Stratovision
Because the broadcasting antenna for Stratovision is usually hung beneath the aircraft in flight, it naturally has a great command of line-of-sight propagation.
On 23 June 1948 the system's airborne transmitter rebroadcast the Republican National Convention, being held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to the surrounding nine-state area during the 9 to 10 pm EDT time period.
[2] In 1961 a nonprofit organization, Midwest Program on Airborne Television Instruction, commenced a Stratovision service from the airfield of Purdue University.
MPATI delivered its programs to television channels 72 (call sign KS2XGA) and 76 (KS2XGD) in the UHF band, by transmitting videotaped lectures from the aircraft to an estimated potential 5,000,000 students in 13,000 schools and colleges.
Work on modifying two Lockheed Super Constellations has been underway by Navy electronics experts at Andrews Air Force Base ...
The project is an outgrowth of a broadcasting plane used by the Navy during the Cuban and Dominican Republic crises when both radio and television were beamed to home in those countries.The same article went on to report that during the Baseball World Series of October 1965 Stratovision had also been used to bring the games to the troops.
The Agency for International Development (AID) had purchased through the military Post Exchange Service, 1,000 monochrome, 23-inch television sets modified to operate on a variety of domestic power sources, and which had been airlifted to South Vietnam on December 28, 1965.
On 7 February 1966, Broadcasting magazine reported that after working out a number of technical problems that the first show on channel 9 would begin at 7:30 p.m. and feature South Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky and U.S.
Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge in a videotaped production, followed by channel 11 at 8 p.m. with General Westmoreland introducing a two-hour program which incorporated one hour of the Grand Ole Opry filmed in Nashville, Tennessee.
The U.S. programming on NWB-TV channel 11 was Bob Hope in a two-hour special called Hollywood Salute to Vietnam, followed by half-an-hour of the Grand Ole Opry and another half-hour of the quiz show I've Got a Secret.
Production was very cheap, below local TV standards in Federal Republic of Yugoslavia with slide show and narration based news.
The Stratovision concept continues to be used as a stop-gap measure where land-based transmitters are not possible and where large areas of territory need to be served with a television program.
