One of the most familiar suburban sights used to be television antennae on the rooftops. You saw so many of them that they became invisible. In the town where I grew up, we had TV stations from 30 to 60 miles away that we watched. Two (later three, when a UHF station went on line in 1968) were north of us, about twenty degrees apart. The other three were in Tulsa, about 150 degrees to the left.
That meant our antenna had to be turned to get the best pictures. Those rooftop antennas were quite directional. They needed to be pointed directly at the transmission tower to get an optimal signal.
Channel seven in Pittsburg, Kansas, and channel twelve in Joplin, Missouri were close enough aligned that splitiing the difference between them gave an acceptably sharp picture.
But if we wanted to watch Red Skelton, Ed Sullivan, or any other CBS offerings, we had to tune in channel six from Tulsa. That meant the antenna needed to be rotated.
My normally acute memory escapes me when I try to remember what dad did before we purchased a rotor. I know he did SOMETHING, because we watched the Tulsa stations frequently. Perhaps we just lived with snowy pictures. We had a black-and-white TV at the time, and the bicolor medium was much more forgiving of weak signals than its color counterpart.
But I do remember dad getting that rotor. It was immediately after purchasing our first color TV.
The problem with color TV and a misaligned antenna wasn't the snow. It's amazing how poor a picture we were willing to accept back then, in this day of 48" plasma hi-def's. No, the problem was that the color ITSELF would come and go with a less-than-optimal signal. And having the picture go from b&w to color and back in the course of a few seconds was simply too much to bear.
So, my thrifty father saw fit to invest a few bucks into having an installer come out and put a rotor on our antenna. It was powered by a controller with the Tulsa, Pittsburg, and Joplin alignments preset. You just turned a pointer to the desired location, and the rotor would obey with a "cachunk . . . cachunk" repeated until the light that marked the antenna's actual direction would meet the pointer's location. Presto! KVOO in perfect glory!
Rotors worked well for a while. Then, the quality of the rotor determining how long it would take, it would begin freezing up along its path of rotation. You could frequently get past the bad points by backing it up a bit and trying again. But eventually, it would freeze solid. Then, you had a perfect picture from somewhere (if you were lucky) and poor pictures from everywhere else.
Now, you were sunk. You weren't about to go back to b&w, and you also weren't going to tolerate color that came and went. So you had to spring for a new unit.
When the above scenario took place later at our home outside Pea Ridge, Arkansas, dad refused to give in. Our antenna pole went down alongside the house, so it was possible to rotate it manually. However, the antenna's guy wires didn't allow a full 360 degree turn. So we were still stuck watching Fort Smith's channel five. But channel five showed all three networks in those days in an arrangement that seems strange today. Its audience decided through letters and phone calls what shows should be shown when. So one station showed shows from the Big Three, frequently switching from CBS top ABC to NBC during the course of a single evening!
But I missed the familiar faces for channel seven's newscasts. I grew up listening to Vic Cox giving sports reports about the Oklahoma Sooners as well as Kansas and Kansas State. KFSM was OBSESSED with one team, the Razorbacks of Arkansas. And there was NO other team worth reporting on, in their opinion (and that of its audience, myself excepted).
So, I kept turning that antenna hard against those guys until one of them finally snapped off! FINALLY, I was able to get that blasted antenna pointed towards Pittsburg again. Vic Cox's bald head was a welcome sight, and so was news about OTHER college teams.
Of course, that weakened antenna probably fell over soon after we moved away from that place.
Recently, I installed a small amplified multi-directional antenna in my attic which enables me to watch our local networks in hi-def, something that Dish Network unfortunately does not yet offer in my area. As I tuned into my local station and was now able to see every blade of grass on Augusta National's fairways, I reflected on how I had ditched my antenna circa 1984, and had returned to it twenty-three years later.
However, I'm stopping short of installing a rotor.
Comments (6)
When we married in 1974, our first TV set was a black & white Curtis Mathes console model. The plastic knob on the tuner was broken, so we had to change between the three channels with a pair of vise grips. Once we arrived at the desired channel, the vise grips had to be held at an angle for the picture to be visible. So, we used masking tape to tape the grips to the top of the console. Understandably, we seldom changed channels!
Posted by James Davis | April 9, 2007 2:20 PM
Posted on April 9, 2007 14:20
My eldest brother emailed this to me today:
"what happened was, dad sent me up on the roof to rotate the antenna via the pole, come hell or high water and winter and summer. i can still remember the angles from the straight roofline for the various stations.
Posted by Ron Enderland | April 9, 2007 5:51 PM
Posted on April 9, 2007 17:51
Ha! This is something I had forgotten about until now. We didn't have the fancy rotor that turned the antenna. My brother, sister and I were the antenna turners! I remember going outside and dad had a screwdriver wedged in the pipe that held the antenna pipe and we would have to remove the screwdriver and twist the pole around until the OK was yelled out the door! We didn't have to climb on the roof though,since the pole was in the ground next to the house. Thank goodness for small favors!
Posted by Rhonda | April 11, 2007 7:15 PM
Posted on April 11, 2007 19:15
Hmmmm,
I wasn't aware we could have gotten CBS from Tulsa back in those days..We tried pulling from channel 10 out of Springfield, MO...which didn't come in very well at all........
Posted by Doug Fletcher | April 13, 2007 5:08 PM
Posted on April 13, 2007 17:08
What I recall was fiddling with various settings from time to time. Vertical and Horizontal. And TV repairs were not that rare. Yes, TVs were worth repairing at one time and there was a business and market for it. And there was the fuss, the ghost images, wavy lines. It was tough.
Now in Portland Maine, a city of 65,000 with suburbs in surrounding towns, we had all 3 channels locally so rabbit ears or built in antennas usually worked well. You didn’t have to adjust them often, but there was a time when if you wanted channel 8 ABC, you would have to make special adjustments.
Cable definitely improve things in picture but once they deregulated, yikes, rates went through the roof. Sort of like that free trade BS they fed us.
But getting the picture was only part of the problem. Programming was limited and advertising was only growing and revenue from ads was also still growing. So the money available for programming as limited as well. And lots of old movies and serials from the theater were made into TV broadcasts so we got to see the entertainment of many decades previous. I think this gave us a unique opportunity to see what people and the world and what it produced were like back then.
But I will say I don’t think there was all that much change from 1930 to maybe 1965. Things really accelerated in the 60s. change had been slow but was get much faster rapidly. I find the type of programming much more interesting than the technology that delivered it.
But I do so some similarities from the tech of then to the tech of now. Color TV had been around a while but note very family had it. We did not get a color TV till 1985! Black and white was fine and money was tight. Color TV was much more expensive for years. In 1985, a color set was above $400. It had come down enough where we decided to go for it.
But for many, color was just too great to go without. My grandparents had color for nearly as long as I can remember. By mid 60s anyway. I remember small portable sets coming into vogue in 71 or 72. We had a small one in the kitchen and it got a lot of use as we ate there. Star Trek was on around 6 PM on ABC while the others showed the news. I suspect many kids eventually got a cheap small set in their room.
Now we have digital and HDTV, with those sets remaining quite high compared to a get 19 inch color set for typically $200 or less by the time HD was picking up in sales. I got my last NTSC color 20 was $109. But I can’t help but think HD will be a while getting popular and lower in price as really, since the advent of cable and improved NTSC and LED screens, many were never really dissatisfied with NTSC. We could record with VHS and even DVD.
So while many love HD, a lot of us will remain holdouts as we were in the 80s.
Posted by Scott I | May 14, 2009 5:15 PM
Posted on May 14, 2009 17:15
Didn't need the rooftop antenna! We lived in a Maryland suburb, just a couple miles away from the Washington DV affiliates! Rabbit ears worked the best not to mention an occassional coat hanger if the antenna broke! I still know people today who do not have cable and still have a directional TV antenna! And of course being so close to Baltimore, we often got a couple Baltimore stations. And when the sunspot cycle was high, Philadelphia stations would skip on in! Rotors are still a staple for Amateur radio operators who rely on beam antennas a lot!
Posted by Rivers End | June 10, 2009 10:01 AM
Posted on June 10, 2009 10:01