, companies began experimenting with subscription television services delivered over UHF broadcast channels.
Subscribers needed decoder boxes because the broadcasts were scrambled.
Spectrum began broadcasting Sept. 22, 1982, on KTMA-TV, Channel 23, in the Twin Cities, offering scrambled subscription programming.
Its Spectrum Sports package included Minnesota Twins baseball and Minnesota North Stars hockey games.
In 1983, the FCC reallocated UHF channels 70 through 83 from television to land mobile radio services, including public safety, early cellular testing, and trunked radio.
A trunked radio system is a computer-controlled two-way radio network that lets many users share a small pool of radio frequencies.
Twin Cities Spectrum subscriptions peaked at 27,000 in May 1983, then fell to 13,000 by 1985 as cable competition grew and the Minnesota Twins and North Stars did not renew their sports contracts.
Spectrum’s movie service ended Sept. 29, 1985, and Spectrum shut down entirely a week later after broadcasting the Twins’ final regular-season game.
After Spectrum closed, KTMA-TV Channel 23 returned to being a free over-the-air station, so viewers no longer needed a decoder box.
In 1986, KTMA-TV switched to independent programming, showing reruns, movies, and local shows.
KTMA-TV premiered “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” or MST3K, Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 24, 1988.
KTMA-TV filed for bankruptcy in 1989, was sold, and was rebranded as KLGT in 1992.
By the late 1980s and early 1990s, cable companies began replacing many long coaxial trunk and feeder cables with fiber while keeping coaxial cable for the final connection to neighborhoods and homes.
In a traditional cable system, trunk cables carried signals over longer distances through the main network, while feeder cables branched out through neighborhoods toward customer drop lines.
These hybrid fiber-coaxial systems increased capacity and reliability, helping cable systems evolve from one-way television delivery into broadband internet, voice, and data networks.
By the late 1990s, many cable systems had become two-way networks capable of handling video, internet, and phone services.
After the 2009 digital conversion, KTMA-TV’s old analog UHF Channel 23, 524 to 530 MHz, was no longer the station’s actual broadcast frequency.
WUCW, the successor to KTMA-TV, still appeared to viewers as Channel 23, but that was only the on-screen, or virtual, channel number. Its actual digital broadcast signal was carried on UHF Channel 22, 518 to 524 MHz.
By 2026, voice and video were largely Internet Protocol, or IP, applications, sent as data packets over fiber, coaxial cable, satellite, and wireless networks alongside other digital content.
As of May of this year, channels 14 through 36, spanning 470 to 608 MHz, make up the current US UHF television range.
John Walson Sr., born John Walsonavich, died March 27, 1993, at 78.
Leroy “Ed” Parsons died May 1, 1989, at 82.
In the late 1940s, cable TV provided only a few broadcast channels.
Today, viewers have access to hundreds of channels and streaming services through modern coaxial, fiber, satellite, and internet-based networks.
An AI-assisted photographic collage by Mark Ollig illustrates the historical
evolution of cable television, moving from early community antenna systems
and rooftop arrays to analog sets and decoder boxes. The work, created through
OpenAI image generation, depicts the transition of the industry into modern
 |
AI-generated collage showing the evolution of cable television from early community antenna systems. |
