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Unwanted DX? Any instances where DX is more of a nuisance?

radioman148 said:
In the late 70s I was staying at a hotel in Reno, Nevada. Apparently the superstations had just started. I wasn't at all aware of them so imagine my surprise when I turned on the TV in my hotel room and received WGN-TV and WTBS from thousands of miles away. The pictures were perfectly clear so I knew it wasn't e-skip. So I called the front desk and asked the hotel manager why I was getting Atlanta and Chicago TV stations from so far away. His reply to me was I guess your TV just has excellent reception. True story!
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After CKLW-TV/CBET 9 and WWTV 9 both signed off for the night back in the day, I could swing the rotator to the SW and see WGN-TV 9 many nights on my Allied Radio Colorset 60 antenna in Genesee County, MI.

Recalling the days when most stations eventually signed off for the night, you Chicago area people may remember this line.

"Channel 2 was signing off the air".

"Ariel" by Dean Friedman, 1977, which reached #4 on WLS. Heard once every 46 minutes along with the other Top 4, according to the late great Larry Lujack in a Chicago Tribune interview article from circa 1980. Different color lights would come on for each top record when they were to be played next.

Presumably, WCBS-TV was the station viewed signing off in Paramus, NJ.
 
It just occurred to me that when I was living in Tampa and it was still the analog TV days, there were many times during the spring and early summer when the interference from tropo was so strong that it would make the local stations hard to watch.

They would even sometimes have a thing running across the bottom of the screen saying how atmospheric interference is causing a problem with the picture.

On the TV in my room with just the rabbit ears, some of the local channels could be overtaken temporarily by the distant interfering ones which were usually from Gulf coast states as far away as Texas.
 
Speaking of WCBS-TV, who remembers this classic test pattern they used to air for 15-30 minutes after the last 'Late Late Show' movie decades ago? Sometimes it was a little longer, but usually around 5 or 5:30 on a weekend morning, ch 2 had nothing left to fill, so they went 'off'.
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crainbebo said:
Speaking of WCBS-TV, who remembers this classic test pattern they used to air for 15-30 minutes after the last 'Late Late Show' movie decades ago? Sometimes it was a little longer, but usually around 5 or 5:30 on a weekend morning, ch 2 had nothing left to fill, so they went 'off'.
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Dean Friedman didn't mention the Test Pattern. I guess he was too "busy" with the "Friend of 'BAI". ;)

And I was listening to WLS daily during the Day with my antenna and preamp set up in West Central Michigan. There were few strong FM signals in the area at that time. You could barely get WLS on the car radio Days, but it was like a local with the antenna and tuned preamp Days. WIND and WOKY were even solid during the Day.
 
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Early in the cable days in the southwest suburbs of Chicago, the new system used antennae for local stations, all cut to the specific channel and 60-plus feet up. Stations still signed off then, so on a few nights, we were treated to rock-solid signals from WKBD-50 Detroit when the local 50 signed off, as well as another Michigan station, maybe the Detroit PBS.

Naturally, this motivated me to crank up the old tower and play along. My incoming signals weren’t as clear but they were there.

I also remember being high in a Springfield, Ill., hotel one night and noticed signals bleeding through the cable. The connection wasn’t great, so I unhooked the cable and there was a ton of UHF rolling in from across the state and beyond. I should have packed a loop antenna!
 
The head end for cable systems in Genesee County, MI had a 250 foot tower, and to get CKLW-TV/CBET, they had a 4 bay 10 element Channel 9 antenna about 60 miles away across a 500+ foot ridge to their TL on Riverside Drive in Windsor. There was always cochannel interference from WWTV 9, more than 110 miles away. CBET moved 15 miles further South, and they had to move to the head end of the statewide microwave system for cable systems for Channel 9 and Channel 50 along I-75 , on a 425 foot tower near the highest terrain along the ridge.
 
radioman148 said:
In the late 70s I was staying at a hotel in Reno, Nevada. Apparently the superstations had just started. I wasn't at all aware of them so imagine my surprise when I turned on the TV in my hotel room and received WGN-TV and WTBS from thousands of miles away. The pictures were perfectly clear so I knew it wasn't e-skip. So I called the front desk and asked the hotel manager why I was getting Atlanta and Chicago TV stations from so far away. His reply to me was I guess your TV just has excellent reception. True story!
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The shocker for me was when I was flipping the dial and found WGN....in Canada! The second shocker was was finding WGN on my hotel room in Winnipeg and catching a Cubs game, Tom Skilling etc. The local WGN instead of the insipid "WGN America".
 
cyberdad said:
The shocker for me was when I was flipping the dial and found WGN....in Canada! The second shocker was was finding WGN on my hotel room in Winnipeg and catching a Cubs game, Tom Skilling etc. The local WGN instead of the insipid "WGN America".
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That's what I got in Reno--the local WGN and WTBS. This was in 1978. I wasn't even aware there were "Superstations" then. I'd never heard of them yet.
 
Growing up in Tulsa, our local channels were 2, 6, 8, and 11. When tropo was active in the humid early summer, OKC's 4, 5, 9, and 13 were usually coming in reasonably well at ~100 miles. Sometimes 5 was mixing with another 5 from Ft Smith Arkansas. Lots of open channels for E skip. I remember getting stations from Cincinnati, Miami, South Dakota, and others. Our channel 2 often suffered due to Eskip interference, usually from Miami or Daytona Beach, but sometimes NYC and others.

I spent a lot of time in the car for work in the 80's and E skip and tropo on FM were common. I haven't heard either for a long time, both due to lots of local LPFM/translators and to car radios that appear to somehow be stuck on "local" setting.
 
Reno must have been one of the first places outside of the Midwest to get WGN. And it was WTCG-17 back then, not WTBS.
Case in point, once they went to satellite, kids all over the CT and MT time zones were sending postcards to Bozo, eager for their chance to win prizes in the Grand Prize Game. It became a national phenomenon, not just Chicago and Illinois (at least for the WGN version).
There were some markets that never saw WGN on cable. Seattle was one of them. Yet most Portland cable providers had WGN in its heyday. I guess it had to do with independent 'saturation' - Seattle already had KSTW, KCPQ, and KTZZ for non-network entertainment. Plus, the time-zone differences.
 
crainbebo said:
Reno must have been one of the first places outside of the Midwest to get WGN. And it was WTCG-17 back then, not WTBS.
Case in point, once they went to satellite, kids all over the CT and MT time zones were sending postcards to Bozo, eager for their chance to win prizes in the Grand Prize Game. It became a national phenomenon, not just Chicago and Illinois (at least for the WGN version).
There were some markets that never saw WGN on cable. Seattle was one of them. Yet most Portland cable providers had WGN in its heyday. I guess it had to do with independent 'saturation' - Seattle already had KSTW, KCPQ, and KTZZ for non-network entertainment. Plus, the time-zone differences.
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I forgot their calls were different, but I was amazed to get a station from Atlanta in Reno.
 
crainbebo said:
Reno must have been one of the first places outside of the Midwest to get WGN. And it was WTCG-17 back then, not WTBS.
Case in point, once they went to satellite, kids all over the CT and MT time zones were sending postcards to Bozo, eager for their chance to win prizes in the Grand Prize Game. It became a national phenomenon, not just Chicago and Illinois (at least for the WGN version).
There were some markets that never saw WGN on cable. Seattle was one of them. Yet most Portland cable providers had WGN in its heyday. I guess it had to do with independent 'saturation' - Seattle already had KSTW, KCPQ, and KTZZ for non-network entertainment. Plus, the time-zone differences.
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WGN made the Cubs America's baseball team, I guess
 
Either that or WTBS and their coverage of the Atlanta Braves.
 
cyberdad said:
The shocker for me was when I was flipping the dial and found WGN....in Canada! The second shocker was was finding WGN on my hotel room in Winnipeg and catching a Cubs game, Tom Skilling etc. The local WGN instead of the insipid "WGN America".
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WGN, WSBK, WPIX and KTLA are still carried on Canadian satellite and cable, along with network stations from Seattle and Buffalo or Detroit and Rochester, depending on the service. And about every OTA station across Canada. It’s quite the TV wonderland.
 
tvnut said:
WGN, WSBK, WPIX and KTLA are still carried on Canadian satellite and cable, along with network stations from Seattle and Buffalo or Detroit and Rochester, depending on the service. And about every OTA station across Canada. It’s quite the TV wonderland.
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The cities and stations you mentioned are certainly the most common that I encountered most often in my roughly 2o years of being in Canada three or times a year. But wait, there's more. Add Denver, Minneapolis, Boston ,Chicago, even Phoenix to the list, along with a few smaller markets (Erie, PA, for example). You'd get the entire network feed with Canadian commercials inserted (at least in most cases). Winnipeg would seemingly have a different American city represented every time I was up there. Usually Denver, but that's also where I saw Phoenix and the Twin Cities.

Fox was the last of the "big four" to arrive, but NFL football is what broke the ice. Exactly as Rupert Murdoch intended, (The CRTC had to approve it.)

I have trips to Canada coming up next month and then September, and I'm always curious to see what local affiliates will be tapped for American network programming.
 
For a long time, the CRTC didn't let FOX onto cable in Winnipeg, and even then, it was WUHF Rochester or KMSP in Minneapolis. They did not approve the carriage of KNRR-12 Pembina ND because its location 60 mi S of Winnipeg would take away advertising sales from Canadian stations. But KNRR was viewable in Winnipeg with a decent antenna, color picture, albeit a little fuzzy.
 
cyberdad said:
The cities and stations you mentioned are certainly the most common that I encountered most often in my roughly 2o years of being in Canada three or times a year. But wait, there's more. Add Denver, Minneapolis, Boston ,Chicago, even Phoenix to the list, along with a few smaller markets (Erie, PA, for example). You'd get the entire network feed with Canadian commercials inserted (at least in most cases). Winnipeg would seemingly have a different American city represented every time I was up there. Usually Denver, but that's also where I saw Phoenix and the Twin Cities.

Fox was the last of the "big four" to arrive, but NFL football is what broke the ice. Exactly as Rupert Murdoch intended, (The CRTC had to approve it.)

I have trips to Canada coming up next month and then September, and I'm always curious to see what local affiliates will be tapped for American network programming.
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The ones I mentioned are on the satellite services, but there are local variations on cable. An odd one is in Alberta, where the Spokane PBS station, KSPS, IDs as Spokane-Coeur d'Alene-Calgary.
 
It's all about the networks. When NBC added the new WBTS-CD in Boston about 4 years ago, and pulled the NBC affiliation from WHDH - Bell Canada which distributed it had already obtained permission to swap WBTS for WHDH on the affected cable systems at the moment the change took place.
 
crainbebo said:
For a long time, the CRTC didn't let FOX onto cable in Winnipeg, and even then, it was WUHF Rochester or KMSP in Minneapolis. They did not approve the carriage of KNRR-12 Pembina ND because its location 60 mi S of Winnipeg would take away advertising sales from Canadian stations. But KNRR was viewable in Winnipeg with a decent antenna, color picture, albeit a little fuzzy.
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KNRR (ex KCND) ch 12 originally signed on to pull in viewers and advertisers from (or for) Winnipeg. Whether they admitted it or not. :).
 
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