That would’ve been ABMV-4 and STV-8.
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From austvarchive’s Twitter account.
Channel Seven’s Wonderful World of Living Color
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Can someone explain why there is a channel 5A? Why wasn’t it called 6 and the rest of the numbers increased incrementally.
I know that both ABC and commercial stations (eg RTS5a) were allocated this peculiar channel in various places.
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In Australia we had Channels 1 to 12 which were further classified as Low band and High band. Low band were channels 0 to 5A, High band was channels 6 to 12. In addition to an extra channel at 5A, we also had 9A . I am unsure of Channel 9A was ever used. Channel 8A and Channel 12 was added prior to digital television in Australia.
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When TV was first planned the dial only went from Channels 1 to 10. It was soon apparent that this was not going to be enough to support Australia’s growing TV industry. It was decided to add 3 channels to the dial – 0, 5A and 11 – meaning that existing stations didn’t have to change anything, but it meant that older TV sets needed re-tuning to accommodate any new channels such as when Channel 0 started in Melbourne and Brisbane.
As mentioned, Channel 9A and 12 were added in more recent years to accommodate digital TV. Although IIRC even 9A was used by a handful of late arriving analogue services.
9A is primarily assigned for DAB radio now but there are still some remote digital TV services using that channel.
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Explains why regional station RTS was assigned the 5A frequency.
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Apparently 5A was also a Channel Midstate Television used. Was the translator in Hay
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ABC Western Victoria was on 5A while ABC Northam-York later moved to 5A sometimes in the 1970s.
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The DDQ relay in Toowoomba also moved from 5 to 5a.
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Part of the problem was that an analogue channel 10 overlaps 9A by 1MHz - so 9A could only be used for TV in markets where 10 wasn’t used for analogue TV, or was at least far enough away that the slightly reduced separation wasn’t an issue.
That kinda accidentally made it the spot where DAB ended up - as during the simulcast period 9A-9C were available (on TV 9A), while 9D overlapped with the bottom of analogue 10, so we had 3 usable DAB blocks squeezed in between Channel 9 and Channel 10 analogue.
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but that was the case with any analogue TV channel in general, wasn’t it? Why you couldn’t have two adjacent channels in use in the same market. The exception being channels 9 and 10 as there was enough gap between them, hence the later addition of 9A?
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Yeah, that’s not the best way of wording it, 10 would also need to be free of analogue TV in adjacent markets to use 9A for analogue. So presumably in most of those cases, you could just use 10.
It also meant 9A couldn’t be used for Digital TV until post-switchoff in most markets.
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I thought they shifted Channel 10 up 1MHz at some point (2000s maybe) to accommodate 9A being its own channel. Or did they never do that with analogue?
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Yeah - they did - but I don’t believe any legacy channels were moved. New analogue allocations on 10/11 would have been in the shifted spot.
On the oldest ACMA listing spreadsheet I have from 2012, so after some analogue switch offs, almost all of the analogue 9A and the channel 10/11 allocations on the shifted frequency were in WA - seemingly it was a method they used to add WIN into the markets on VHF.
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I was like “what were they thinking?” when Sunrise replaced its theme song with that in 2010.
By the end of 2011, the “(Reach Up for the) Sunrise” song by Duran Duran, first introduced in 2004, was reinstated (the song was released on the very day the show, along with Seven News, rebranded following the Athens Olympics).
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Thanks for that summary of Channel 5a. Very interesting!
Now I have another question for you: why in the biggest capital city markets were the channels allocated as 2, 7, 9 (then later 10?). Why not, say 2, 4, 6 or 1, 7, 10 or something else?
What I’m really getting at is why that identical pattern (with the commercials bunched away from the ABC) and why the exact same arrangement in Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney?
I do know that there was a general preference for ABC stations to use channels between 1 to 4 if possible.
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why those specific numbers 2, 7, 9 and 10, I do not know. But the original provisional plan of TV channels allocated channels 2, 7, 9 and 10 to Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. Hobart was provisionally assigned channels 2, 4, 6, 8. Canberra was assigned channels 7 and 10.
Even before TV began, the Australian Broadcasting Control Board decided that both VHF and UHF would be used for television, but the initial roll-out of television would be only on VHF, with UHF only to be explored should the VHF band not be sufficient to accommodate future services: “The Board appreciates that if unforeseen developments prove that more channels must be provided for television stations than are available or can be secured in the VHF band, it will be necessary to use UHF channels.”
This was due to the reduced coverage area of UHF frequencies and the higher cost of tuners to accommodate UHF. The ABCB also considered the possibility that UHF may be more appropriate for use by colour television when that should eventuate.
Source: Annual Report, Australian Broadcasting Control Board 1954-55. https://apo.org.au/node/62967
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The VHF high band channels were probably seen as a more saleable asset. At one point, wasnt there talk of a fourth commercial channel?
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There was talk of a 5th channel as far back as the 1960s but I think the discussion was around it being an educational channel and then in the 1970s discussion was around ethnic/multicultural television, with Malcolm Fraser promising a multicultural television service in the lead up to the 1977 federal election.
As for a 4th commercial channel this has come up at various times over the years but mostly has been shutdown given that most of the time there is barely enough to maintain three commercial channels in good health.
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I wonder how much discussion went the other way. The UK had just one channel right up until a year before we launched pretty much straight to 3 channels, Canada until 1960 only had a CBC-affiliated channels, even though they had private owners; and NZ/Ireland held out for decades on commercial TV.
In the US, there were major cities with only 1 TV channel, and others with just 2 or 3. This was a mixture of the commercial reality and even more issues than we had with how you fit all the channels in, but the markets with 4+ channels weren’t exactly all thriving.
It seems kinda surprising Australia would launch with both a national broadcaster, unlike the US, while also allowing private commercial television - a combo that seemingly didn’t exist at the time the decisions were made, at least in the anglosphere.
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