Quote:
Originally Posted by vortalexfan
Their house they just bought was built in 1997, their old house was built in 1962, there was some weird hacking done with the original cable runs in the house but my parents had that repaired when they had their cable service transferred from their old house to their new house because there were some cable hookups in the house that weren't working so the cable company came in and repaired the cable runs.
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If your parents' former home was built in 1962, the cable wiring (not to mention the AC power wiring) is 60 years old and was probably well overdue to be upgraded (three-prong grounded AC sockets, et al). I don't know what was done to the original cable runs (you said they were hacked), but from what you said in your post, whatever was done must have messed up the wiring fairly badly; that, or else the original cable was reused, rather than being replaced with new cable as it should have been.
However, I was glad to read in your post that the problems were corrected and your folks are now enjoying cable service as it should be. The northern Indiana area is considered part of the Chicago metro, but I'm not sure Chicago's TV and FM stations reach the area as well as they reach the closer-in suburbs of the city.
I am in a similar situation where I live, in east-central Lake County, Ohio. I am some 30 miles from downtown Cleveland, and about 15 miles further southwest from the city's TV stations' towers; the TV reception here isn't bad except for the CBS station on channel 19, which was moved several years ago from channel 8 when the station was sold. For some reason, I don't know why, channel 19 simply does not reach here without cable.
I live in an apartment building, so cannot erect an outdoor TV antenna; this all but forces me to have cable to get decent TV reception (including CBS channel 19). When I lived in suburban Cleveland, the CBS station was on channel 8 until the late 1980s or early '90s, and reached my home at the time (Wickliffe, a Cleveland suburb 15 miles east of the city) quite well.
However, when I moved to my apartment in 1999, things changed drastically; that is, I could receive most of the stations, except CBS 19, well enough to watch, simply using an indoor antenna. As I said, I don't know why channel 19 does not reach here without cable. The studios are located in Shaker Heights, an eastern Cleveland suburb; the transmitter is located in Parma, a southwestern suburb, and so should reach the entire Cleveland area without cable. The city where this station's transmitter is located is in fact a Cleveland suburb, which the station should reach with no problems, using a simple indoor antenna. Since all of Cleveland's TV stations do in fact reach the entire metropolitan area (about 50+ miles), there should be absolutely no reason whatever why channel 19 should not reach my area.
Before DTV, channel 19 had a 3.762-megawatt (ERP) signal, and reached most of the metropolitan area (with the exception of far-eastern and far-western suburbs) quite well. I don't know, however, just how much coverage was lost after the DTV switch, but it must have been quite a bit since the station lost a lot of its coverage area from then on, and still has dead spots in its coverage area to this day. (A repeater station was installed recently to fill in the area where channel 19's DTV signal does not reach well, or at all.) To make matters worse, he transmitter was damaged by lightning about six months after the station's initial sign on in 1985; this may well have had something to do with the reduction in the coverage area (the transmitter may have been operating at sharply reduced ERP output after the lightning strike, and may still be to this day), but I'm not sure.