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Frank StantonFrank Stanton
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the networks, and a few large, successful independents, played. There's a thing called mileage separation that's important in understanding the way that allocation was done. If you had Channel 10, you couldn't repeat Channel 10 -- I don't know if it was 50 miles or someplace -- so it had to be spaced so it didn't interfere. Moreover, you couldn't put Channel 9 and Channel 10 in the same community because they were side by side. So, there were technical reasons why the assignment of channels turned up some strange anomalies. The thing that stood me in good stead in helping Governor Dewey with his “Man in Albany,” on the start of what later became Cap Cities, was because I knew, from studying the allocations upstate New York, that there was an assignment made for Channel 10, up in the Adirondacks, that nobody would ever want. I knew it was sitting there, nobody had ever thought about moving it into Schenectady, and that was the thing that broke the G.E. hold on the Schenectady market.

So, anyone in the early days who studied those allocations could find places you could get a station and move it a little bit so that it didn't interfere with this mileage separation. But, that's why there was only one “V” in there, because you had “Vs” in Austin and San Antonio that blocked getting the “V” there because of interference.

Q:

You had Vs in San Antonio and --?

Stanton:

Dallas. I'd want to study the allocation table, but that was done almost -- There was another factor.

There was a man by the name of [Harry] Plotkin who was general counsel to the FCC, dedicated to getting the UHF used for television. The VHF was at one part of the spectrum,





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