[Greg B.]

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.