This brings back some memories for me. I was in Aachen (Germany, very close to the area the author describes) in 2003 and the Plus grocery store (similar to Aldi or Lidl) had small black-and-white TV sets on sale for something like the equivalent of $20. On a whim, I snapped one up and took it back to my hotel which was a few blocks away. With a single rabbit ear, I was able to get channel 3 from Liege (Belgium), channel 5 from Roermond (Netherlands), channel 11 from Koln (Cologne), and three UHF channels from Aachen (the various major German networks). The hotel cable carried a whole host of stations from those three countries (not sure whether they carried French TV or not). I still have that TV set (airport security didn't know quite what to make of my carrying it onto the plane). It is, of course, analog, and I still use it for home experiments with a flea-power TV transmitter I got on eBay and which can be set to PAL with the appropriate audio offsets.
Here it is:
