In the late 70s I was in northern Nevada. I turned on the TV in my hotel room and couldn't believe I was getting a TV station from Atlanta (WTBS). I didn't know anything about Superstations or satellite TV at the time and of course I knew it wasn't "e-skip" so I called the main desk at the hotel. The "smart alec" guy I spoke to told me "I guess your just getting great reception"
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Your clearest very far analog/digital TV DX
- Thread starter Thisi
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Let's give it up for the guy who invented the rotor! I lived in a house here in Crystal Lake with one for a couple of years in the late 70s. NFL Sundays were the BEST. I had WITI-TV from Milwaukee on Channel 6, so I never missed a Packer game. If the Packers were losing...which in those days was common....I could just swing the antenna around and watch an AFC contest on WOC-TV, Channel 6 from Davenport. And on more than a few Sundays, I could flip back and forth on channel 3 between the Lions on WKZO-TV from Kalamazoo, and Packers on WISC-TV from Madison. So much for the NFL's stupid rules for blackouts and doubleheader Sundays.
When we first were able to get cable TV in our neighborhood in south Jersey in 1980, among the stations like TBS and HBO we also got channel 9 and 11 from New York in addition to the locals.
That was a big deal for me because I could finally see them clear as the local stations all day long.
But on some nights and mornings with tropo, the New York channels got 'lines' just as they always had with my antenna on the roof and a couple nights the interference made them unwatchable.
It was obvious the receivers for the two New York channels were down in our area.
I finally located the tower not far from us which had antennas the size of our one on the roof but way up between 100 and 200 feet.
That was a big deal for me because I could finally see them clear as the local stations all day long.
But on some nights and mornings with tropo, the New York channels got 'lines' just as they always had with my antenna on the roof and a couple nights the interference made them unwatchable.
It was obvious the receivers for the two New York channels were down in our area.
I finally located the tower not far from us which had antennas the size of our one on the roof but way up between 100 and 200 feet.
My godmother and family lived in Johnsburg, on the Fox River, north of Crystal Lake. They had a tower and rotor and got all Chicago, Milwaukee and Rockford stations. I’d think Madison would be there as well. Davenport, I dunno. It was a big antenna but I didn’t get to fool with it much. For them, the key was no blackout of Bears games.
My cousin who was a big Bears fan put up a large TV antenna on his house. He didn't have a rotor he just wanted to see the Bears home games in the 60s. The antenna was pointed at the CBS station in South Bend, Indiana. Needless to say I was at his house many Sundays.
That is an amazing website. I can sit here for hours looking at all this information. The big question is, why no FM radio maps, like the ones presented?
The furthest tropo reception I received in Picayune, Mississippi during the analog era was the adjacent markets Baton Rouge and Mobile/Pensacola. In digital, WTVY Dothan, AL is the most distant tropo reception I've seen, about 230 miles away. I saw some e-skip on analog channel 3 last summer of a Spanish-language TV channel, most likely Cuba.
RabbitEars also has coverage maps for FM. I don't know why there's no link to it anywhere on their site. https://www.rabbitears.info/fmq.php
RabbitEars also has coverage maps for FM. I don't know why there's no link to it anywhere on their site. https://www.rabbitears.info/fmq.php
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Is Cuba still on Analog or did they switch?
Analog won't be fully turned off in Cuba until 2024, according to this.
advanced-television.com
Cuba delays full digital TV until 2024
Cuba has delayed its digital switchover. Cuba’s deputy minister of communications, Ana Julia Marine Lopez, confirmed in an interview with a local newspaper
advanced-television.com
I "beat the blackout" of many a Bears game in the 60s by watching them through the snow on Rockford's WREX-TV channel 13, which was a CBS affilliate in those days. Fast forward to the early 70s when I was working at WHBF-TV and radio, the CBS affilliate for the Quad Cities (Illinois-Iowa), which was on the Bears network, so we had the all the Bears games even if blacked out in Chicago.
......Well, ALMOST all of them. One Friday before the end of the season, a bunch of us were all sitting around rather bored, and one guy got the bright idea of picking up the phone, calling up CBS in New York, and asking them to flip us from a meaningless Bears game to a Packers game with playoff implications. To our astonishment, the CBS guy said, "Okay sure". When game day Sunday rolled around, the switchboard was closed, and the calls rang into the newsroom. Where I happened to be working. Suffice to say my ears are still burning.
Of course I blamed the whole episode on "Those suits at CBS".
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I remember picking that station up as a kid in Fresno, since that market was all UHF. I also would pick up KTVS 3 from Sterling CO.
I can understand why. The Bears are a home team to them. Same was true farther in Iowa in the late 1990s, where Waterloo, I think, wanted to show the Bears and sometimes were told by Fox, "You're getting the Vikings." The station would put up a crawl during the game saying it was Fox's decision. Bet the phones rang off the hook there too.I "beat the blackout" of many a Bears game in the 60s by watching them through the snow on Rockford's WREX-TV channel 13, which was a CBS affilliate in those days. Fast forward to the early 70s when I was working at WHBF-TV and radio, the CBS affilliate for the Quad Cities (Illinois-Iowa), which was on the Bears network, so we had the all the Bears games even if blacked out in Chicago.
......Well, ALMOST all of them. One Friday before the end of the season, a bunch of us were all sitting around rather bored, and one guy got the bright idea of picking up the phone, calling up CBS in New York, and asking them to flip us from a meaningless Bears game to a Packers game with playoff implications. To our astonishment, the CBS guy said, "Okay sure". When game day Sunday rolled around, the switchboard was closed, and the calls rang into the newsroom. Where I happened to be working. Suffice to say my ears are still burning.
Of course I blamed the whole episode on "Those suits at CBS".
Going back to the early days of TV, when it was Bears and Cardinals home games, first on ABC, then Dumont, then CBS, the basic Chicago network traditionally has been South Bend-Rockford-QC-Peoria-Champaign (and Chicago for road games and eventually home games). When the Cardinals moved to St. Louis, I understand Peoria sometimes got the Cardinals, but the Bears were a staple in the other four, and are in Peoria again with St. Louis a twice-orphaned NFL city.
Great summary David.
If only today's Cable were still CATV with the same purpose, it would still be of modest cost to the average consumer. On account of deregulation beginning back in the 80s, things were literally turned upside down. Instead of CATV operators being seen as doing broadcasters a favour by bringing their programming and most importantly Advertising to viewers in areas where antennas wouldn't work - conned the FCC into essentially eliminating the "must-carry" rule so that TV broadcasters can charge Cable operators a fee for the "privilege" of "re-transmission" of their signals.
In the United States commercial Television was founded on the principle of it being paid for by advertising so TV could be free. Its so sad that the public has been successfully lied-to so that the consumer thinks the high cost of Cable is solely the fault of the cable or satellite operator. Witness when a particular contract is up and a station is temporarily pulled from a Cable line-up and the given station/channel has the chutzpah to claim on-air that it's only the Cable company acting in bad faith - to my knowledge no TV station has ever told the viewing public on-air that they actually charge the Cable system for the "right" to carry their station. I'm pretty sure most viewers are not aware of this fact.
And to add insult to injury on top of this, many Cable systems have seen the neccessity to add-on an extra fee called "broadcast surcharge" (mine is $20 a month and there's no way around it! ). One wonders how many viewers are actually aware that a huge chunk of their monthly Cable bill goes essentially straight into the pockets of their favorite channels or stations, all the while they are forced to sit through seemingly endless Prescription Drug advertising. To me this is not only outrageous it's simply downright disgusting.
Channel 4 was probably WWL
Oops! Someone already posted that
furthest was probably WISC Madison or WOOD tv Grand Rapids ~ farthest on a regular basis was WREX 13 Rockford.
I had a conversation a few years back with the manager of one of the local TV groups in the Palm Springs market. He said that over 50% of the revenue came from the carriage fees, and that without that, they could not do any local news or other local programming.
The FCC, he said, had licensed so many channels to the market without the revenue increasing that there was no way to sustain a station without fees.
I realize this David, and I know it's unreasonable or darn near impossible to turn back the clock. My lament is that this should never have happened to begin with.
From a personal standpoint I'm p....d that I can't order channels al-a-cart, as promised many years ago by both the Cable industry and the Government. From Cable I need only 2 or 3 news channels plus one specific sports channel. We get reception on all our local Broadcast Channels from an antenna wired to every TV in the house. And we stream virtually all of our entertainment programming.
However, the only way to get these 3 or four channels is to a subscribe to a more expensive than basic programming package to which the previously mentioned $20 "broadcast surcharge" is added extra. NOT including Internet and land-line phone charges, our monthly bill for just TV is over $100. A hundred bucks for 3 or 4 commercial channels that are advertiser supported.
Yes, we are being fleeced, this is a essentially a modern form of usery. As Peter Finch said in "Network": "I'm mad as hell and I can't take it anymore".
But, of course I will, I just have to vent from time to time, as I walk to the mail box to drop in my cable bill.
From a personal standpoint I'm p....d that I can't order channels al-a-cart, as promised many years ago by both the Cable industry and the Government. From Cable I need only 2 or 3 news channels plus one specific sports channel. We get reception on all our local Broadcast Channels from an antenna wired to every TV in the house. And we stream virtually all of our entertainment programming.
However, the only way to get these 3 or four channels is to a subscribe to a more expensive than basic programming package to which the previously mentioned $20 "broadcast surcharge" is added extra. NOT including Internet and land-line phone charges, our monthly bill for just TV is over $100. A hundred bucks for 3 or 4 commercial channels that are advertiser supported.
Yes, we are being fleeced, this is a essentially a modern form of usery. As Peter Finch said in "Network": "I'm mad as hell and I can't take it anymore".
But, of course I will, I just have to vent from time to time, as I walk to the mail box to drop in my cable bill.
I have tried over and over again to get ESPN and its associated channels removed from my service. I know I am paying around $150 a year for channels I have never watched and never will. But there is no way.
If we want to look at monopolies, give professional sports a look. The NAB had to drop the "Code" of good practices as it was judged to be collusion. Yet the teams in every sport and league work together to determine rights, fees and the like.
What happened to the Seal of Good Practice in detail?
Maybe we should consider ourselves fortunate bundling is not common in most businesses. Imagine going to a local supermarket to buy some cheese, and being told it was only available in the hamburger / lettuce package. As silly as that sounds, it is not inaccurate.
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