Quote:
Originally Posted by NowhereMan 1966
WTAE-TV is iffy over the air, even here in Pittsburgh so many people in those outlying areas are usually SOL on ABC unless they can pull in 33 out of Youngstown.
|
I have the same problem in the small town where I live. Channel 3 (NBC), WKYC-TV, here in northeastern Ohio 35 miles east of Cleveland, does not reach my area at all on an antenna; OTOH, the reception on the other stations (5, 8, 19, 25, 43, 61) is passable but nowhere near city-grade. (The only station I can get with an antenna well enough to watch is channel 19, the CBS affiliate for northeastern Ohio.) There is no other NBC affiliate anywhere near here (the closest one is channel 12 in Erie, Pennsylvania, 60+ miles east of me), so most folks in my small town have cable or satellite, both of which do carry every OTA TV station in the Cleveland area, including channel 3. The pictures are beautiful--"just like downtown" as the expression goes; better than anyone could possibly hope for from an antenna.
I don't know how this small village ever got along without cable, though the locals obviously managed as I see the remnants of large near-fringe-area antennas (what few of them are left--most have been taken down by now and scrapped) on roofs and chimneys of houses all over town. The local bowling alley down the street from me still has a high-power antenna on a rotor, mounted to the chimney, but I have a feeling they might retire that installation in favor of cable or satellite next year.
If I were living in Pittsburgh (or anywhere else) and were having trouble receiving any of the area's local TV stations, I wouldn't bother with a TV antenna; I would get cable or satellite and would not look back. There are areas of this country where TV antennas simply will not work (by virtue of sheer distance from the stations or terrain features; many small towns are literally hundreds of miles from the nearest city or are blocked by mountains from so-called "local" stations that may be only a few miles away), so satellite/cable is the only way people living in these areas can get any kind of TV reception. It would not surprise me if these people got along without television even as late as the '70s, listening instead to radio on what few stations they could receive, even if those stations were 100+ miles distant.
Cable or satellite systems almost always get local channels from the nearest major city, even though the "nearest" city may be 100 miles away or more. In these deep-fringe areas, I would not be surprised if the satellite provider has only satellite service with local channels (not satellite without locals [the area's local channels being received in the usual way, with an outdoor or rabbit-ear antenna] as is an option in metropolitan areas), as, again, in areas 100+ miles from the nearest stations, an outdoor antenna, even a high-power monster on a 50-foot tower with a rotor and a mast-mounted preamplifier, either will not work at all or the results will be so poor the effort will not have been worth the trouble.