Our antenna many years ago was mounted on top of a tall, tripod, short wave tower. You turned the knob as you continued watching the screen. When you achieved the cleanest picture you let go of the knob.
Remembering your old TV days
- Thread starter CourierDriver
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Our antenna many years ago was mounted on top of a tall, tripod, short wave tower. You turned the knob as you continued watching the screen. When you achieved the cleanest picture you let go of the knob.
When I was a kid in Massachusetts I got all the Boston and Providence stations. The Providence affiliate was fuzzy but carried "The Muppet Show". We had WSBK-38, a fantastic independent, that got swallowed up by WBZ and switched to carrying UPN. A little later the Red Sox and Bruins decided to invest in NESN and have all their games on cable. Bastards!
My parents tuned the UHF knob to static and I only knew VHF channels. Then we had a babysitter show us the cartoons on UHF. Sweet!
The VHF tuning knob cracked and broke, so my dad stuck some needle nose pliers down the hole and tuned it permanently to Ch 3, and we used the Betamax VCR's tuner from then on out. This VCR was 70 lbs and top loading, with a sticker advising us that the wood finish was imitation.
We also had a Sears "portable" TV of the finest backbreaking construction. The white gave out in the tube so we only got really deep saturated colors, without brightness. Our TVs were solid state but I remember my dad taking vacuum tubes to Radio Shack for testing, ca 1982.
Time marched on and I got a job in TV, in Master Control, working an overnight shift, taking and recording satellite feeds of syndicated shows we'd be airing in a couple days. I got to watch tomorrows Seinfeld... and Jeopardy! TVLand was still unscrambled on Satcom C3 so I'd watch "The A-Team" from midnight to 1am while airing mindless infomercials for Tom Bosley and the "Specialty Merchandise Corporation."
They say if you do what you love you'll never work a day in your life, but the flipside is they didn't pay me very much in return. The exhaust pipe on my cutlass ciera failed right at the muffler joint so I forced myself to fix it out of poverty. It was kinda fun, actually, and I discovered I had that "mechanical acuity."
We transitioned to digital TV and automated master control while at it. I survived all the layoffs but it was a Pyrrhic victory in that the job was no longer a "craft" live switching different sources. Instead it was poorly paid IT support for a low-bidder POS automation system. The vendor's worldwide headquarters was a business condo in Gainesville, FL next to a tattoo removal shop. I could... and had to... log in from home when the automation pooped itself. So I'd turn on my TV (in dead air) and wait for my laptop to boot up so I could fix the darn thing. For example a break might be scheduled to fire at 20:32:18 but Windows (XP!) would set the clock ahead to 20:32:19 at 20:32:17 and "miss" the break. So it'd wait 23 hours 59 minutes for that time to come around again, effectively locking itself up.
We got MeTV as a second channel affiliation and it was a smashing success. We were unmanned over the weekend due to a stingy owner and the signal went out in a snowstorm. EG the satellite dish was drowning in snow. I went in, roof-raked it off, restored the signal, and put four hours on my time card to force the issue that they should maybe have personnel on duty or at least an on-call policy. Got a stern talking to because it wasn't my job and they could "make good" the missed ads, so only $10 was lost. Ok. Resigned so I could go work on nuclear submarines instead. Was the first, and so far, the last person from that station to make this switch.
My parents tuned the UHF knob to static and I only knew VHF channels. Then we had a babysitter show us the cartoons on UHF. Sweet!
The VHF tuning knob cracked and broke, so my dad stuck some needle nose pliers down the hole and tuned it permanently to Ch 3, and we used the Betamax VCR's tuner from then on out. This VCR was 70 lbs and top loading, with a sticker advising us that the wood finish was imitation.
We also had a Sears "portable" TV of the finest backbreaking construction. The white gave out in the tube so we only got really deep saturated colors, without brightness. Our TVs were solid state but I remember my dad taking vacuum tubes to Radio Shack for testing, ca 1982.
Time marched on and I got a job in TV, in Master Control, working an overnight shift, taking and recording satellite feeds of syndicated shows we'd be airing in a couple days. I got to watch tomorrows Seinfeld... and Jeopardy! TVLand was still unscrambled on Satcom C3 so I'd watch "The A-Team" from midnight to 1am while airing mindless infomercials for Tom Bosley and the "Specialty Merchandise Corporation."
They say if you do what you love you'll never work a day in your life, but the flipside is they didn't pay me very much in return. The exhaust pipe on my cutlass ciera failed right at the muffler joint so I forced myself to fix it out of poverty. It was kinda fun, actually, and I discovered I had that "mechanical acuity."
We transitioned to digital TV and automated master control while at it. I survived all the layoffs but it was a Pyrrhic victory in that the job was no longer a "craft" live switching different sources. Instead it was poorly paid IT support for a low-bidder POS automation system. The vendor's worldwide headquarters was a business condo in Gainesville, FL next to a tattoo removal shop. I could... and had to... log in from home when the automation pooped itself. So I'd turn on my TV (in dead air) and wait for my laptop to boot up so I could fix the darn thing. For example a break might be scheduled to fire at 20:32:18 but Windows (XP!) would set the clock ahead to 20:32:19 at 20:32:17 and "miss" the break. So it'd wait 23 hours 59 minutes for that time to come around again, effectively locking itself up.
We got MeTV as a second channel affiliation and it was a smashing success. We were unmanned over the weekend due to a stingy owner and the signal went out in a snowstorm. EG the satellite dish was drowning in snow. I went in, roof-raked it off, restored the signal, and put four hours on my time card to force the issue that they should maybe have personnel on duty or at least an on-call policy. Got a stern talking to because it wasn't my job and they could "make good" the missed ads, so only $10 was lost. Ok. Resigned so I could go work on nuclear submarines instead. Was the first, and so far, the last person from that station to make this switch.
4WD
$50 site donor 2025
Parent’s TV’s bought at Sears on credit …
Wild Wild West was way wonderful watching with Winegard waves
Wild Wild West was way wonderful watching with Winegard waves
Yup, we had one too. This was around 1963.
We had a big hand-me-down B&W Zenith from my grandparents until the mid eighties. I grew up thinking Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner were black and white. We got a new 19" color set and VCR one Christmas, and I remember that being a big expense for my parents at the time.
I think they still have that VCR, and the TV passed to me in 1998. When I got married a few years later, my wife had almost the identical TV, except one had dials and one had buttons. We kept hers until it let some smoke out and quit around 2007. We're still using the "flat tube" 27" Toshiba replacement.
My other grandparents had a color TV at least by the mid-seventies. I would watch Rockford and Man from Atlantis at their house. The color balance was off, so Patrick Duffy always looked a little sunburned.
Kids today will never know what it's like to smack a TV trying to stop the picture from flipping.
I think they still have that VCR, and the TV passed to me in 1998. When I got married a few years later, my wife had almost the identical TV, except one had dials and one had buttons. We kept hers until it let some smoke out and quit around 2007. We're still using the "flat tube" 27" Toshiba replacement.
My other grandparents had a color TV at least by the mid-seventies. I would watch Rockford and Man from Atlantis at their house. The color balance was off, so Patrick Duffy always looked a little sunburned.
Kids today will never know what it's like to smack a TV trying to stop the picture from flipping.
twouvakind
Site Donor 2025
Trinitron?
Does anyone remember the plastic screen that you set up in front of the T.V. to make it look bigger?
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Haha yes!!
We had a tv in the early fifties and so remember Our Miss Brooks, Buster Brown show with plunk your magic twanger froggy and many others. When the black and white picture would shrink a ampilfier device would be placed in line with the connector on the back of the tube. Also remember test patterns from half way across the country that were bounced off the ionosphere which were rendered illegal by the FCC.
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Remember the "vertical" and "horizontal" knobs that you had to turn to control the picture flipping?
Those were in older sets that couldn't do automated syncing. It would eventually drift to the point where you'd need to adjust it. By the time we had a solid-state TV with a digital keypad for channel selection, there weren't too many controls other than color and brightness selections.
I think our TV might have also had a fine tuning setting.
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I also remember that "dial behind the dial" on the VHF and UHF channel dials that you'd perpetually turn to make the picture more clear. It was like a ring type dial that ran circumference around the channel changer dial.
We lived about 80 miles from Houston. Dad would send me outside to "turn the antenna" that was on a pole attached to the side of our house, to zero in on the direction the signals originated from. It was just a piece of pipe cemented into the ground that had an aluminum mast fitted inside it, so it turned by hand. Almost nothing came in clearly during the daytime but at night it got pretty clear, especially in the wintertime. The good ole' days, I miss them.
I recall TV repair and tube shops being quite common in the 50's and 60's. Used TV's were a big thing from those shops as well. My dad brought an early TV used in about the latter 50's. It lasted about a month. We were TV-less again until he got another used set in the early 60's. A fairly large RCA B&W. That things was still going into the early 70's as an extra basement TV. It must have been a somewhat deluxe model as it had a built in UHF tuner. They got a new console color TV ( maybe Zenith) in about 1967. If I remember, an average price for one of those at that time was about $600. or more. Perhaps at least $4500. in todays dollars. I purchased my first new TV in about 1979, in my late 20's. A 12 inch B&W set from JC Penney for $100., on a sale. It was the cheapest new TV I had seen at that time. I had seen little TV for nearly 10 years due to military, school, rural living and lack of dinero.
I just remembered something.
We lived in Maplewood N.J. just outside of Newark.
It was the '50's and propeller airliners would fly over us on their approach to Newark airport.
As they droned overhead the picture would get fuzzy.
We were of course on a roof antenna.
We lived in Maplewood N.J. just outside of Newark.
It was the '50's and propeller airliners would fly over us on their approach to Newark airport.
As they droned overhead the picture would get fuzzy.
We were of course on a roof antenna.
In our house the antenna was in the attic suspended from the ridge beam. Once the adjustment was made it was secured in that direction. We rarely had much interference. Mostly it would be planes from McChord Field that might cause some ghosting for a moment.
I am glad you posted that. So many people whine about "how hard it is" today but they never appreciate (or even know about) the advantages we have today. I tried telling a young coworker having a pity party this. I asked him what his mortgage rate was. He says 3.xx% I tell him my first house had an 11.5% mortgage. I asked him, what do you pay for gas? He says $1,59. I told him I paid the equivalent of $3 gas much of my driving life. 286 computers used to cost $2000 in the early 80's. It goes on and on and on.
4WD
$50 site donor 2025
No, we sat in the corner and not allowed to touch controls LoL
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