As a kid who grew up in Bishop and started his broadcasting career there, this is just plain weird. I've heard of rim-shots, but 270 miles out of Los Angeles and they get a translator in Banning and carriage in the L.A. Metro on Dish and DirecTV?
A little history: Bishop (population 3,500) had no radio until 1953, when KIBS (1 kw day, 250 w night, AM 1230) signed on. And because of terrain (Bishop is in a 20-mile wide valley with 14,000 feet worth of mountains to the west and 11,000 feet worth to the east), there really weren't listenable out-of-market signals during daylight hours. There certainly wasn't TV. But at some point in the 1950s, someone fixed that by running cable all the way up the Owens Valley...bringing every TV signal (and, as a bonus, every FM signal) from Mt. Wilson. So you could see 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11 and 13. If you didn't want to pay for cable, 2, 4 and 7 were on translators, as was KOLO-TV, Channel 8, in Reno (then a CBS affiliate), which was eventually added to the cable lineup. But (until the 60s TVs that were all-channel) you had to buy a UHF set-top converter box.
The closest thing to a TV station was down at the cable office, where a stationary black and white camera was trained on a motorized board that had a clock, a round dial-type thermometer, a barometer and a wind speed meter mounted on it. It would spend 15 seconds on the clock, slowly turn, stop, and you'd spend 15 seconds looking at the temperature, and so on. When I left Bishop for the last time in 1976, that was still the only "local TV" in town and was the only "specialty channel" available.
Until this thread, I didn't know Channel 20 existed. I knew about 33 (KSRW), which I guess has been on the air for close to 20 years now. Are they getting satellite carriage in the L.A. metro, too?
