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#16
09-21-2005, 09:40 PM
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Quote:
 My uncle is getting ready to take down his old big C band satellite(used to be mine) and carry it to the woods.He's got cable now.Pulling in all the wild feeds on that used to be fun too.Everything's going digital and subscription and hardly any freebies left on that either.And the 18 year old reciever was giving up the ghost.Had to hit it on top sometimes( I had reworked the IF board on that POS Uniden a couple of times,notorious for cap failures and bad connections),had sparkles on high channnels and the remote was falling apart.My mom had an older about 25 foot tower with guy wires that did about as good as my grandmother's did until the good antenna broke and they put a supposed to be "deep fringe" Radio Shack antenna up there.I wasn't living there so I don't know how it did with DXing but it hated 47.Couldn't get it good for some reason.Then within a year cable came through.That was still standing as only a pole for his Utility light til this summer when they took it down.It's probably been hauled to the dump by now.It was pretty rusty.I have a tall outdoor pole with a useless rusted antenna and disentegrated wires that would be fun to DX with but I don't like heights and I ain't willing to spend the $$$ to replace the antenna,rotor and wires.Don't have the time to DX anyway.I stayed up a little too late the other nite...lol.Dragged thru the day.I think you could do better since you're a little further west.I have been in a couple of houses in Cambridge that could pick up Baltimore stations pretty good with an outdoor antenna and this was in the daytime which is usually worse than nights.
Last edited by JCFitz; 09-21-2005 at 09:49 PM. 
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#17
09-23-2005, 10:18 PM
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Yeah, up this way a decent antenna setup will pull from across the bay pretty good. But I have never been in a house east or south of here that had such an antenna. The last place I stayed had a real good amplified antenna & rotor but the pole it was on was probably 50' from the house. That long lead didn't help. Still, you could manage everything out of DC/Baltimore & on a good night you might get passable results out of Philly. Can you pull Norfolk from the flea market down at Temperanceville?
I had a big dish given to me a long time ago but never brought it home. The motor that moved it was shot. One day, where it sat at friend's house, I was able to bring in several channels of hockey from Canada, just by playing around aiming it. I thought this was great but they were unimpressed. Would have helped quite a bit if they would have just cemented the post it was on into the ground! As it was it would lean & get blown sideways in the wind. I remember a couple friends of ours when I was growing up got these dishes. The one guy, I don't think he ever made it through a thunderstorm without it blowing out.
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Bryan
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#18
09-25-2005, 11:27 AM
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#19
09-25-2005, 02:15 PM
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One time I received a Channel 24 (PBS) from Muncie?, Indiana on my 1966 Sony B&W portable TV using my bow-tie UHF antenna. I'm here in the Pittsburgh, PA area.
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#20
10-20-2005, 01:45 AM
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Stories of fantastic TV, FM and 6m DX from Ohio
Before I had cable I used to get some incredible TV DX, both with the TV antenna in the attic of my home at the time and on rabbit ears. I live some 35 miles from Cleveland. Most of the time we get Detroit and Toledo stations when the TV bands open up in the summer, but I remember several summers in the '70s when I'd see channel 2 (WPBT, PBS) in Miami just as clear as a bell, and one year (late seventies, IIRC) when I was getting the station every day, great picture, for about five days. Another summer I had the surprise of my life when I got channel 2 from, of all places, Cheyenne, Wyoming, and also channel 2 from Tulsa, Oklahoma. (Seems like most of my DX was coming in on channel 2, and the TV antenna was pointed southwest at the Cleveland TV stations, so it makes sense I'd be getting TV DX from the Southwestern United States when the bands opened.) One year I also saw channel 4 from Port Arthur, Texas, and for several years when the local TV stations would sign off at night, I'd see channel 5 (WNEM-TV) in Saginaw, Michigan early in the morning, before our local ABC affiliate signed on. As far as FM DX goes, I mostly hear (both where I used to live and where I live now) just Detroit, Toledo, and several southwestern Ontario stations when the bands open up, but the best FM DX I've ever had with an indoor antenna was about 35 years ago. It was in the summer, in the middle of a bad thunderstorm. One of the local FM stations was knocked off the air. In its place, I heard, to my surprise, a station in West Palm Beach, Florida, booming in just as loud and clear (and in stereo yet, IIRC) as if it were one of the local stations in Cleveland. I was using a 17-transistor AM/FM/FM-stereo portable with a whip antenna at the time. There was also one summer in the mid-seventies when the six-meter ham band opened up wider than the Grand Canyon (temperature inversion, no doubt), and I contacted a station in South Dakota. I was using a Heathkit 6-meter transceiver with a superregenerative receiver, a 5-watt transmitter and a 20-foot-high (more or less) home-brewed antenna with round elements at that time. That was a summer I knew I'd never forget, along with the DX I mentioned earlier.
BTW, sometimes when the conditions are right I can get, on the cable, channel 49 from Michigan (UPN or WB, I think) behind a PBS channel about 50 miles from here. The Michigan station all but pushes the local channel off the screen when the conditions are just right; the rest of the time I have windshield-wiper, Venetian-blind effects, etc. that make it very difficult or downright impossible to watch the PBS station. About three years or so ago, again in the summer, I also had a mishmash on one of the cable channels, channel 4 (one of the local UHF stations is downconverted to that channel). I don't recall what station or stations was/were wiping out the local channel on our cable, but it was fun to watch while it lasted.
__________________
Jeff, WB8NHV Collecting, restoring and enjoying vintage Zenith radios since 2002 Zenith. Gone, but not forgotten.
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#21
10-21-2005, 07:11 PM
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FYI - Thanks to the variations in analog reception at remote cable headends, many of them are now installing digital receivers and taking the converted-to-NTSC output to put on the cable system. No more "venetian blinds" - but of course , they don't see the skip in the summer and fall that's so interesting either.
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#22
10-26-2005, 09:04 PM
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I also remember one night, my friend and I hooked the rabbit ears to my 1982 Zenith and when Channel 4 used to sign off at night, we picked up a channel 4 out of Washington DC.
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#23
06-20-2006, 07:43 AM
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I was flipping channels on the 1960 Zenith (there's nothing good on here on vhf at 3AM, I was just checking the remote), and I pulled in something on ch6. I am not aware of a ch6 around here, never got anything on it before, it only lasted for a few minutes, and there was a lot of FM interference, I really couldn't make out much, the audio that I think went with the tv station was in Spanish. It was a brief moment of excitement in an otherwise dull night.
I used to do TV dx-ing all the time. I had a 17" Zenith not too unlike this one and one of those made for FM radio only antennas ontop of a 2 story house I used for vhf, as well as a vhf/uhf television antenna ontop of one of the sheds. That FM only antenna actually worked surprisingly well on all the vhf channels. I really miss the TV dx-ing but being on the first floor of a 2 level apartment building there's not much I can do. This is the only thing that really upsets me about the tv stations changing to digital. There's not much I like to watch on the tv anyway, most of the time I just watch DVDs or tapes. But if I'm receiving something from really far away I like watching it even if I don't like whatever program it is, and by the time I finally might be able to get a place I can put a big antenna on top of, they'll be nothing to receive with it. I know you are supposed to be able to get those converters, but I wouldn't think you would be able to DX with it, I wouldn't think it would work with a really weak signal. Maybe I'm wrong, I don't really know anything about this modern stuff. Has anybody tried it? Oh well, if I can't do TV maybe I should get into the AM dx-ing, if I strung a copper wire from one end of the apartment to the other I might do pretty well, I got a 1948 Stromberg-Carlson console radio that one night pulled in an Albequerque station with just the built in antenna. Last edited by Adam; 06-20-2006 at 09:17 AM.
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#24
06-20-2006, 10:25 AM
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Quote:
http://pages.cthome.net/fmdx/hdtv.html
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#25
06-20-2006, 10:42 AM
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I was driving from Detroit to DC on Sunday June 18, scanning the FM dial between Youngstown, OH and Pgh, about 12:30-ish. My FM radio received A TON of FMs from Florida for about 50 minutes. WQOL from Vero Beach; WRMF from West Palm, Gator Country 101.9 from Naples; A few from Orlando, one from Jacksonville. I bet TV was skipping big-time then as well--at least channel 6...!
PS. Unfortunate I didn't read CaptainMoody's free TVs thread before I left for Detroit. I was staying in Rochester Hills--just 20 minutes or so from Roseville...
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#26
06-20-2006, 11:18 AM
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Charles
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#27
06-20-2006, 07:56 PM
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Have a look at http://pages.cthome.net/fmdx/hdtv.html Be sure to continue to his second page for complete dated logs of his analog and digital dx-ing Last edited by old_tv_nut; 06-20-2006 at 07:59 PM.
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#28
06-21-2006, 08:22 AM
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"Have a look at http://pages.cthome.net/fmdx/hdtv.htmlBe sure to continue to his second page for complete dated logs of his analog and digital dx-ing"
That was interesting reading. It's good to see that it will still be possible to pull in distant stations in the near future. "But where you are, pressed right underneath the hills blocking your line of sight, that's pretty good! I wonder if you got a bounce off the Verdugo mountains?" I don't know what was going on, whatever it was it only lasted for a few minutes. I have found that specifically these hand-wired-chassis Zenith b&w sets have amazing ability to pull in far off stations.
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#29
07-09-2006, 03:45 AM
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Digital TV DX in Australia is also alive & well so it seems.
On Wednesday morning (05/07/06) my boss went out to do an antenna job & he was getting ABN12 & ATN6 on a customers STB in the Sunshine Coast regon in an area that is served by ABQ12 & BTQ6 from Brisbane & he saw ABC Sydney in the channel info instead of the usual ABC Brisbane. The signals were breaking up as to be expected for this mode of propergation as it was battling with the Brisbane ABC signal & it was edging it out for a time. Unfortunatly we have no real proof of this & I was only told about after it had happened. There was a massive high pressure system that covered most of eastern Australia at the time that might account for what had happened.
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