[NowhereMan 1966]

Originally Posted by Jeffhs

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.

Yeah, I remember when we first got color in 1971, Mom said we would get cable with the TV. Back then, cable carried your local channels along with some on the outlaying markets like Johnstown, PA, Wheeling, WV, and Steubenville and Youngstown, OH. Although TV is more homoginized now, back then, you might see a Youngstown station broadcast a movie at 4 PM or Steubenville broadcast cartoons or a local indy UHFer put on "The Monkees," "Lost in Space," etc. I remember when WKBN had "The Money Movie," all of us kids would gather around when it was "Planet of the Ape's Week" or secret agent films where we would watch "In like Flint" or "Matt Helm." Game shows like "Match Game 7x" are favorites too. Maybe, just maybe, with DTV, we might see some more variety again. Getting back to cable, it is a shame they don't have the adjacent market stations, if your local pre-empts what you want to see and you don't care to watch it, you can go to one of the others.

Come to think of it, over the air analogue TV, when I want to watch NBC, I watched channel 9 out of Steubenville instead of our local 11 because for some reason, 11 came in with a lot of ghosts and adjusting the rabbit ears didn't work while I got channel 9 a lot better. Channel 4 is tricky too, for some reason, their signal was weak and even in parts of the city proper, a lot of people have trouble getting it. So far with DTV, I can receive them much better though.

Just for the heck of it, I did some experimentation and there are places like in Montana and North Dakota where the strongest stations you can receive via antenna are from Canada so I'm sure those people there watched the CBC and indy Canadian stations.