KS2XGA, Channel 72 (Educ.)
KS2XGD, Channel 76 (Educ.)
located high above Montpelier, IN (1961-1968)
Owned by The Midwest Program on Airborne Television Instruction
Television stations KS2XGA, Channel 72 and KS2XGD, Channel 76 were the stations of MPATI, The Midwest Program on Airborne Television Instruction. MPATI was a non-profit organization of educators and television producers who pioneered efforts to transmit instructional television to a wide audience before the advent of cable and satellite.
The MPATI project began as an experiment in 1959 and began actual telecasting in 1961, through a grant from the Ford Foundation. The stations were located inside two DC-6AB aircraft based at the Purdue University Airport in West Lafayette, Indiana. The aircraft would fly for six to eight hours at an altitude of 23,000 feet (about 4 and a half miles up) and take a twenty minute figure-eight station centered over Montpelier, Indiana. From this height, the coverage area was approximately 200 miles in diameter, including the Detroit and Chicago metropolitan areas.
The origins of the MPATI project date back to the mid 1940's. The line-of-sight problem that only allowed broadcasters to send signals from ground-based receivers plagued early television. Yet, in 1944, Westinghouse engineer Charles Noble discovered a solution to this problem. A plane flying at an altitude of 25,000 feet could "see" with a radius of 225 miles, many times more than conventional ground transmitter sites could. Noble's idea was to equip planes with broadcast equipment that would allow them to transmit signals to a larger audience. It was called "Stratovision".
The FCC freeze on television channel allocations in 1948 ended Westinghouse's experiments with Stratovision, thus shelving the idea until the late 1950's. By then, television broadcasting had indeed changed. Commercial television had outgrown the idea Stratovision had been designed for. Television networks had already sprung up and connected local stations from coast-to-coast with duplicated programming. Educational television, on the other hand, still lacked the means to send dupilcated programming to a large area. In 1958, Westinghouse contacted Philip Coomb, executive director of education for the Ford Foundation, who was very enthusiastic to use Stratovision for educational purposes.
Programming from the planes was completely pre-recorded. Taped classroom instruction, test patterns, ID "slates" with canned music behind the video were completely on tape. The television equipment (videotape decks and such) and the two UHF transmitters were powered by a gas-turbine generator located in the aft end of the fuselage. The 40 foot UHF antenna, lowered under the bottom of the plane once the plane was "on station", was gyroscopically stabilized to ensure that the antenna was always aligned toward the center of the earth. In theory, the idea was sound. In practice, however, the idea was not economically viable. In 1963, the project relied on membership fees from the various school districts throughout the Midwest who used MPATI's taped instructional courses. However, not everybody paid the fees. Since it was an open-system, anyone with a television set (with UHF) could tune in. As a result, after several reorganizations of the project, MPATI ended the Stratovision broadcasts in 1968. It just could not meet expenses through user fees. So, MPATI ended production, turned in the planes and the licenses and simply became a tape library. For the next three years, MPATI served as a lending library to its member schools and eventually completely dissolved in 1973, after a long protracted suit with Westinghouse. However, MPATI and Westinghouse did settle amicably in 1973 after MPATI's assets were liquidated.
For a look at one student's discovery of MPATI, please click here.
More info on MPATI can be accessed by clicking HERE. (Courtesy of Mike Femyer, Phoenix, AZ)
Editor- History written by Peter Q. George with information provided from Kristi Mashon and Karen King of The University of Maryland Libraries and with further information through Bucky Terranova. We thank them all for the information about these two long forgotten stations from UHF's not-so-glorious past.