Hi all,

I have a question about the VHF turret tuner on my 1960's/70's 12" AWA P1.

The knob has the channels 0 - 11 (incl. 5A) listed around the tuner, in an anti-clockwise direction. However, between 0 and 11, there is an asterisk ( * ). What would this be for?

As there is a separate knob (of sorts) on the rear, could this be for UHF transmissions, using the fine tuning knob on the rear to change between channels/frequencies?

Cheers,

Chris

Definitely not for UHF. I'm not sure why the * was there though and I've noticed on some of the older ten channel sets that there was up to three *s on the knob. Perhaps these blank positions could have allowed receivers to be upgraded in the case of extra physical channels being allocated rather than it being necessary to replace the whole tuner.

When I think back, they were using UHF as early as 1979 to run translators in Sydney. Channel 9 even had "UHF 52" in their channel ident for a time as a way of showing that UHF was available if the VHF transmission couldn't get through. If you didn't have a coloured set or a video cassette recorder there was no way of receiving signals from the translators and you had to put up an antenna tower instead.