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Mysterious TV signal that was received by the late Jeff Kadet (K1MOD) in the Washington D.C. area in 1973

R

Route66Fan

Back, early one morning, in 1973, at the time, Washington D.C. area resident, & TV DX'er, Jeff Kadet (K1MOD) reported seeing a mysterious TV signal broadcasting a test pattern & causing co-channel interference with WMAL-TV's (Now WJLA-TV.) signal on Channel 7. When WMAL-TV signed off the air for the night, he was able to get a picture of the test pattern that the mysterious signal was broadcasting, as well as the TV stations callsign (VV28999). Mr. Kadet had once run a, now defunct, website about TV DX'ing & had this to say about the mysterious TV signal:
During the early am one morning in 1973, when I lived in Bethesda, MD, this mystery channel 7 came on the air under WMAL about 20 minutes before they signed off. The CCI was 20 KHz offset to WMAL, so channel 7- (minus).

After WMAL cut their carrier this test pattern appeared. I called the FCC to find out where VV28999 was licensed to but they had no record of it. The station was coming from the direction of the Pentagon.
Click to expand...
Here is the picture that he took of the mysterious TV signal:
thumb_DC-07-vv28999.jpg

What could this have been?
 
RadioPatrol said:
Pentagon pirate station??? Test LPTV pattern
Click to expand...
No LPTV in 1973, and I have no idea why the Pentagon would be fooling around with pirate TV. The VV prefix is assigned to India, so unless someone at the Indian Embassy in Washington was doing something, my guess is that it was just some pirate using one of those old B&K Television Analysts.
 
Could VV28999 be a phone number? VV2-8999 would translate to the modern format of 882-8999. I read somewhere that the FCC used to require certain low power auxiliary stations to identify with a phone number while they awaited their authorization in the mail.

TV Assist stations are currently allowed on channel 8 and up. It's not too far of a stretch that maybe low power auxiliary stations were allowed on the lower channels at one time. Or possible just out of band by accident.
 
The 2 letter, 5 digit format was long gone by 1973, except for Chicago. Besides, the letters had to be the first two letters of a real word that was used as the exchange name, such as TUrner for 88x.
 
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