My local ABC affiliate was always on UHF, and later the Fox station came along. PBS and the religious stations were there of course. And on the right kind of cloudy day, we could pick up public access from hundreds of miles away.

Most stations didn’t want to be on the UHF band because if people didn’t have the right antenna, they couldn’t pick it up. Your standard VHF aerial wasn’t very good for higher frequencies. I actually went up on the roof one day and patched in a UHF loop to the main antenna so I could tune in channel 59, and it worked pretty well for a redneck-engineered job. But Dad was furious because that antenna never picked up channel 4 again, no matter why we tried. Nothing I did should have caused that, but the blame fell squarely on me.