I guess RTN is going to the dogs like everyone else

[zenith2134]

That's ho you can tell a TV enthusiast from a 'normal person' We like seeing the station sign off, we tape DTV conversions, dead-air is a magic thing to us too, even if it only lasts 15 seconds once a month or year.

[wa2ise]

Originally Posted by zenith2134

We like seeing the station sign off, we tape DTV conversions, dead-air is a magic thing to us too, even if it only lasts 15 seconds once a month or year.

Don't forget the test patterns

[zenith2134]

Oh test patterns are the real treat---I like leaving 2 or 3 old TVs running all displaying a test pattern when it's being broadcast (which is rare!) Gives the TV studio feel.

So, do you guys think any analog-TV pirate stations will start to show up after June 12th? I'll be tuning in periodically to check, you can be sure of that! May even be armed with a VHS deck in case something really cool happens...

[site123a]

It's funny you guy's are talking about that.. Right before WBFF signed off and showed the DTV infomercial, they ended by playing the National Anthem followed by the indian test card. The video looked like they were just playing back an old VHS tape...

[Hemingray]

Man, wish we had RTN here.

[cfranz]

LAO and CSI (and the rest of them).. Honest if I really need to see hacked up people week in and week out, I just watch the news from the left coast.

Geeezz. Guys this can't be doing us any good....

I loved Emergency. Basides Julie still give my blue jeans a rise...

[bgadow]

site123a, sorry I missed that! I hadn't been able to pull them in here with my current antenna. Warm memories of WBFF as a kid, Captain Chesapeake, etc.

Some of the stations had great sign-offs, well worth me staying up for. When I was around 8-12 years old I did a lot of that, and getting up early to watch sign-ons. On rare occasions I'd stay up until 3am when pretty much the only thing on TV was WMAR running episodes of Private Secretary. I've often wondered how they came to pick that show to run-maybe they had a stash of them in the film library?

[NowhereMan 1966]

Originally Posted by zenith2134

I sort of wish TV stations would sign off at night like they used to. End the day with the National Anthem and go to snow or colorbars. Kind of a nice sentiment.

Those were the days, I remember when most TV stations signed off. The one exception was KDKA-TV here in Pittsburgh. Even in the late 1940's, they were 24 hours, they had a program called "Swing Shift Theatre" where they would broadcast movies all night since Pittsburgh was a heavily industrial area. I remember when TV stations signed off, they would invite people to tune into the radio station that was associated with the TV station so they can keep up with news and so on.

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by zenith2134

That's ho you can tell a TV enthusiast from a 'normal person' We like seeing the station sign off, we tape DTV conversions, dead-air is a magic thing to us too, even if it only lasts 15 seconds once a month or year.

I know what you mean. I used to watch Cleveland's TV stations sign off, then I'd get up at 5:30 the next morning to see them sign on. I snagged some interesting TV DX on channel 5 early in the morning, before the Cleveland ABC affiliate on that channel signed on; the DX station was WNEM-TV in Saginaw, Michigan. One summer about 15-20 years ago, I even saw stations coming in from Cheyenne, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Texas, Miami, et al on channel 2--sometimes one on top of the other. One summer about 20-25 years ago, before I had cable, I was able to get Miami's PBS channel, WPBT-TV channel 2, five days straight, with a picture good enough to watch--and I was only using a 12" portable TV with rabbit ears at the time. Being an amateur radio operator, seeing DX like this on television excites me plenty (just as it does on the ham bands), but as we all know, most ordinary people are aghast or think there is something wrong with their television if their local channels get trampled by co-channel interference from stations hundreds of miles away.

Most people don't bother with the channels between their area's local stations anyway; today's TV sets are designed with programmable scan lists that can be set to scan only the channels in the viewer's local area, with an option available as well to delete from the scanning list channels the viewer does not watch.

It is questionable, however, how many people actually bother to actually go through the scan list, channel by channel, to delete the ones they don't want; my best guess is most people just accept the default settings on their TV which cause the remote or local channel up/down control buttons to scan the entire list of stations available. This list can be very long; Time-Warner analog expanded basic, for instance, has some 70 channels, including subscription movie channels. The digital service has 200 channels or more, so rescanning the TV or cable box, then going through the list to delete unwanted channels, could be a long process. Many people today can't or do not want to be bothered with this procedure (if they can figure it out in the first place--many ordinary, non-technical TV set owners don't know much more than how to turn the set on and off, change channels, turn the volume up or down and mute the sound) so they just accept whatever the TV's default settings give them, even if it means having to wait seemingly forever for the set or the cable box to scan through the list to find the station they want. Many people just use the keypad on the remote or on the set to go directly to the channel they want to watch and do not use the scan buttons.

I have cable service from Time-Warner (bare-bones basic, local channels only) that also offers several religious, home shopping and other special-interest stations that do not particularly interest me, so I went through the scan list and deleted the channels I do not care for. Now the channel up/down buttons on my remote cause my TV to scan through only the major network stations in my area, which is why I got bare-bones basic cable in the first place--to save money and to get the local network affiliates (in that order), not home shopping and these other channels that run seemingly endless strings of infomercials. There is a former home-shopping channel on my cable from Canton, Ohio (60 miles or so southwest of Cleveland) that runs infomercials almost 24/7; good thing it it fully digital now, having shut down its analog transmitter a short time ago, or else the electric bill for operating two transmitters could have bankrupted the station several times over. The station would have been better off, IMHO, to continue to sign off at 2 a.m., as I am sure it did when it was a general entertainment station back in the late '60s through the eighties.

The religious station (WDLI-TV, channel 17, also in Canton, Ohio) will sign off permanently on April 16, so that the Cleveland NBC affiliate (WKYC-TV) can put its digital transmitter on the air on that channel, as they have been planning for some time. The station's pre-transition digital cable position is channel 2.