Hi! New here + 1950s DX Photos...
 

Been enjoying the posts in the TV groups for awhile now and thought I should introduce myself.

I'm basically a TV DXer (FM too) but love to see and read about old TVs.

Pretty much stopped watching network prime time television back in 1977.

Got into Laserdiscs in 1985 and DVDs in 2000.

I have an old Sony TV that might be considered rare, a KX-M270.

Anyway, I had a co-worker whos father-in-law was a TV DXer in the 1950s and he photographed his DX and I got to scan those photos and I like to share them with everyone!

1950s UHF IDs and Test Patterns...

http://s24.photobucket.com/albums/c4...s%20and%20TPs/

1950s VHF Eskip IDs and Test Patterns...

http://s24.photobucket.com/albums/c4...0IDs%20andTPs/

1950s Providence/Boston area IDs and Test Patterns...

http://s24.photobucket.com/albums/c4...0IDs%20andTPs/

1950s VHF Tropospheric Ducting IDs and Test Patterns...

http://s24.photobucket.com/albums/c4...0IDs%20andTPs/

Plus here is a pic of WJAR Channel 10 Providence Rhode Island seen in Illinios May 1961 by a DXer I have not
been able to ID yet...

http://s24.photobucket.com/albums/c4...ois_5_1961.jpg

If the links don't work just go to the photobucket site and search for Hawkwind02054.

And I'm a member of the WTFDA http://www.wtfda.org/ A web site for TV Dxers...

Always wondered- How DO you DX TV ? Welcome to AK ! Lotsa TV & radio guys here.

Very nice! Thanks for sharing. I really enjoyed DXing as a kid-we had a decent outdoor antenna then & I would stay up late/get up early and catch what I could. I think the best I ever did from MD was CT, though I don't recall the station. I really need to get my act together and try it again before analog dies.

Welcome, and really cool stuff you shared with us. Thanks!!
Dan

Very cool! The WMCT 5 Memphis News slide brought back some pleasant memories for me. They're still around and a NBC affiliate.
The T was dropped a long time ago...so they're WMC TV5.

What is a "DXer"? Just wondering.

I was thinking how I'm 38 so I remember the test patterns of the 70's and 80's. The old fashioned circular designs were still around in some places but eventually most stations went to that color bar thing (how boring).

Anyway in remembering this I am wondering if TV even ever stops at all anymore. Think about it. Even after the network signs off most stations turn into all news or infomercial until morning local news. I don't think TV ever ends anymore.

I guess the powers dont want to waste all that time broadcasting a more or less useless image for hours on end. Time is $$. I always wondered why they didnt just fade to black after the good old National Anthem. I miss those days...

Hi Hawkwind, welcome to AK.
Those pictures are great!!

Hawkwind....now that is cool. Brings back memories from way before I became a ham radio operator in 1966. It was probably late 50's and I remember vividy TV DXing with my Dad. With nothing but the rabbit ears on top of the set I recall seeing stations particularly from Texas and Oklahoma.
'58/'59 marks the best sunspot peak on record but we didn't know anything about that sort of thing at the time. Your pics are really cool and very interesting. Another thing that will be only a memory after analog is gone...too bad really but time marches on.

Holy Smokes! WWLP, WHYN, WHCT, WKNB... all from the time when my parents were kids in their 20's!!! I'll have to ask if they saw any of those!

THANK YOU and welcome to AK!!!

Tom

Ah the good ole days when they ran movies at night and i used to get up at 5am to await the test patterns from stations start ups, i used to calibrate my tvs to them.. I remember DXing. Got some nevada channels once and a bakersfield channel 11. As they started building around me, my reception started to be affected. I remember being a kid living out in the country and my dad being able to suck in alot of channels on an old philco.

Then came the 80s and the FCC opened the flood gates for infomercials. These networks make me laugh. They dont endorse the products or the claims made, but they'll sure as hell palm the money and turn a blind eye to the most outrageous 30 mins of lies, hehehehehe

Steve

In the early 70's I was delivering a new Magnavox Color Set to a home in the Bootheel of Missouri. I hooked it up to their antenna which was pointed South to pick up Memphis stations. When I turned on the set and started going through the channels I was picking up a station on channel 2 in Spanish, after we watched it a few minutes I finally figured out it was Havana Cuba. I used to TV DX when I was a kid at home, the best I ever did from Southeast Missouri was Billings Montana.

I don't know if I'd say that. TV DXing will still be around, it'll just be done differently with ATSC than with analog. Just do a Google search, you'll find pages from people who have DX'ed digital TV, such as this:

http://pages.cthome.net/fmdx/hdtv.html

http://www.wtfda.org/index.php?optio...=106&Itemid=53

"DX" is ham radio lingo for "Long Distance" reception. meaning outside of the broadcast station's intended market area in this context.
BTW, WWOR TV is now channel 9 in NYC, or more precisely Secauus NJ. They used to be WOR TV, but there was some silly scandal and the FCC made the owner sell it, and give NJ its only VHF channel. They still transmit from the Empire State Building in NYC.
http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c4...g?t=1195159886
These pictures look to show pretty good signal to noise, but a photographic film camera set at a long exposure would tend to intergrate out the noise and build up signal.
And WNET is now NYC's educational channel 13
http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c4..._3_13_1955.jpg

I'd like to try answer 2 questions here.

"Always wondered- How DO you DX TV ?"

Before and to some extent after the Internet I would check channels that don't have stations on the air
and see if anything far away was coming in. Sometimes if I was spinning the dial and skinny lines on nearby

channels, that would tell me that conditions are open and I'd spin the antenna west and see if anything is

coming in on 2 through 69.

Also it's known that tropo is best in the spring and fall and that summer is good for Eskip.

Now with the internet I'm on a mailing list with other Dxers and they ost alerts if they see DX.

Here is a good web page that predicts tropo conditions:

http://www.dxinfocentre.com/tropo.html

Web page is maintained by a fellow WTFDA member.

"What is a "DXer"? Just wondering."

Someone who enjoys getting far away signals throughout the radio spectrum.

Other than TV FM, I've DXed LW, MW, SW, VHF-Low, VHF-High and UHF with a communication receiver and a scanner.

And finally, heres a great web page that gives the histories of defunct UHF TV Stations including WWOR-14 and
WNET-16:

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Olym...14/morgue.html

Also maintained by a fellow WTFDA member...

Here are several in succession.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkbghBLIll0

Literally, I think it's "Distant Xmission", xmit being short for transmit. I think it pre-dates ham radio. Maybe telegraph era. FWIW.

Neat to see those old test patterns .
Now all the stations all use those ugly color bars . :thumbsdn: and they dont have any station identification .
The best DXing I did , was summer 06 I was recieving KCRA Sacramento CA.
I am in BC canada , so that is not bad considering I have a hard time recieving Vancouver . KCRA was recieved under ideal weather conditions , and soon disappeared . It was a lot of fun while it lasted .
The best part was that all this took place on the screen of a
1954 Crosley 17" table TV with matching stand .
I have made many attempts to recieve UHF but still have had no luck .
Im going to raise the antenna up higher and try again .

Hehehe KCRA 3 is one of my local channels here.. :banana:

I remember talkin to folks in BC Canada when i was runnin CB radios :D

Ah the magic of "skip"

Steve

Thanks so much to those who explained what this whole "DX" thing is. At least to a certain degree. By and large I still don't understand anything more than somehow there is a way to pick up distant stations that you should not be able to receive.

Is there a piece of equipment like a signal booster or what? I sure wish word of this was out back before the early 1980's when people started getting cablevision around here. We generally only got 3 VHF channels clearly, and 3 others that you had to do the rabbit dance for. Seems like we eventually got around 3 clear UHF channels, one being Public Broadcasting System which really stinks when your a kid. NOW I would enjoy it, especially Dick Cavett. Looking back we got along kust fine, even getting up to change the channel was OK, no bother. Now I pay $50 a month to have access to a couple hundred channels. I actually only frequent about 5 of these channels. How ironic? The math doesent work at all. I'm now PAYING to view LESS than I did back when I had it for FREE.

I think I'll cancel my service........to pay for gasoline....................

Its weird hearing about DXing after all the years (25) that I have enjoyed vintage electronics. Never heard the term or idea in my life. It would seem that someone who knew how to pull in extra channels back before cablevision would have become a millionaire selling this idea or possible service to the masses.

Four must haves for TV DX'ing:

TV (obviously, but preferably with an analog tuner)

TV Antenna - a big 'ole Fringe Yagi mounted as high as possible

Antenna Rotator, with the antenna matched to the compass

LOTS of coffee, for late night DX'ing

When I was a younger, Dad used to DX with his 27 element VHF/UHF Channel Master "wind trap" antenna hooked up to a Channel Master rotator. I remember my thrill was watching the antenna turn. He used a TS-915 Quasar we had, and would regularly pick up stations along the East Coast - farthest probably being WDCA in Washington (200 miles) or the Wilmington NC station (>300 miles!). We couldn't see too far to the west, probably because of the Appalachian Mountains, but would pick up Richmond and Petersburg, both about 90 miles away. If the nearby (<3 mi) Naval Air Station had any air traffic, all bets were off - the radar/ILS would interfere.

Thanks for posting the links - some of those stations are now Mega-stations on cable or with PBS (WGBH..) I'd love to see a screen shot of WYAH-27, if somebody out there has one....

Cheers,

what's your handle , i was on CB for a while .:yes:
actually we still have ours operating .

You don't always need the best antenna or tv but it sure helps. TV DX is come and go. One minute you are watching a station from hundreds of miles away and the next minute it's gone. When I was kid I did it with our main TV, a GE KE chassis console. This was in the late 70s/early 80s. I just kept flipping the dial. While waiting for something to show up it was fun to watch stations sign-on or sign-off. Some did a better job than others. WJLA-7 in Washington had a great montage of DC historical sites with Ray Charles singing "America". Local WMDT-47 had a great helicopter shot of a worker near the top of its tower. I remember WBOC-16 running about 10 minutes straight of public service spots before signing off. If I stayed up long enough there might only be a couple stations left on the air-I remember WMAR-2 in Baltimore would stay on; they ran the old show "Private Secretary" at about 3:30am. There are still some stations that sign-off, but I myself sign-off too early nowadays! In the early 80s we got a new GE set with digital tuning and it never did as good. I mostly did AM broadcast band dx'ing. That's easy enough to do-you can just jot down a list from 540-1700 and one by one see which slots you can fill in.

what's your handle , i was on CB for a while .
actually we still have ours operating .

Just like my e mail add "Stallion" to the locals and "5 1 2 northern california" to the DXers... I took my 5/8 groundplane down about 96 for roof work. Still have it in the back yard and my PRESIDENT in the closet. :D
Steve

I was "KAAR5167" on CB, then I got a ham license "WA2ISE" back in 1976. I suppose I'm a legacy of that old song "Convoy" by CW McCall. "This is the Duck.."

Back in the mid 70's I graduated Syracuse University. Syracuse, a town so small they only had 3 TV channels, and the NBC outlet was so lame that they didn't carry "Saturday Night Live". Guess they thought it was too riskay or something... :yikes::nono::thumbsdn: So on Saturday night we all went :beer::beerchug::drunk::beerchug::drunk::beer: Back then legal age was 18.

Nice DX pictures, Hawkwind.

Regarding CB, I was "The Blue Knight" mostly on channel 21 or 29 on the north side of Chicago in the late 70's through 1984, call sign KBIH7773.

my handle is BUCKSHOT . I got into it around the same time you got out . Around 95 - 96 . more or less use it locally now . not many of us on anymore , at least in our area .

Best TV DX I got was around 1960 or so, bright sunny morning, from southeast TX I picked up Fargo ND. Had an outdoor antenna but probably only 20-30 ft high.
Reece

In the late 60's we set up a large Winegard VHF/UHF/FM antenna on a 40' tower with pre-amplification at the antenna, fed by coax to the house. The tube preamp/distributor was a Winegard and the rotor was a Channel Master.
Anyway, late in the evening when the local stations and some of the Memphis stations would sign off, I'd turn the rotor towards the south and watch WJTV out of Jackson, Mississippi or turn towards the north-west and watch KFVS out of Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Back then we had a late 50's color Admiral that had outstanding sensitivity and selectivity. It wasn't much to look at from a beauty standpoint (big black metal box on gold legs), but it had a great picture and audio and made DX'ing a fairly easy task. It was eventually replaced with a hybrid RCA 25" set that was a dog performance-wise, thus ending my TV DXing days. But, there was still MW & SW DXing! ;)

Yeah i think the older tvs really sucked up the signals whereas newer smaller tuners werent that sensitive.

Steve

Your "Unknown channel 6b" is WBRC-TV, Birmingham, AL.
Used to do this, too. Need to se where my pictures are...

Thanks!..

Cool pictures.
I used to DX a lot of TV. I started back in the mid-80s through the mid-90s with a mid 60s Zenith b/w I got from my grandfather, I had one TV antenna ontop of one of the sheds, an FM only antenna ontop of the chimney, an another tv antenna in the attic. Eventually I got a few more sets, late 60s RCA b/w, and a mid 70s Zenith 12" b/w ss portable, but the old Zenith was still the best for DX. With that FM antenna ontop of chimney (which was the highest of the 3 antennas) I could usually pull in ch 3 and ch 6 from Sacramento at night (we were in San Jose). Since I got back into TVs in the past few years, living in apartments I've been unable to put up a good antenna. I'm not sure yet whether I'll eventually get into digital TV DX or not. I've heard that you can still pull in distant stations with the converters, but somehow, if it's not actually an old set that's receiveing the signals, I loose interest. I read somewhere, although I don't know if it's true or not, that some uhf stations might not have to switch to digital. I hope that's the case.

LPTV stations don't have to switch.

I noticed in all those pictures, that by the mid-'50's WATV in Newark, NJ (later WNTA-TV and WNDT, now public TV's WNET) used the exact same test pattern design as created by WPIX in 1949 and used by that station well into the late 1970's. Would anyone know what TP was used by 13 in the 1958-61 period as WNTA?

Also, I'm interested as to any place where to find DX photos of color circular test patterns from the 1960's and '70's (outside of Jeff Kadet's DX Photos site which I've seen and have been impressed by) - or at least B&W photos of same.

Around 1971, cable TV was brought to Atlantic Canada. Crude by today's standards. The nearest US stations were several hundreds of miles away, and there was no microwave link yet built from the head-end, on the Canadian side of the US-Canada border near Calais, Maine, to the destination city of Halifax, Nova Scotia. The government regulator, the CRTC, only allowed us 2 US stations originally, the NBC affiliate in Bangor, Maine, WLBZ Channel 2, and the PBS station, WMED-TV. Given the considerable distance between Calais and Bangor, reception from the head-end antenna, even with a large tower, was hit and miss, especially on Channel 2. For some time until the microwave link got built, programming was a week late, as tapes were made and "bicycled" to cable systems in Nova Scotia for replay the next week. Pretty unbelievable.

The point of all this is that when WLBZ would fade out due to weather conditions, sometimes other signals would take its place. I remember in particular watching it one day around 1973 and seeing WLBZ disappear, only to be replaced with the crystal-clear signal of WMT channel 2, the CBS affiliate in Cedar Rapids, Iowa for an extended period. This was thrilling to me as we did not get a CBS affiliate (and would not until the mid-1980s) so it was like watching something forbidden. I was dumbfounded as to how this occurred and actually did some research in the days that followed. Somewhere I learned about signal skipping due to tropospheric effects. So if nothing else, it taught me something I didn't otherwise know.

An analog tuner was nice...you could use the fine tuning to dial in stations that were "offset" a few kHz from the channel's center frequency. VHF stations were assigned either a - or + offset to minimize co-channel interference from others on the same channel. A few stations were licensed with zero offset.

Atsc dx
 

I still DX with the new ATSC system. It's harder to do but just as rewarding! I use a CM4251 Channel Master Parascope and a Wade VIP-307 in New Orleans, a CM4251 Channel Master Parascope and a Wade VU-937 SR with the P8Z UHF plug in in Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi.
Analog from Mexico and Canada come in occaisionally. On a good day I have reached out on digital to Austin Texas. I use the Channel Master 7777 amplifiers, one on each antenna and use the older Alliance rotors as they handle the weight loads without problems.

Very nice TV DX setup!

I live in the S.F. Bay Area, which is surrounded by hills, so I don't think I would have much luck receiving out-of-area signals. One day, I might put a good-sized TV antenna and CM 7777 on my 55-foot ham radio tower, though.