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DXing in Analog

M

MarioMania

I remember in the 80's in Pacifica, CA I used to get alot of Sacramento Stations on FM & TV

I didn't know about Tropo or even DXing at all

One time in my Room was watching The Transformers on Ch. 31 around 4pm with just a Bowing Antenna

One night when KRON 4 Signed off I got Ch. 4 KCRL from Reno, NV Poor or changed to KCRA 3 in Sacramento, CA

On FM, in my room got KSFM in clear on 102.5

DXing in Digital isn't the same, My 1st E in California

 
From northern California, Reno would have been tropo, not E-skip. If you were receiving E-skip, you would have been watching stations on Channel 4 from, say, Denver, KC, the Twin Cities, New Orleans, DFW, or maybe even Milwaukee or Indianapolis. You would also have picked up stations from 750+ miles away on Channel 2 and 3, assuming Oakland and Sacramento were off the air, although sometimes they could be overridden if conditions were really good.

It's common on the lower VHF channels and the FM band. I personally have never seen it on Channels 7-13, but it is possible. I have worked stations on 2 meter FM in the southeastern US from Chicago, thanks to E-skip, but that's rare.
 
Ah, the good old days when KNEW, Channel 3, Portales, New Mexico, could be counted on for a couple of appearances a year in the Chicago suburbs. Or WWL, Channel 4, New Orleans. Or NBC's smallest affiliate, KYUS, Channel 3, Miles City, Montana. Great fun.
 
I remember KTVK Phoenix and WEDU Tampa making it to Chicago on occasion as well.
 
Was never anywhere NEAR as much into FM and TV DXing as I had been into AM. But unavoidable triumphs surfaced.
There was the radio gang, in a place located in the geographic centre of Long Island -- aptly named Middle Island -- one Saturday afternoon 1971 in December ....getting nothing on the TV but E-skip. The house was a hippie haven and treated TV as gauche and establishment. The TV aerial sat on the lawn. But there were college football games and halftime updates from all over the Gulf, and a weather guy pointing to a map of what we identified as Louisiana. On channel 3, there was no 'regular' WTIC Hartford or ANY video but instead the jumble of Dixie accents y'all-in and drawlin and sho-nuffin and good buddyin. CBers? Hams?
....one afternoon on the old black-and-white back in Queens, Dad and I were watching WBOC Channel 16 from DelMarVa one afternoon.
.... a Long Island gal I dated (a sometimes DXer) saying that she saw a station called 'Wavey TV ten' one afternoon. That was WAVY from Norfolk.
.... Experiencing some tropo DX one night here and catching a Cubs-Cardinals game on Channel 43 in York -- the game when McGwyre later hit his 62nd.
.... It was just after having bought and installed a $50 Radio Shack-Job TV aerial outside one afternoon. It wasn't an especially ambitious afternoon for me, so It didn't even clear the kitchen roof; I didn't wanna hoist it up all the way yet to clear the house roof; only to see if I could get Wilkes-Barre if I aimed it that way. It had to work better than the rabbit ears.
So I warmed up the set and went through the channels.
Channel 2: Some opera. Clear as a bell.
Channel 3: Faintish KYW from Philly.
Channel 4: Nothing.
Channel 5 -- wait a minute! An opera on channel 2? WCBS in NYC wouldn't be playing an opera ......
It IDed as WFTL Fort Lauderdale. I missed a snapshot of the graphic by a few seconds.

FM and TV ESkip and trope are like the Northern Lights. When you're caught up in them, you don't care how long it will last. You just wind up immersed in it for the duration.
....
 
WFTL on Channel 2? The only record I can find for those calls was for Channel 23, and it went dark in 1957.

Miami had PBS on Channel 2, but its call letters were WTHS and WPBT, shared for several years.
 
From the area in the triangle between Fort Wayne, IN, Lima, Ohio and Dayton, Ohio in the late 60s and early 70s, we had a VHF antenna pointed toward Dayton, and a UHF antenna pointed toward Fort Wayne (most people had an additional antenna pointed toward Lima for WIMA/WLIO. Our antenna wasn't as high as it should have been,with Fort Wayne stations being a little snowy. I don't have my logbooks anymore, but from memory, tropo would bring in South Bend and when it was really good, UHFs in Grand Rapids,Michigan and even as far as Wausau, WI.
WLW-D channel 2 had lower power than it eventually got due to its co-ownership with WLWT, Cincinnati. We saw sparklies anyway but when E-Skip started up it often got wiped out. WPBT 2 in Miami was in often when E-skip came in. I particularly remember Cuba on channels 3 and 6. I know I had a QSL from WEAR-TV 3 in Pensacola. Lots of Florida, Gulf Coast and seversl Texas...some Mexico too. I can remember an occasional station I received making an announcement that "some of our viewers may be receiving skywave interference".
 
KeithE4 said:
WFTL on Channel 2? The only record I can find for those calls was for Channel 23, and it went dark in 1957.

Miami had PBS on Channel 2, but its call letters were WTHS and WPBT, shared for several years.
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Picked up Miami 2 when analog stations began to shut down. It was a Nightlight station for Miami and floated in after WBBM signed off.
 
@ Keith
Doubtless you're correct with the calls. I wasn't quick enough with the camera, and am in no way coordinated enough to compile and organize FM and TV DX like with AM DX. But I do remember a Ft. Lauderdale ID at bottom right. For some reason I'd remembered the calls as WFTL, which seems convenient enough with all the years past, lol. But it was the Miami-area PBS station.
Wasn't the last time I'd gotten eSkip from Florida on average equipment, either. I should have been keeping better track of the TV and FM stuff, but as I said, I never pursued it.
 
There is an "Appalachin legend" that when WSAZ Huntington WV (analog 5 1949 until it switched to 3 in 1952), first started, there were viewers in Cuba. I don't know if it was channel 5 or 3 signal.

I do know during a strip mine reclamation project on a KY - TN hill top in 1973, Channel 3 Huntington often came in better than Channel 3 Chattanooga. It just depending on rabbit position.
 
secondchoice said:
There is an "Appalachin legend" that when WSAZ Huntington WV (analog 5 1949 until it switched to 3 in 1952), first started, there were viewers in Cuba. I don't know if it was channel 5 or 3 signal.

I do know during a strip mine reclamation project on a KY - TN hill top in 1973, Channel 3 Huntington often came in better than Channel 3 Chattanooga. It just depending on rabbit position.
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E-skip reception would have been entirely possible, but regular reception, I wouldn't count on it.

WSAZ did, in the early days, run very high power, and from what I've heard, was powerful enough to overtake WLWC within the city of Columbus, which shared channel 3 for about a year in the early 1950s (I refer to online accounts, I wasn't around in those days ). Not sure what the people at the FCC were smoking, to think that two low-VHF stations 100 miles apart could share a channel.

In southeastern Kentucky, a few cable systems tried to carry WHTN (now WOWK) as well as WLOS, both on channel 13. That would have required some seriously directional antennas in tandem. In that same time frame (1970s), one system in Harlan County tried to carry WCPO-9 Cincinnati, then one or two years later, another nearby system attempted WSOC Charlotte (this per Television Factbook). My guess is that the former operator invested in an antenna cut for channel 9, couldn't provide a viable signal, and then passed it on to the other system, "hey, this antenna doesn't work for us, put it up on your tower and see if you can get anything with it". Unless someone found the mother of all sweet spots, signals would have had to be absolute trash by the time they traveled those distances. (Or perhaps WSWP Grandview WV went on the air and compromised both stations.) WSOC actually appeared in TVFB with 5-24% viewership in Harlan County one year.

It would be nice if there were some old-timers in the industry up there from back in those days who could be interviewed and see how it all rattled out, but anyone who would know, probably isn't around anymore.
 
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I miss the analog says of summer in New Jersey with my antenna on the roof that got VHF New York channels from 80 miles away.

In summer, channels 2, 4, and 5 would often be taken over by the rolling bars from E Skip and I'd get stations from Florida to the Midwest to Canada.
 
MichaelD1972 said:
Analog television still exists in Cuba. Yesterday, I heard audio from Tele Rebelde (Channel 4) on 71.75 MHz. It's the first time I ever received TV audio due to e-skip in New Jersey. Further details can be found in the description of the video.
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So Cool
gar hi said:
I miss the analog says of summer in New Jersey with my antenna on the roof that got VHF New York channels from 80 miles away.

In summer, channels 2, 4, and 5 would often be taken over by the rolling bars from E Skip and I'd get stations from Florida to the Midwest to Canada.
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E's are rare in California
 
cc333 said:
I miss analog TV.

DXing it was so much fun!

Digital's not the same. It's boring and, well, digital. You have the signal or you don't. There's no grey area where you could make out a picture through the static with almost no signal.

c
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True, but one thing you do have with digital, is that the PSIP data can decode even with a pilot signal (just enough to lock the PSIP data). So even if you never see anything, you can know that you did receive the signal. Better than nothing.

Some receivers are very sensitive to pilot signals. A lot of times I will leave my set on an unused channel overnight, then the next morning, I find PSIP data has locked to my receiver. Kind of like an angler leaving a trotline in the water.

I have yet to lock anything on low-VHF that way. E-skip on low-VHF with a DTV receiver is a rare, rare thing, due to the very small number of low-VHF digital TV stations.
 
MarioMania said:
So Cool

E's are rare in California
Click to expand...

When I visited my brother in Aptos in the summer of '86 and '87, I got pretty good E Skip from west Texas late in the afternoon on his little battery operated hand held black and white TV a few times and it lasted for hours.

But yeah, it wasn't nearly as common as it was on the east coast where the TV E Skip would begin in the late morning and continue in the afternoon and even the early evening most every day.
 
gar hi said:
When I visited my brother in Aptos in the summer of '86 and '87, I got pretty good E Skip from west Texas late in the afternoon on his little battery operated hand held black and white TV a few times and it lasted for hours.

But yeah, it wasn't nearly as common as it was on the east coast where the TV E Skip would begin in the late morning and continue in the afternoon and even the early evening most every day.
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And the beauty of analog e-skip was that your equipment didn't have to be any good, nor did your location really matter. I've worked some of my most enjoyable skip with a portable set on a road trip, pulled over to the side of the road or at a rest stop, with a single rabbit ear.

I might have shared this story either here or another forum before, but on the night of June 27, 1995, I had KIMT-3 coming in from Mason City, Iowa (this, again, with that old black and white Sharp set and a single rabbit ear in Fairfax, Virginia, where my wife was in school at the time), and they were reporting the disappearance of their anchor Jodi Huisentruit. I got this feeling that this story wouldn't turn out well, and sure enough, sadly, I was right. Eerie coincidence that I would get that particular station on e-skip that night.
 
gr8oldies said:
From the area in the triangle between Fort Wayne, IN, Lima, Ohio and Dayton, Ohio in the late 60s and early 70s, we had a VHF antenna pointed toward Dayton, and a UHF antenna pointed toward Fort Wayne (most people had an additional antenna pointed toward Lima for WIMA/WLIO. Our antenna wasn't as high as it should have been,with Fort Wayne stations being a little snowy. I don't have my logbooks anymore, but from memory, tropo would bring in South Bend and when it was really good, UHFs in Grand Rapids,Michigan and even as far as Wausau, WI.
WLW-D channel 2 had lower power than it eventually got due to its co-ownership with WLWT, Cincinnati. We saw sparklies anyway but when E-Skip started up it often got wiped out. WPBT 2 in Miami was in often when E-skip came in. I particularly remember Cuba on channels 3 and 6. I know I had a QSL from WEAR-TV 3 in Pensacola. Lots of Florida, Gulf Coast and seversl Texas...some Mexico too. I can remember an occasional station I received making an announcement that "some of our viewers may be receiving skywave interference".
Click to expand...
Rural Grant County IN in the mid 1970s.. I was all of 8 so the technology of the antenna escaped me. All I DID know was that we had a rotator so Indianapolis (WRTV WTHR WISH) and the Ft Wayne UHFs WPTA WANE were local. South Bend was surprisingly clear some mornings.. 15 and 16 on the old RCA dial went to a snowy 18 (Lafayette I think) and 21/22 both loud and clear. Chicago never happened for whatever reason.. eventually we got the early iteration of cable with the White Sox on 44.
 
Patrick 29582 said:
Rural Grant County IN in the mid 1970s.. I was all of 8 so the technology of the antenna escaped me. All I DID know was that we had a rotator so Indianapolis (WRTV WTHR WISH) and the Ft Wayne UHFs WPTA WANE were local. South Bend was surprisingly clear some mornings.. 15 and 16 on the old RCA dial went to a snowy 18 (Lafayette I think) and 21/22 both loud and clear. Chicago never happened for whatever reason.. eventually we got the early iteration of cable with the White Sox on 44.
Click to expand...
18 would have indeed been Lafayette, a former employer of mine. You'd have been in a great spot to get both Indy and Fort Wayne with a rotor.
 


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