Here is another great set, a space command 300 1960. Im going to be bidder on this one, and would like to win this one for my space command collection. Thanks-Doug

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3283347070&category=3638

Originally posted by drh4683
Here is another great set, a space command 300 1960. Im going to be bidder on this one, and would like to win this one for my space command collection. Thanks-Doug

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3283347070&category=3638


Doug, I've been curious about this for some time. Where do you put all your Zenith TVs? All I can say is, your house must be huge, or else you have a storage shed or two on your property.

BTW, I've also wondered about Downers Grove, IL. I know it's a suburb of Chicago (used to hear it mentioned a lot on WMAQ radio at night before it went all-sports two years or so ago), but I'm curious as to the size of the city and how far it actually is from downtown Chicago.


BTW (2), I asked you a question some weeks ago as to the number of UHF TV stations in the metropolitan Chicago area, but never received an answer; perhaps the query got lost or some such thing. Are all the stations you get from Chicago, or do you have a large motorized antenna that enables you to pick up stations from Milwaukee, Indianapolis, etc.? I know some of the stations that say they serve the Chicago area are actually in Gary, Indiana (IIRC, I think WJYS-TV is there, as I saw the station listed on one of the websites that list TV stations in major metro areas).

Hi Jeff,

Here is a list of all the local stations that I can receive on TV

Here is how the list works, first channel number, call sigh, location, affiliate, transmitter output in kW, transmitter antenna hight in meters, transmitter location.

2 - WBBM Chicago, IL CBS 35.5 418 John Hancock Cntr, Chgo

4 - W04CQ Chesterton, IN 0.115 77 LPTV

5 - WMAQ Chicago, IL NBC 20.0 494 Sears Tower, Chicago

7 - WLS Chicago, IL ABC 55.0 457 Sears Tower, Chicago

9 - WGN Chicago, IL WB 110 415 John Hancock Cntr, Chgo

11- WTTW Chicago, IL PBS 60.3 497 Sears Tower, Chicago

13 - W13BQ Portage, IN 0.085 33 LPTV

13 - WOCK-CA Chicago, IL 3.0 346 John Hancock Cntr, Chgo

18 - W18AT Gary, IN 26.3 49 LPTV

20 - WYCC Chicago, IL PBS 2,430 378 John Hancock Center

22 - W64CQ Arlington Hts, IL TBN 1.4 76 APP: to move to ch. 64

23 - WFBT Chicago, IL Ethnic 12.3 473 Sears Tower, Chicago

24 - W24AJ Aurora, IL 7.0 133 LPTV

26 - WCIU Chicago, IL 5,000 472 Sears Tower, Chicago

28 - WOCH-LP Chicago, IL Ethnic 47.3 355 John Hancock Cntr, Chgo

30 - WSPY-LP Plano, IL 3.3 145 LPTV, CP: move to ch. 57

32 - WFLD Chicago, IL Fox 5,000 430 John Hancock Center

34 - W34CK Arlington Heights, IL 0.47 444 Sears Tower, relays ch. 62

38 - WCPX Chicago, IL PAX 5,000 381 John Hancock Center

44 - WSNS Chgo, IL Telemundo 5,000 472 Sears Tower

50 - WPWR Chicago, IL UPN 5,000 494 Sears Tower

54 - W54AP Blue Island, IL EWTN 21 119 LPTV

54 - W54BE Sugar Grove, IL 1.69 58 LPTV

54 - 960920WE Kankakee, IL 5,000 107 Application only

55 - WPXE Kenosha, WI PAX 5,000 144

56 - WYIN Gary, IN PBS 1,350 306 Crown Point, IN near Cedar Lake

57 - W57DN Elgin, IL TBN 17.8 98 APP: to move to ch.46

60 - WXFT Aurora, IL TeleFutura 5,000 494 Sears Tower

62 - WJYS Hammond, IN 5,000 146 Tinley Park, IL

64 - W64CQ Waukegan, IL TBN 46.1 455 Sears Tower

66 - WGBO Joliet, IL Univision 5,000 393 John Hancock Center

68 - W36AO Palatine, IL TBN 12.6 455 Sears Tower,


69 - W69EA Hammond, IL 0.074 30 CP only

As you can see, chicago has a bunch of stations, so the UHF dial gets to use its full range.
Funny you mentioned where I keep my tvs. Currently Im moving to batavia, IL about 20 miles west of my home in downers grove. Downers grove is about 18 miles west of Downtown. The new house is much larger and will be nice place to keep my tvs and display them more appropriately than just stacking them all over the place like I do now. As of now, they are in an indoor storgage facility and will stay there untill I move this June.

I have a big 18' long yagi on the roof right now, with a rotor and signal amp. I can pull in the quad cities, south bend indiana, benton harbor michigan, and if Im lucky milwaukee. its in channel 4 and its rare that I pick that up. Also rockford, IL about 100 miles west northwest of here, freeport, IL same direction as rockford. can also pick up University of Illinois tv station on UHF. Thats rare. When there is a big temerature inversion, known as troposheric ducting, I can pick up those far away stations almost crystal clear. Like just before a severe t-storm.

In the new house, I am going to build a 40' antenna tower and use my current antenna which is just a UHF/VHF yagi.
I have a catwhisker UHF outdoor antenna which is superior for UHF, I will hook that up as well, and pick up even better UHF. The new home is in more rural area, flatter land so TV stations should come in very clear.

I live near Austin, Texas and around here, there is only one VHF station, all others, including PBS, are UHF. The reason for this is that Lyndon Baines Johnson owned the VHF station back here in the 1950s and 1960s and did not want competition. I need cable or at least a UHF tuner (usually from a VCR) to watch anything other than the FOX network on my old TVs.

Doug (drh4683),

Thanks for the information. Holy mackerel, is that ever an impressive list of stations! You aren't kidding when you say your area has "tons" of UHF stations, and the VHF dial being packed as well in good weather conditions.

The area to which you are moving seems to be about the same distance from Chicago as I was from Cleveland, before I moved to my apartment out here in the boondocks over four years ago. I lived in a Cleveland suburb called Wickliffe, which is in Lake County, Ohio about 15 miles from downtown (and over thirty miles from the Cleveland TV transmitters, which are located southwest of downtown; where I live now, I am 45 miles southwest of the transmitters and need cable to get decent reception--I cannot even get one channel [NBC channel 3] on an antenna here, although 5 and 8, and the four commercial UHF stations, 19, 25, 43, 55, 61, come in well enough [in monochrome] to watch, but not good enough in color, although, ironically, the four commercial UHF stations, one of which [19] is the CBS affiliate for northern Ohio, *do* come in almost as clear as if I were within a few miles of the transmitters, instead of 45 miles away).

I now live in Fairport Harbor, Ohio, which is a village in east-central Lake County located 30 miles east of downtown Cleveland and about a mile (more or less) from the south shore of Lake Erie. While my TV reception on an antenna is not as good as it was when I lived in the suburbs, my FM radio reception here is great! Using an amplified indoor FM antenna on my Aiwa bookshelf stereo, I get almost all the Cleveland stations with excellent signals; in the summer, my FM dial just lights up with all sorts of stations from Detroit (both in the city and its suburbs as far out as Ann Arbor), southwestern Ontario, Canada, Toledo, Ohio, and, when the conditions are exactly right, Erie, Pennsylvania.

I guess being so far away from the Cleveland FMs means having less intermod, allowing me to hear stations I would not have ordinarily known were there. My area (where I live now) is actually almost exactly between Cleveland and Ashtabula, Ohio; I remember reading somewhere in an old electronics magazine (Popular Electronics, IIRC) that if you live in the suburbs of a major city, or between two cities, you are likely to hear just about anything on AM or FM radio, especially the latter. I remember one summer about 34 years ago (I was still living in the suburbs at the time) when one of the local Cleveland FMs was knocked off the air. While I was waiting for the station to sign back on, I left the dial on the local station's frequency (107.9 MHz) and was amazed to hear a station from West Palm Beach, Florida, booming in--in stereo, yet--every bit as well as any of the locals from Cleveland, and I was listening on an AM/FM stereo portable radio with a telescoping whip antenna. :eek:

Here are my area's "local" stations, all from Cleveland (also carried on Comcast digital cable, which I have here). All except three (the ones listed in Akron, Ohio) broadcast from maximum-power transmitters and towers located in the Cleveland suburb of Parma, some 20 miles west of downtown.


Channel 3----------WKYC, NBC
Channel 5----------WEWS, ABC
Channel 8----------WJW, FOX (was CBS until about 10 yrs ago)
Channel 19--------WOIO, CBS (was Fox until abt. 10 years ago; swapped networks with channel 8)
Channel 25--------WVIZ, PBS
Channel 43--------WUAB, UPN
Channel 55--------WBNX, Warner Bros. Network
Channel 61--------WQHS, Univision (Spanish)--was WCLQ subscription TV (early '80s) and Kaiser Broadcasting WKBF (late '60s-early '80s)

On cable, I also get the following stations from the city of Akron, Ohio which is some 70 miles south of where I live now and 50 miles south of my previous residence:

Channel 23---------WVPX, Pax (was ABC WAKC and WAKR-TV until about seven years ago)

Channel 49-------WEAO, PBS (basically duplicates programs of PBS WVIZ Cleveland)

Channel 67-------WOAC, Akron/Canton, Ohio (Home Shopping, something like HSN was before it pulled its programming off broadcast TV and went to cable exclusively a few years ago)

My channel list is nowhere near as extensive as yours, but then again, metropolitan Cleveland is a smaller television market than greater Chicago. The Cleveland area's NBC affiliate, WKYC, was operated by NBC twice in the last 50-odd years--the first time from 1948 until 1955, then Westinghouse bought the station and operated it until 1965 (as KYW-AM and TV, with KYW-FM being little more than a license at the time for an FM on 105.7 MHz which never materialized), then the FCC forced NBC to buy the station (along with its companion AM and FM radio operations) back in 1965. The stations were then known as WKYC-AM, FM and TV and were broadcasting from a studio building on 6th Street in downtown Cleveland. The three stations were operated by NBC (again), and were affiliates of the (now defunct) NBC radio network from 1965 until 1970 or thereabouts (the network tried to make a top-40 powerhouse 50kW rock station of WKYC-AM, referring to the station as "KY-11", during this five-year period, but failed miserably; the FM was an afterthought and had automated easy-listening music, with NBC radio news at the top of every hour and an old NBC Radio variety program called "The Monitor Beacon" on weekends, over the same period; this program, and NBC radio news, were simulcast over WKYC-AM as well--in fact, it was the other way around; the FM simulcast the AM programming on weekends.)

WKYC-TV (now known simply as WKYC--the AM and FM stations were sold off several times since NBC unloaded them almost 35 years ago and are now known as WTAM-AM [the station's first-held "heritage" call sign, dating back to when the station first went on the air in 1923] and WMJI-FM, Majic Oldies 105.7) is an affiliate of the NBC television network, as it has been since it first went on the air in 1948.

I apologize for being so long-winded, Doug, but I've had a lifelong interest in radio and TV (I'm also an amateur radio operator [WB8NHV--my callsign, which also appears after my name in my profile signature], as I have been since 1972) and know the history of most of the major radio and TV stations in Cleveland. When I get started talking or writing about that, or anything connected with it, I have an awfully difficult time stopping.

Good luck with your move to Batavia, IL. I've heard of the town, but don't know much about it beyond what you mentioned in your post. It's a good thing you have all your TVs in storage for now; you're probably going to have enough of a job moving your furniture without having to worry about dozens of TV sets of all sizes besides. I know what it's like to move, as I had a big job on my hands (which, I assure you, I will not soon forget!) when I moved from Wickliffe, Ohio to my present apartment in Fairport Harbor. I brought almost everything I owned with me, and wound up throwing out much of it when I got here as my apartment isn't that big (one bedroom). As it is, my furniture takes up most of the room in the apartment itself, with the rest of it (including my bedroom set and my ham radio setup) in the bedroom. But I'm not complaining--in fact, I wanted to live here. I spent 40 years of my life in the city (I'm almost 48 now) and have always wanted to live in a small town, which is why I moved to this village of 3,180 population (according to the 2000 census) just about four and a half years ago.

I think you'll like living in an area which is more rural than where you are now. That the Batavia area is flatter (as you said in your post) than your present residence (Downers Grove) means your over-the-air TV reception will be better, as there will be fewer obstructions between your antenna and the stations you want to receive, not to mention less noise, interference, etc.

Just out of curiosity, how far is Batavia from downtown Chicago? You said Downers Grove is about 18 miles from the center of town, and Batavia is about 20 miles west of Downers Grove. Where would that place Batavia in relation to Chicago? My best guess would be about 38 miles. Good thing you'll be putting up another big antenna, as you'll be in something of a near fringe area for Chicago television/FM reception. However, as flat as you say the Batavia area is, you shouldn't have any trouble getting the Chicago stations with your new antenna.

Again, Doug, I wish you the best of luck when you move in June. At least you'll be moving in the summer, which is to be preferred, IMO, over having to move a house full of furniture in winter, in the middle of a blizzard. I moved to my present apartment in late autumn 1999; believe me, that wasn't the best sort of weather to be making a move across a county [even though Lake County, where I live, is the smallest of Ohio's 88 counties], even though it was only 12 miles! There wasn't much snow the day I arrived here, but it was cold as any iceberg--the wind whipping in off Lake Erie, the south shore of which is just a mile or so from my apartment, didn't help matters much either.

Kind regards,

Originally posted by peverett
I live near Austin, Texas and around here, there is only one VHF station, all others, including PBS, are UHF. The reason for this is that Lyndon Baines Johnson owned the VHF station back here in the 1950s and 1960s and did not want competition. I need cable or at least a UHF tuner (usually from a VCR) to watch anything other than the FOX network on my old TVs.


I remember reading in an electronics magazine some years ago about LBJ's TV station in Austin. I believe (though I am by no means certain) the station was KLBJ-TV on channel 7 at the time. The other stations which followed were, as you said, UHF stations. I don't recall the call signs of the ABC, CBS or PBS affiliates in Austin, but the NBC station there is, IIRC, KXAN on channel 36, probably operated by the same media firm which owns KXAS (NBC channel 5, formerly WBAP) in Dallas.

BTW, I'm curious. When did Austin's only VHF station (again, I believe it was/is channel 7) switch networks to Fox, and with what network was it originally affiliated?

Thanks in advance.

Kind regards,

I am not sure of the exact transfer date, but it was fairly recently that FOX and CBS switched. CBS is now on channel (KEYE)42, I believe.

ABC is on channel (KVUE) 24, and NBC (KXAN) is on 36. PBS(KLRU) is on chanel 18 with a local independent on channel 54.

FOX is on channel 7.

By the way, there are still both AM and FM radio stations here with the call letters KLBJ. Mrs. Johnson just recently sold her interest in these.