Kathy over at The Junk Drawer has a post up about her favorite TV station being moved to channel 1,129. I posted a comment there and thought I would share it here on my blog.

I remember the day we first got a television. It was Christmas and I was about seven years old. Coming in through the black and white static was... Underdog!

When everything got all set up, we had three channels, 6 (NBC), 10 (CBS) and 13 (ABC). I was enough of a geek, even back then, that I built a special antenna that could pick up a distant station, channel 2, but it was also NBC, so it didn't make much difference. We also managed to eventually get 19, which was a repeater station of channel 10. Also, during storms, we sometimes could get weird bounces and I would fiddle with the TV trying to keep the signal from half way across the country coming in. You can still sometimes get the same effect on AM radio.

As to channel 1,129, one of the issues that broadcasters are concerned about is 'channel slamming' where your channel gets stuck out in 'digital siberia'. Back when we only had a few channels. we would surf all the channels, and sometimes find something interesting on a channel we didn't watch. With so many channels these days, the chances of discovering an interesting new channel while channel surfing is greatly diminished.