Editor’s Note: In a few months, the Moapa Valley Television Maintenance District (MVTVD) will be beginning its 60th year of servicing the community. Over the past six years, the district has gone through a major conversion of its equipment to a new digital format. The district is now re-broadcasting 33 channels of digital programming to local residents equipped to receive a free to air TV signal. But the district had very humble beginnings. The following history, written by the founder of the MVTVD, outlines those early beginnings. This will be the first in a series of articles this summer which will explore impending challenges faced by the MVTVD and other rural translators across the state.
By VAL SMITH
In 1955, I was teaching 5th and 6th grade music in the Logandale Elementary School and running my own radio repair business on the side. At that time, I borrowed a TV from Garheim Music Co. in Las Vegas. I had been doing quite a lot of business with them in renting and buying musical instruments for the school band. I believe that this was the first television set that was in the Moapa Valley.
But receiving a television signal down in the Moapa Valley back then was a challenge. I purchased a humongous TV antenna, mounted it on our house and proceeded to look for some stations to show up. Las Vegas KLRJ Channel 2 had recently come on the air but I received only a spotty and very snowy signal from it.
Often I would get skip signals out of Texas or Kansas or some state in the mid-west. We could watch some, or maybe all of a program. We were thrilled at this!
By 1956 my interest in television was growing. I experimented with other antennas and other locations. But we live down in a hole in Moapa Valley and none of my attempts worked very well.
I had my eye on the Beacon Hill location, just north of the current I-15 Logandale/Overton exit, as a possible place to receive a good signal. Unfortunately the road up the hill was rough and it only went up to the saddle at that time.
One Saturday I took my Amateur Radio field strength meter and a homemade di-pole antenna and walked up to the top of the hill. My meter would tune to 54 MHz, which is the video portion of channel 2. I got a good signal.
But that was still a long way from the people of the valley. There would need to be some kind of translator placed there to “boost” the signal down into the valley. I had read about other towns in Nevada doing this same thing but there was not much information about it at this time because the technology was just getting started.
Still, I surmised that I could put up a channel 2 receiving antenna, feed that into a TV tuner, then into an IF amplifier. I could then convert that signal to channel 4, connect it to an antenna and beam channel 4 down to the valley.
I was eventually able to scrounge some parts together and put together a system that I hoped would work. But then there was the question of where to get power to run that system up on the hill. Well, there was the beacon which, at that time, was the only thing on top of the hill. Maybe we could “appropriate” some power from that.
On a Saturday in the fall of 1956 I and a couple of partners took the equipment up to the hill. We climbed on foot from the saddle to the top of the hill where the beacon is. We were able to get into a power box and, as I said, “appropriate” some electricity.
We laid the equipment out on the rocks and cabled it all together. It was all just out in the open, subject to the elements. We mounted the big channel 2 antennas onto a 1” pipe and we just put rocks around the pipe to anchor it. We guyed it to other rocks so the wind wouldn’t blow it away. It was quite a sight when we were through.
Finally, we turned it on and, by golly, it worked! Of course, there was still a lot of tinkering and tuning to do, but it did work.
We were probably transmitting a total power output of ½ to 1 watt of radiated power at most.
Of course, I was soon interested in adding television sales and service to my existing radio repair business. Once we had a reliable signal coming from the hill, I negotiated with Metcalf Electronics in Las Vegas to supply me with TV sets.
These were custom made sets. If a component part of the set went bad, it could simply be unplugged and another one plugged in while the original part was being repaired. They were made by “Setchell-Carlson.”
Jesse and Alta Whipple of Logandale were the first of our customers to purchase one of these sets. We sold quite a few in the community.
Unfortunately, it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that our site design up on Beacon Hill wasn’t going to last long. The first rain that came, I was up there with plastic sheeting trying to keep the moisture out of the equipment. I used a hair dryer to dry out the circuits.
My trips up to the hill became more frequent. Keeping the equipment live and on the air was becoming a real job. It was also becoming expensive! Tubes had to be replaced. Gasoline had to be purchased. No one had really thought of these things.
Finally, toward the end of 1956, I spoke to a couple of the men in town that had purchased our TV sets and proposed that we form some sort of organization to maintain the signals. Wendell Hutchings and Lester Shurtliff were willing to work on a committee to see about raising some operational funds and were the first two committee members of record on the TV District. We asked the TV owners in the community to contribute $1.00 per month to help in the up-keep of the translator. To you who are reading this, does this sound familiar? Of course, we were met with no great enthusiasm.
We struggled along with one channel for about 6 or 7 months. We made improvements along the way. Better amplifiers were added. The TV tuner gave way to a manufactured converter. A metal box was added in an attempt to protect the equipment from the weather.
The technology in the translator field was growing by leaps and bounds. We had a TV organization. We were collecting some money, and had a few dollars in the bank. A couple of fellows from Salt Lake City sent us a letter inviting us to purchase some translators they were manufacturing. The board agreed to purchase three units. By now, KLRJ had moved from channel 2 to channel 3 and was now KNBC, so we had to purchase new equipment. We added channel 8 and channel 13 to our list.
Most important to us was that the Overton Power District made a road to the top of the Beacon Hill. Now we could drive all the way to the top and didn’t have to climb it on foot. They also built a small building to house all of their radio equipment.
We approached OPD and asked if we might contribute part of the cost of the building in exchange for room for our TV equipment. They agreed. I don’t remember the exact amount, but as near as I can remember, it was $500.
We installed our new translators in the building and Irvin Bryner brought his jackhammer up on the hill and drilled several holes for us to cement in our receiving and transmitting antennas. This really helped make things much better weather-wise.
The decision to purchase all this new equipment brought on some of the darkest days of the TV District from a financial standpoint. It took a good deal of money to upgrade and add the new equipment and our funds were quickly depleted. As I recall, at one time we had $2.89 in our bank account.
The decision of the board to make these upgrades meant that we would have to borrow money. Two of our TV board members, Lynn Bowler and Ron Dalley, personally signed a note at the bank to guarantee payment of the money we needed to purchase the equipment.
Along with the new equipment we erected an “H-Frame” at a receiving site down below and south of the main tower so we could isolate our receiving antennas from our transmitting antennas. Donated labor from some good valley people, and pipe from Simplot Sand Company made this possible. Keith Henderson spent many hours of donated labor on this project welding the frame together.
The Board decided to try to consolidate all of its transmitting antennas, so we built a windmill tower hoping that we could mount all of them in one place instead of having them scattered all over the hill. We learned a good lesson. The antennas needed to be isolated from each other to some extent. By putting them all together on the windmill tower they fed signals back to the receiving site too much. So the windmill tower was really never used for what it was intended.
By now, the FCC had also gotten into the act. The federal agency was making all the TV districts license their equipment. This became no small job either. Filling out federal forms took many hours of time and effort.
There had to be a person who held an FCC license available to qualify to operate and maintain this equipment. Part of my college graduation requirement in electronics way back in 1947 was to pass and obtain at least a Third Class Radiotelephone License issued by the FCC. I had passed my Second-Class.
So now I had found a use for that license. It was still in effect, and I have kept it current all these years.
Eventualy we out-grew our space in the OPD building. So the district board decided to build its own building. We hired Robert Behmer to build a small brick building on the site and we moved all of our equipment into it. With the addition of more equipment it wasn’t long before we had to add on to that building too.
Solid-state equipment rapidly became available which dramatically changed the translator business. Even though the cost of equipment became more expensive, the quality became so much better.
As our old vacuum tube equipment was replaced, other newer brands were purchased. The Board attended a Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas where the translator manufacturers were showing their latest equipment. We purchased equipment which, when installed, gave us channel 5, the Fox Network.
Color television came of age in 1964. Our translators were able to translate color as well as black-and-white. But the Setchell-Carlson TV sets we were selling were not in color. So I found a distributor in Salt Lake that sold RCA and Zenith and I became a dealer for them.
Adelia Shurtliff of Overton bought the first color TV in Moapa Valley. She purchased an RCA color TV set. It was quite a novelty. Neighbors would gather at her house on Sunday nights to watch Bonanza.
Mesquite was providing two stations in the Virgin Valley out of Salt Lake. They were getting a signal from Utah Hill just northwest of St. George. In checking our site we found that we were not getting sufficient signal strength from Utah to deliver us a quality picture.
McKay Larson of St. George, who was the founder of the Washington County Television District, was a good friend of mine (a fellow Ham Radio Operator). I approached him about providing us a signal, too. He had no problem with it and said that we would just have to buy the transmitting antennas and they would furnish us with the signal. So the board approved the purchase of our UHF translators, and the antennas. We provided two channels out of Salt Lake.
Later on however, we had to pay Washington County TV Board a fee for the use of their signal. As I remember, it was $100.00 per month.
By the time I decided to retire from the TV Board in 1976, we were maintaining seven translators for five Las Vegas channels and two Salt Lake channels. PBS was being provided by the Clark County School District. A new building had been built to house all our equipment with room to spare. We were having minimum shutdowns due to equipment failure.
Rumors were coming at that time that in the distant future we were going to have to move to digital TV. It seemed at the time, at least for me, to be nothing I needed to worry about. It was in the far distant future.
There are a lot of day-to-day experiences that happened in the course of servicing the television district.
I remember several times being up on the hill and physically holding on to antennas to make sure they didn’t blow away in a strong wind.
One time we saved a woman who had found herself lost at the top of the hill and didn’t know how she got there nor how she was going to get down.
One afternoon some Cub Scouts found a Desert Turtle on top of the hill while they were visiting the TV site. I took the turtle and relocated it about 5 miles away when I left the hill that day to make sure that our environmentalists wouldn’t find it up there and shut down our TV site.
One time, a drunk found himself up on the hill and couldn’t turn around. I found him off the road and called a tow truck to get him off the hill.
I have run on to several kids’ beer parties. When I asked them politely to leave they cooperated and did so with no problems, especially when I informed them that they were on federal land.
The “Hill” nearly became my second home for many years and a lot of memories are still with me. It really has been a lifetime experience, and to drive by on the freeway now and look up to see all the construction that has taken place since I had to climb up on foot, is nothing short of amazing!
There are many people who deserve so much credit for the TV Maintenance District. They have struggled, all along, with ways to finance the district. Many board members have answered phone calls from irate valley residents about TV service as though the board members were getting paid to serve on the board. I can’t count the number of phone calls that I have answered in this category. However, there have been a few that have called to thank the board for the service they gave to the valley.
The present board members have launched into a similar infancy in the translator field of digital TV. They have had to abandon all of the old, and make a new beginning because very little of the equipment that was left to them could be utilized in this new age. I wish them continued good luck!
