KDKA-TV at 70
January 11, 2019
70 years ago today WDTV Channel 3 went on the air with a live broadcast from the Syria Mosque in Oakland. An affiliate of the DuMont Network, WDTV, it was also the third station DuMont owned behind WABD in New York and WTTG in Washington, DC.
That was 1949, but by 1954 DuMont was floundering. Other stations were being given construction permits which caused channel 3 to move down to 2. Westinghouse, who owned KDKA Radio, offered an unprecidented $9.75 Million for the WDTV license and by 1955 it was KDKA-TV. By then, WQED-TV (13) had signed on as an educational outlet while WENS and WKJF struggled on channels 16 and 53 respectively. KDKA cherrypicked programming from all of the networks and soon WIIC (11) would have become the exclusive CBS affiliate. A challenge by WENS regarding channel 11s VHF allocation which WENS believe it lay claim to as a struggling UHF channel, delayed WIIC signing on for 2 years. CBS went to KDKA exclusively as a result and WIIC went with NBC when it signed on in 1957.
KDKA is synonymous with Pittsburgh in both radio and TV and PBRTV wishes the staff and management all the best at 70 and beyond!
I used to hear about Dumont and WDTV from my parents and was amazed it was a on a channel that was no longer used in the area. I also asked them what happened to channel 1 on TVs, but I don’t remember that they had an answer to that one.
A good but lengthy history of TV channel 1 is presented on this link:
http://www.tech-notes.tv/History&Trivia/Channel%20One/Channel_1.htm
What was TV channel 1 (50-54 MHz) was re-allocated and is now the six meter amateur (ham) radio band. The six meter band is subject to frequent “skip” conditions where signals from hundreds of miles away are received. A TV station on channel 1 would be subject to this problem quite frequently.