NY Times old TV story
 

Really Enjoyed this story in a recent New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/ar...A14%22%7D&_r=0

Very enjoyable read!

We still get snow when the converter box
times out. It only happens on channel 3 or 4.;)

Even as a child of the 90's, and even if I was not part of the hobby I'd still get that story...My folks have always been slow to spend money on the latest electronics.

I remember staying up till all the area stations went off the air....
Some had better sign off presentations than others...
Good story....

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We got "Cable" TV very early on-1964-'65. In those days, it was just a BIG antenna, we got WLOS TV out of Asheville. WLOS was NOT considered "Local" content, so eventually it was dropped. SOMETIMES, we could pick up a station on Channel 3 or 4 out of Spartanburg, SC...Mostly, it was just audio & SORT OF ghostly images.

Before getting a separate UHF 4-bay bowtie with a mast pre-amp, my brother and I watched independent channels WTAF and WPHL from Philly "through heavy snow" to see the Three Stooges and other BW re-runs on the 1971 Zenith. The audio was perfect:)though

Watching a cartoon or color program this way on UHF was unpleasant - as the color killer would be at its borderline, with colored snow popping in and out, making it impossible to see anything.

Great article anyone over 40 can relate to, the Author totally captured my impression of DXing AM on Dad's Philco 46-200 transitone. The hand did get hot - OW

I get into the menu and eliminate the time-out feature. :yes:

Right now, I'm the only one in the family, that still uses a CRT TV.
Years ago, I was the first one to have a color TV, VCR and a few other electronic marvels. Now, there's nothing out there that interests me much.

Well said!:thmbsp:I lost any interest in new electronics toward the end of the 1980's, a big investment being a new CRT for keeping my 1977 Magnavox touch-tune going until 2004. I got a DTV converter box in '05 but nothing much since.

I remember being a kid and getting up early on Saturday morning before the local station came on the air. The first thing to show up was a picture of their station, and the announcer said "This is WATE TV-6 in Knoxville, TN, beginning our broadcast day". They would proceed to a recording of a band playing "The Star Spangled Banner" with a background of military airplanes flying over.

When I was a kid, I never thought about watching TV all night long. All three of the stations we could pick up went off the air shortly after midnight.

At my old station...unnamed for this post to protect the suspects...we had a disgruntled sign-off engineer. One night, Ray decided on an on-air editorial. He lit up our TK-42 and pointed it at a station ashtray laying on the news desk with a station matchbook folded to a triangle to stand up on a glorious close-up he had managed. As the signoff announcement droned by "Station WXXX operates at a power of..." Ray ran to the studio and set the matchbook on fire. He then got back to master control to show the NAB seal of good practice. No one noticed.

Same thing is true of short wave. Today you can go on line and get perfect "radio" and even TV from overseas, no problem. But SWL'ing in the old days was more fun: the thrill of the hunt, what can you hear, and finally a weak signal coming in from half a world away rising and fading as if influenced by the ocean waves. The programs heard didn't mean as much as the thrill of the reception: truly the medium was the message, and still is.

I watched the local TV stations in Cleveland (channels 3, 5 and 8 at the time, '60s-'70s) sign on and sign off, back when TV stations still left the air at one or 2 a.m. for three or four hours, signing on again at six a.m. the following morning (long before today's 24-hour television and infomercials).

Channel 8 in Cleveland, the CBS station at the time, would stay on the air well past midnight on Friday nights with horror movies. The other two network stations would leave the air shortly after the last network program ended; the stations would show a couple of local religious programs (I remember "Credo" on channel 3), and then the sign off announcement. After that, snow and static until the stations returned to the air some time around six a.m.

I'll never forget one morning back in the '70s when I had my TV on at 5:30 a.m. or thereabouts, before channel 5 in Cleveland signed on. I didn't have any special kind of antenna on my set, just rabbit ears, but I remember seeing a reasonably good picture from the then-NBC affiliate in Flint, Michigan, WNEM-TV on channel 5. Of course, that image went away in a hurry once Cleveland's channel 5 signed on.

Even though TV stations don't sign off at night anymore, there are times when some stations interrupt their programming briefly after midnight. I get a PBS station on my cable from a town about 30 miles southwest of here; the station normally runs 24 hours a day, but last night at about 2:00 a.m. or thereabouts, I saw a color bar test chart (not a round test pattern) with a small square bouncing around on the screen, and a black box in the center of the pattern, inside which was "xxxx Columbus" (I couldn't make out the word ahead of the city name, but I think it may have been a network or station ownership ID).

watching tv back then became more of an adventure at times just to get a good picture. We live in the South Bend area and putting up an antenna in order to get Chicago channels was hit or miss at best. Then once we got a color set in the early sixties the problems were multiplied. Keep in mind even as a kid I was good at adjusting the best possible picture. Others weren't so lucky. I remember going in people's houses and wonder how they could set there and watch such a crummy picture. And there again when color started to take off most people didn't know how to adjust the customer controls in order to get an acceptable picture. Then there was always to slide telling us that there were technical difficulties at the station and you got to stare at that annoying slide hoping your favorite show would come back on.

If that wasn't enough there were always those pesky problems like dirty pots causing intermittent problems, dirty tuners making the channels drift or go snowy. I guess that was all part of enjoying that new medium of televison

Fond memories of station sign on and offs... both had the national anthem and announced fcc info.. my favorite u as cbs, they would sign off with the eye in red.with black background. Announcer would say "station wcbs, new York. ..goodnight" snowy screen.

When I was 10-15 y.o. there were many times when I'd stay up well past midnight...or get up at 5am. (but probably not both in the same day!) I used to know all the station sign-ons and offs. A couple stayed on all night: I remember WMAR-2 in Baltimore airing "Private Secretary" at 3am. WRC-4 in DC would just have the station logo up with a periodic i.d. by the announcer. Many nights I'd fall asleep watching Letterman or SNL. If I was watching WRC, I awoke to the announcers voice in the middle of the night. If I was tuned to WBAL-11 I'd awake to what I thought at first was wild applause but it was actually static, as they'd signed off for the night. Around that time I picked up a 60s Emerson portable (still have it) with a sleep timer, so that solved the problem.

I was like that too. I'd stay up until the Cleveland TV stations signed off for the night, and I also knew every station's sign on and sign off announcements--even when the UHF stations came in (starting with NET [now PBS] channel 25 in 1965, then, three years later, channel 43, then channel 61 (they both signed on the same year), and finally, in 1985, channel 55. I would get up at 5:30 a.m. some mornings to see the stations sign on. Channel 3, the NBC station in Cleveland, had a rather unique test pattern with a color test chart actually built into the pattern--that is, the different colors were shown as wedges in between the resolution and video bandwidth indicators.


Channel 3 sign on: "WKYC TV channel 3 in Cleveland now begins its broadcast day. WKYC-TV is owned and operated by the National Broadcasting Company, with studios and offices located at 1403 East 6th Street in Cleveland, Ohio. Portions of today's programming is recorded and on film."

Channel 5: "This is WEWS-TV, your Scripps-Howard station, first in Cleveland. WEWS-TV opperates on channel 5, 76-82 megahertz, with studios located in the WEWS building, Euclid Avenue at East 30th."

I don't recall channel 8's sign on anymore, nor those of the UHF stations. Channel 8 used to run all night on Friday nights with horror films, returning to its standard 5 a.m. - 1 a.m. schedule the next day.

All three stations carried the announcement pertaining to rebroadcasting that station's programming without written consent. "The programs broadcast by this station may not be used for any purpose except exhibition at the time of broadcast, on receivers of the type used for home reception, in places where no admission, cover, or mechanical operating charges are made." The Cleveland stations stopped these announcements when they went to 24-hour telecasting, but some stations, such as WMAQ-TV in Chicago, would make the announcement at sign on and sign off well into the 1990s. The WMAQ sign off is now available on YouTube.

Having lived my whole life in southern NH I can really identify with the author of this article and the trials and tribulations they went through to bring in a sketchy signal. I have probably done the same thing to see a Bruins or Red Sox game. I also remember laying in bed at night listening to my 1950's vintage Westinghouse clock radio, usually tuned into Larry Glick on WBZ in Boston or the Milkman's Matinee on WNEW in New York. Listening to Larry usually involved a lot of giggleing and snorting into my pillow as he would play the Orangutan (http://youtu.be/T-XeBvd5Pqw) or the graveyard maurader usually around 1AM when my parents would yell to turn the radio off and go to sleep. Now I can listen to and sometimes watch Bruins or sox games on my phone with perfect digital reproduction and while its easier I miss, a little bit, the effort one had to go through not so long ago...but I wouldn't go back.

The sad part about this NYT article is that younger readers will completely believe the article and think that all TV before cable was snow, ghosty, rolled, and unreliable.

Only reinforcing the special effects on Mad Men that present all television viewing in the day as being by sporadic-E skip.

If you weren't between tall buildings, behind a hill, or just plain too far away from the transmitter sites, analog TV reception over-the-air could be excellent (unless one got too close to a big CRT where the inherent 480i resolution would be seen as unsharp). The first time I had cable (1990, long before DTV or HDTV), I saw some snow and moiré patterns in the picture on cable, so I would switch to the antenna to watch the local stations, even though they were on cable.

Another fact is that many of today's DTV subchannels with 480i look a LOT worse than analog 480i did due to compression (some 480i SDTV is almost as good as analog, but some of it can be badly compressed. When WNWO 24.1 has an HD program with a lot of motion, Retro 24.2 can look downright awful, like early internet video with a 56k telephone line modem. When the 24.1 program is not using so much data, the Retro looks a bit better).

The CATV antenna for Greater Bugtussle here was at the top of the local hillock that was the tallest, & reasonably accessible. In the Eighties, I had a JVC "All-in-Wonder"- 4.5" color TV, AM/FM/TV, cassette recorder/player, we'd take it up there & see what faraway TV stations we could get.. Turned out that we were only getting a SLIM portion of what was Out There.. There were usually 2 or 3 OTHER sources of major networks & PBS that we COULD have gotten, not to mention the "Other" independent lo-power stations.