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People stamping their feet to get better reception

N

NoWayNoCC

Remember when people used to do this? When I was growing up, I used to hear this constantly coming from the living room. Boom! Bang! Pow! Kablammo! It sounded like fireworks, but it was just Mom or Dad stomping their feet to get better reception on TV.

More than once, I remember my mom saying, "Stupid television!" Then I'd hear her moving the antenna around and yelling out in frustration, "AAARRRGGGHHH!!!"

It was funny.
 
I am old enough to remember the days when:

(1) we'd put aluminum foil on the rabbit ears, thinking that will improve reception;

(2) we'd bang the side of the TV with our fist, to help reception;

but no I don't know about the stomping feet.

cd
 
Southeastern Kentucky used to go extreme for reception. Lexington is an all UHF market so going into the mountains are high gain UHF antennas. Some are mounted at the edge of property so the antenna has a hole in the mountains to receive the signal. Traveling further antennas are mounted atop of hills with a signal sent down by ladder line. Sixty miles from Lexington house mounted TV antennas disappear. TV reception only exist atop of mountains. Reception from that point could be Lexington, Knoxville, Huntington/Charleston or Bristol/Kingsport Johnson City. Occasionally Channel 6 from Bluefield, West Virginia and WLOS Asheville were included depending on location; sometimes both were possible from one spot. But in them hollers relying on ground level antennas it was static beyond an occasional KET transmitter and they were snowy and ghosty.
 
Slapping the TV used to be a common way of getting the mechanical tuner to make good contact after a few years of oxidation built up on the contacts. Also worked (sometimes) to seat tubes which had conductivity problems.

If you owned a British motorcycle with Amal carbs it was the first thing you did before turning on the petcock (free up the float so it didn't dump the contents of the bowl all over your boots).

Slaps work for a lot of things.
 
Remember, hitting a piece of electronics once or twice is a fine technical adjustment,,, hitting it 3 times or more is abuse.
 
We didn't stamp our feet, but back in the early 1960s, when we had our Motorola TV set, my Dad use to have to pound the channel knob. He would draw back and then hit as hard as he could right on the front of the TV. When I did it, my Mom would yell at me, until one time she saw my Dad do it. After that, it was O.K.
 
cd637299 said:
I am old enough to remember the days when:

(1) we'd put aluminum foil on the rabbit ears, thinking that will improve reception;
Click to expand...

The aluminum foil acted to increase the electrical length of the rabbit-ear elements, so that they'd work better on the lower VHF channels. They were called "capacitance hats" (as opposed to tinfoil hats ;D ) in ham-speak. A quarter-wavelength at Channel 2 is about 52 inches, while most rabbit-ear VHF elements are on the order of 30-36 inches. Adding the foil makes up the difference.
 
On my old 1990-91 RCA TV which ran analog 2-69 only, KOMO, KING and KIRO had these problems that would cause the picture to go from moderately clear to unusuable. I kept changing the channel to and back, but it didn't work. Maybe my TV had picture problems.

-crainbebo
 
I still do that! ;D I have an old Motorola digital box that needs replacing, and when I stand beside the TV, I get reception on selected channels, but when I sit down in front of the TV, the screen tells me to stand by for reception (or something to that effect).
 
I do remember tinfoil but not stamping on the floor. I currently have an OTA digital setup in my bedroom and I'm constantly moving my feet (or my cats) to try to improve the signal on certain stations. It works in some cases. There's a part of me that wishes I still lived in my old apartment, when all I had to do is point the antenna east down Route 9 towards the towers in Needham and Newton to get clear reception of all the Boston stations.

As for the old days, my parents had a Motarola B&W set in their bedroom. It was the only one in the house that could pull in WMUR, so I would sit on their bed on Saturday afternoons and watch "American Bandstand".

BTW I refer to hitting something to get it to work as "doing a Fonzie".
 
I remember when a listener to the radio station called to complain about a weak signal. Based on where he was listening from, I suggested an antenna. He asked if tinfoil would work. I said he could try anything, but when he got serious about receiving our station better, go get an antenna.
 
Even with the digital conversion I've had to set up a TV with the converter box in an upstairs bedroom in order to get some Memphis area OTA digital stations that aren't on Charter cable where I live, usually WPTY and WLMT, and even with that it's only occasionally that I can get them.
 
Maybe one of you engineers can solve this riddle: Back in the '60s, before cable (and UHF for that matter), one house, 2-TVs. Reception of Channel 11 on the main TV set in the living room would turn snowy when the "family room" TV was on channel 7. Pounding or slapping upside either unit, nor slam dancing on the floor would solve this problem.
 
I don't recall this, but I recall my mother could stomp her feet to change channels.

Turns out, if she had keys in her pocket or coins or metal, she'd be able to make a noise and it would, at times, change the channel. This is when remote control units where not infrared. She used to pedal her stationary bike and watch her soaps and sometimes the bike would change the channel too.
 
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