Anyone remember these cheezy peices of crap?
Seems like everwhere I went someone had one stuffed in the closet amongst a bunch of junk. Circa 1995 every garage sale had one.
The two controls consisted of a dish rotator , and a tuning control which all it did was cut off one of connections to the rabbit ears .
The important looking plastic things on the dipoles were just that, important hollow plastic shells.
Rabbit ears in sheeps clothing, Sucker bait at it's finest....?
https://playingintheworldgame.files....rtisement1.jpg

This one sold at the WARCI donation auction for I think $2 or $3 in July.

http://www.videokarma.org/attachment...1&d=1564949011

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I think the Archers actually had a rf amp in them if I recall...

Yes, this one did. https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/radio_...preme_v_5.html

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"Dish" was an outrageous design using a dipole for UHF, stoking a delusion among the band-illiterate. Only good in Metro areas and I bet it was not patented either.

"Archer" Antenna: The plastic things on the VHF dipoles were so that you could adjust them without making electrical contact and skewing results of aiming-spreading. The one knob rotated both loop and monopoles, other knob performed the "hocus-pocus" of impedance-matching combinations.

The plastic ring on the UHF loop added a director and reflector element that was just chromed plastic. I never did understand why a bowtie and reflector was not used on these set-tops instead. Loops had one advantage, not limited to horizontal polarization. The best set-top UHF antenna I ever used was that RS $4.99 set-top two-bay bowtie.

These may have been the last of the indoor antennas that used a switch to alter connections between the elements and have separate UHF and VHF leads.

In the early days of digital, the Radio Shack dual bowtie was one of the best non-amplified indoor UHF antennas we tried at Zenith. The other was the "Silver Sensor" log-periodic.

I've one of those "dish" jobs on my Motorola in the bedroom, using 90s-00s era rabbit ears for the CTC21 and BT modulator, and a standard Philips branded VHF/UHF combo yagi I bought for $25 back in '06. I took it with me when I moved out of my parents in '08. It beats anything you can buy at a big box store for DTV reception. A local hardware store still has the same one (though RCA branded) and they want over $100 for it! I'm only 35 mile outside ABQ, bit we have always needed good outdoor antennas for decent reception.

My great grandparents in Douglas, AZ had a big tower for my great grandpa's HF rig, but also mounted a really big Winegard aimed at Tucson up there. Next time I go down, I'll see if its still there and take pictures.