Pluggers by Rick McKee for September 15, 2021

Aluminium foil on rabbit ears, huh?

That stuff makes great hats, too.

A plugger remembers when TVs had external antennae. ;D

Well, we had antenna on the roof. It took two to troubleshoot. One had to fiddle with the antenna above and shout out loud to the one below “is it working now?”

I put up an antenna as back up to cable and it works fine. I can watch the nearly the same cr*p for free.

OK, did that work? I remember mobingthe antenna to weird positions to best grab the transmission, but I never tried that.

we were too far out for rabbit ears, foil or not, we had a rotor tv antenna on the roof, only way we could get Pittsburgh and then turn to get channel 6 in johnstown. my dad signed up for cable soon as it went past the house in the mid/late 70s

No phone calls required for that tech support !

The area I was born in was so flat, you could pick up all three channels with a sewing needle.

Been there did that. It was worse when one of us had to keep holding it for a while b/c the reception was even better. It was a rare treat to climb up the outside antennae pole.

My grandparents had an antenna on the very top of a telephone pole in their backyard. They could get one channel (from Omaha, NE), usually in the evening. Mostly the picture was very snowy, so it was pretty much like listening to the radio except no one was describing the action.

And there was no remote to worry about programming.

I remember aligning the antenna when we bought this place.

I don’t think it’s been plugged in for five years.

Now it has been suggested to do a similar hack for our WiFi.

Interesting that tin foil is used to enhance radio reception on our devices, and to reflect radio waves with tin hats. Both side believe – “… it’s a well know fact…”

You can see the claw marks where he whacked the side of it!

I remember that, but i’m not sure I would call it less complicated… it sometimes took hours to figure out the exact configuration needed to get a signal sans snow

Creating fractal antennas, which every cell phone has today. We were ahead of our time.

Dad invested in a Radio Shack “Archer” motorized antenna when we (finally) got a color tv. Being between DC and Baltimore it broadened our viewing choices…somewhat.

In olden times us engineers knew there was a microwave beam in our area with simple scrambling. We made microwave antennas out of tin cans. We made circuits to descramble the signal. Very simple when you had access to the transistors in the TV. Many movies for free and some pretty spicy.

Some dared to climbed poles near their homes and placed DC blockers (to block detection) on the cable junction box, routed their own cable and got free cable TV. Pirates!