...

ive got about a dozen 1950s-1960s outdoor antennas still new in the box! Some are pretty exotic yagis desinged for "color TV"!! I'll get some pics up when I pull them out of the attic when I move. Im thinking of putting one up on the new house.

I love Zenith TVs, and what better to go with them than Zenith antennas. I have two Chromantenna antennas, the gold one I've had forever, the black and silver one I just picked up today at a resale store. I love the design of the one with the black front panel, makes it look like it is "more than an antenna". The design reminds me of those late 70s Zenith sets with the black panels and the "one knob" electronic tuning.

http://homepage.mac.com/brameika/antennas.jpg

-- Max M.

Ah yes, good ol' rabbit ears, aluminum foil not included. And remember when mom ran the sewing machine or the vacuum how it put multicolored lines all over your favorite TV show?

Unfortunately, I have none to show. Of course, I can show the speghetti bowl behind the entertainment center with the DVD player going into the Radio shack RF modulator going into the 1959 Zenith but who wants to see a mess of wires? :D

These were very common back in the early days of TV.

Simple dipole. Has red clear plastic balls on the antenna rod ends.

Originally posted by jasonlava
Ah yes, good ol' rabbit ears, aluminum foil not included. And remember when mom ran the sewing machine or the vacuum how it put multicolored lines all over your favorite TV show?

Unfortunately, I have none to show. Of course, I can show the speghetti bowl behind the entertainment center with the DVD player going into the Radio shack RF modulator going into the 1959 Zenith but who wants to see a mess of wires? :D


I remember those days, before cable. Except for three years in the early '70s when I lived within 10 miles of Cleveland, I have always lived in weak TV signal areas where the least bit of noise shows in the picture. The suburb I grew up in was some 30 miles from the transmitters; where I live now, about 10 miles or more beyond the Cleveland suburbs, is 45 miles from the towers, and the reception is terrible without cable. (Almost everyone here in my small town either has cable or a DBS satellite dish). One channel, NBC channel 3 from Cleveland, doesn't come in here at all without cable.

The only area I ever lived where I could get even passable color TV reception with rabbit ears was an "inner ring" Cleveland suburb. At the time I had a 1964 Sears Silvertone roundie, VHF only, with Rembrandt all-channel (!) rabbit ears. The reception on the three network stations was acceptable and downright good considering the age of the set, even though the convergence was so far out of whack the picture often looked terrible. The network stations in Cleveland and northeast Ohio were all VHF at that time (again, early '70s), and the area only had two UHF stations (the PBS affiliate and an independent; the latter is now Cleveland's UPN affiliate). Today, the CBS affiliate for the area is on channel 19, and very difficult to receive west of Cleveland without cable. The small town where I live today is a definite fringe area for Cleveland TV; the only stations that come in well using rabbit ears are channels 5 and 8, although the PBS affiliate supposedly has a translator on a high UHF channel serving this area. The amazing thing, to me anyway, is that three of Cleveland's four UHF stations come in here very well using rabbit ears. The one that doesn't is the PBS station, but the translator station east of here by about 10-15 miles should take care of that. I have also had a station coming in here on channel 11, but I don't know what it is--yet. I looked at a TV channel listing on the Web a while back and saw an entry for a low-power Cleveland station on that channel; perhaps it is another translator for Cleveland's PBS affiliate. I guess I'll have to go back and look at that list again to be sure (before I had cable in my hometown, I used to get channels 11 and 13 from Toledo, Ohio in the summer, but I don't think the channel 11 station I'm seeing here is coming from that far away).

BTW, I remember the Zenith Chromatenna all-channel rabbit ears. Those go back to the mid-70s and were made, IIRC, by the original Zenith Radio Corporation of Chicago. Rabbit ears will work if you live relatively close to TV stations, but are no match for a properly installed outdoor antenna, cable or DBS satellite system. Note as well that rabbit ears, while capable of bringing in enough signal for passable or fair to good black-and-white reception in prime to moderate signal areas, are absolutely unacceptable for color, even if you are within a stone's throw, or at least within a few miles of the local (or nearest) TV stations. Rabbit ears were meant for use in strong-signal areas as a last resort, when outdoor antennas cannot be erected for any reason. Do not try to use rabbit ears in a near-fringe or fringe area; the results are almost always disappointing.

BTW (2): I like Zenith TVs and radios (the early ones from the '50s to the '70s) as well, as do maxm and Doug Harland. Had a 23" Zenith black-and-white console in the late '60s that worked exceedingly well once I retubed it (someone had swiped all the tubes from it when I rescued it from a neighbor's trash). I now have two Zenith radios that work very well for their age (one was made in 1951, the other in '63). I also read everything I can get my hands on regarding the original Zenith Radio Corporation of Chicago. I like the design of many of their late-'60s color sets, including one Space Command "600" color console from 1969 with motorized tuners for VHF and UHF, not to mention one of the most complex motor drive systems (Zenith's Ultramatic tuning) I've seen in any remote set. The thing must be one heck of a mechanical jungle of switches, motors, springs, cams . . . I hate to think of what this mechanism must look like. (drh4683, Doug Harland, has at least two [!] of these TVs). The only other remote TVs I ever knew of with a remote system that complicated were the Magnavox 3-way consoles of the mid-'60s, and those were even more complicated than the Zenith Ultramatic because Magnavox's sets had what was known as "total control" of all functions of the TV, AM/FM stereo tuner, and even the phonograph, all from a 2-button remote hand unit. The system was known as the "Phantom" remote control. As with Zenith's Ultramatic, I shudder to think how complicated the Magnavox system must have been, and that's only the mechanical linkages, gears, motors . . . The remote receiver must have had a blue million transistors, relays, tuned circuits and the like, to control all those functions. :eek: I can only guess how many tubes would be required to make a remote system comparable to the Magnavox Phantom using a tube-operated remote receiver.