My clearest would have to have been a couple nights of KVAL Eugene (NTSC) around 2002 or maybe 2003. I received it on the Thomson RCA VCR that had the amazingly sensitive tuner and the rooftop log-yagi my earliest broadcasting exploits were conducted over. Pointed SW towards downtown Potland. KVAL was actually hammering southeast Vancouver like a semi-local despite KPTV being the next channel over. I wish I had thought to record it but my teenage brain never considered it since I wasn't much into DXing then...... maybe once or twice a year I'd do an FM or TV band scan just to see what else is out there in the world but that's about it.
Around fall of 2010 (I think) I was getting CBUT from the "other" Vancouver. This was about a year after KATU discontinued their NTSC service. Not really watchable, there was no audio but you could see the there was programming and the CBC logotype amongst the static. Very weak but detectable. This was on a rabbit ears connected to a Panasonic PV-9662 VCR in a third-floor flat here:
Wikimapia - Let's describe the whole world!. This was back when you could afford $450/month rent on the $10.50/hour you were making at Red Robin and still have a little left over for groceries and utilities, before all the California defectors started gentrifying Vancouver en masse and driving our rent prices out of control like is happening now. Ahem.
And of course there was KCKA in Centralia on 15. Barely a visible picture (there must have been enough, though, since it would open up the colour killer and I'd be treated to rainbow snow) but the aural channel usually hammered 479.75 on my PRO-74 at my mom's house elsewhere in east Vancouver.
As a lot of you probably know, no thanks to 8VSB, reduced ERP levels (relying on forward error correction) and an increasingly high noise floor, even trying to receive local ATSC can sometimes qualify as DXing these days.
This is topical as I just had a discussion about this tonight with my dad. He's one of those who quickly buys a lot of those 'too good to be true' items from TV and the internet, and one closet in his basement is littered with this crap that he's bought over the years, then just tossed it aside when it didn't work as advertised.
He's technologically challenged, thinks he knows much more than he actually does, falls for overblown sales pitches all the time
Oh, you have one in your family too, huh?
I dread the day that's coming in a few years, when we'll be clearing out my grandmother's estate. God. If I had any say in the matter we'd be having Humane Society bring a truck and pick over what they want then get 1-800 Junk to haul off the rest, if I didn't just call the city disposal and rent a skip. Or, you know, just torch the rickety old shack and be done with it.
