CATV has by its very nature always been at the frontiers of long-distance television reception. When the FCC in the United States first laid out its table of frequency allocations for television broadcasting it did so in the belief, uncontested by technical knowledge or experience at that time, that broadcast signals in the VHF band could only be received over line-of-sight paths and the coverage area of a station would therefore be limited literally to the horizon visible from the transmitting antenna.