Another analog station bites the dust

[Carmine]

Detroit has had "ION" TV on channel LP-48 (I think?) for many years now. Rather than the usual spanish language nonsense, or TV preachers, Ion actually had normal programming. (Lots of crappy CBS shows). I never even knew they were a Detroit channel, they seemed vaguely Canadian with all their wholsome sugar-coated goodness. Last month I probably watched it for an hour when they actually had a decent show playing. Sometimes I'd tune in and they just had a "no signal" message transmitting, as if I was watching digital!

Anyways, I was happy they existed because it meant I could at least receive a half-decent picture on the ol' Zenith roundie that lives in my unheated/uncooled breezeway. I've never bothered to connect a converter, but I'd occasionally turn the set on for visitors who seemed interested. I did just that today, and instead of some Jerry Bruckhiemer dreck, was greeted with this:



Which contained a scroll telling me to re-scan my converter box... Which is fairly dumb because I'm evidently not using a convertor box if I can see the message, but I got their point. (A message saying they'd moved to a digital transmission would have made more sense.)

So I "rescanned", as in turned the UHF knob and found this:



An actual Canadian channel (42) which came in well enough for me to see it was Olympic rowing, but not enough to even tune in color worms. The set has only the most marginal UHF loop attached to it. There was also another very weak channel, religious I believe. At some point I plan to put up a good outdoor antenna for some LP DX'ing.

If your curious what the set looks like:



I got this set perhaps 6-7 years ago in a home where it was still connected to cable in a basement outside Toledo. The picture tube was replaced at some point before I got it. It has the later Zenith-style yellow ring just begining to show. No other service work since I got it beyond simple gray-scale and convergence touch ups. Set was in a heavy smoker house when I got it. Did some cleaning, but the chassis has never been removed. It just works, even though temps in that room go below freezing to above 100.