By the time Norman Jaussi moved to Malad in 1960, he already had an impressive amount of experience with communications technology.  Along with training with the Signal Corps at San Luis Obispo for the US army, Jaussi also served a 3 year LDS mission in Germany.  “It was wonderful, but it was very cold.  Very cold,” Jaussi explains.  “When I first got there, the snow was three feet deep.  Lots of the towns were still bombed out, and of course heating was hard to come by over there.”  Between the those two experiences, Jaussi developed a keen sense of making a lot out of a little.  In fact, learning to deal with such privation and a lack of infrastructural resources was something of a boon to Jaussi in his later career, as one of the themes of his work on the translator system in Oneida county has been a need to build systems from the ground up with very little outside help or materials.  Over the curse of his long tenure in the valley, Jaussi has had to engineer seemingly impossible solutions out of seemingly nowhere.

After his return stateside, Jaussi pursued a formal education in the rapidly growing technology fields of the 1950s at ISU, where he pursued a degree in electronics in 1956.  “That was a breeze for me,” he says.  “Of course, I had already had so much practical experience in the field it wasn’t a stretch.”  During his time in Pocatello, Norm was responsible for setting up the original broadcast for Pocatello’s channel 6 using a “broken transmitter” that simply needed a minor mechanical fix to bring to full working order.  “That wasn’t the problem.  The problem was more rattlesnakes than you can imagine.”  

At one point in the mid- 1970s, the county commissioners asked Jaussi to look into establishing a way to bring television broadcast signals into the valley.  At the time, the only signals that were available in Malad came from northern Utah, and could only be reliably picked up in certain areas and under certain weather conditions.  After looking all around the valley for a location where a reliable signal could be found, the hard work began.  “After a signal is found, there’s a lot more to do,” Jaussi says.  Jaussi’s active FCC license cleared the first hurdle, but the more significant ones involved arranging for the purchase of the property on which to construct the broadcast station, as well as the construction itself.  The construction was aided in large part by Marvin Hess, and the land was ultimately leased from the Idaho State Landlord at a cost of $100 a year for ten years.  The County Commissioners also created a TV taxing district which charged landowners $10 a year to help underwrite expenses.  

Since there are no content producers in Oneida county, all of Malad’ over the air TV broadcasts come from outside the area, primarily northern Utah and Pocatello and Idaho Falls.  The antennae which have been established around the valley essentially capture signals from those broadcast areas, and then send them into the valley on assigned channels, which are “translated” for the local area.   From the original channels in 1977, dozens of additional signals have been added, sometimes through acquiring them through fees (each additional channel has an average cost of $20,000 dollars), and sometimes through the fee plus the construction of new equipment to capture and rebroadcast the signal.

The Idaho Public TV signal, for instance, required a new repeater station to be built in a field in Holbrook, and then rebroadcast to the top of the summit and then into the valley.  If you’ve ever wondered why the translator list for PBS between episodes of “Rosemary and Thyme” and “This Old House” displays the call sign for Holbrook, you can thank Norman Jaussi for that, as well as the many people he credits for helping over the years.  “We couldn’t have done this without a lot of people,” he says.  “Marvin Hess and I did all the engineering for free.  Well, it wasn’t free to us,” he laughs.  

Norman is an advocate for digital over the air broadcast TV.  “We have the best TV in the country here,” he says.  “For thirty bucks a year, people are getting clear, uncompressed digital signals that look great.  We have a total of fifty-four channels that are always on TV and have whatever you need.”  The 54 channel total is a result of channels running stacked on stations.  For instance, 15-1, 15-2, 15-3, etc.  In additional to local channels from Idaho Falls, Pocatello, and Utah, the local over the air broadcast feed includes national, syndicated channels such as MeTV, GRiT, Mystery, and others.  For those looking to watch the Olympics without having to subscribe to the Peacock Streaming service, NBC has both a standard and HD channel available over the air, which will be airing the majority of major winter sports throughout the next two weeks.  

Over the last four decades, a lot of changes have happened on the TV broadcast front.  Through the eighties and nineties, Jaussi and the Translator board continued to add channels to their stock.  During that time, various channel realignments happened.  The Federal government, for instance, took over the channel ranges from 52-83, keeping some for future use and selling others to emerging cell phone and telecommunication companies.  This required reassigning some of Malad’s channels, and repositioning antennas.  The largest wholesale change occurred in the early 2000s when the FCC announced a largescale change to digital, rather than analog broadcast signals.  If you remember that period of time, TVs began to lose access to analog signals and require converter boxes in order to decode digital transmissions.  Modern televisions are now built to avoid the need for decoder boxed.     

The long and short of the transition for Jaussi and local TV broadcasts was that new licenses and new equipment needed to be acquired in order to maintain “free TV”.  Some of the additional issues involved having to resolve channels that broadcast on the same frequency.  Channel 3 from Idaho Falls, for instance, migrated to Channel 36, which is also where Channel 9 from Utah migrated.  In order to resolve these kinds of issues, Norm was essentially called upon to engineer a solution out of nowhere, which of course he managed to do.  “That was impossible, but we did it anyway,” he says.

Norman credits his point person at the FCC, Hossein Hashemzadeh, with helping navigate the sometimes byzantine bureaucracy of the constantly changing Federal Communications Commission and other state and local regulations.  “He’s been a great supporter of me, and of Malad—a good friend to our TV here.”

Jaussi also spearheaded a project to put a TV station in the High School.  The project was a major success during its first years, graduating a number of Malad students with TV and media experience who went on to pursue degrees in those fields.  Over time, the TV station was phased out as a result of some concerns about its oversight, since broadcast violations can result in fines from the FCC of up to $100,000 dollars.  “Oneida County has never been fined once, and I definitely wanted to keep it that way.”  

Down the road, Jaussi foresees similar problems with the plan to change to broadcast format to the “AST-3” system from the current one.  While Norm himself promises to stay retired for the future, he mentions that he has already retired four times, so the odds are against it.  Asked what he wants people here to know about the history of TV in the valley, Jaussi says, “If people around here like there TV, why, they can thank me for it!”  The he laughs.