In early 1987 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was considering the reassignment of portions of the UHF spectrum from broadcasting to land mobile communications ("two-way"). Terrestrial broadcasters, concerned that the loss of spectrum would preclude their participation in high definition television (HDTV), sponsored a demonstration of terrestrial HDTV broadcasting in Washington, DC. The only operating system at that time was the MUSE (Multiple Sub-Nyquist Sampling Encoding) system which had been designed for satellite broadcasting by NHK, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation. The RF bandwidth requirement for the terrestrial demonstration was about 9 MHz - the television channel in the United States is 6 MHz - so two adjacent channels, 58 and 59, were used. The demonstration was very successful.


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