Antenna twitchers get a very poor reception

@@alanclarke4646 antenna issue

Gigidy

😂😂😂. Better than coming from Pratts bottom near Tonbridge kent

I know Pratt's bottom so well...I really do!

And the reason why these days we have wide screen TV’s.

I still look at towers too. I worked for Arqiva (formally ntl) for nearly 10 years, and often did surveys up towers and masts for new antenna installations. I have lived on a Greek island for the last 14 years and have 2 towers about 1km away on a hilltop. Would love to get up one again.

Oh, and just as an aside, I was born in Glossop Terrace in Cardiff.

Good luck mate!

Good Luck om

Thanks all @kdof3908 @paulziminskin2ghr282

Good luck!!

All the best sir

It was the same where I lived in Anglia. Many people had one antenna for Anglia Tv and one for London ITV.

I loved the viaduct digression!

I came to ask this as well.

That was what I was waiting for! :) In one region here in New Zealand it was common in to have two antennas due to TVNZ (our BBC equivalent) broadcasting on VHF ch 1+3 from one site and the commercial operators (our ITV equivalent) broadcasting from a completely different site but on higher VHF channels. There many people would have VHF-I antennas pointing towards the TVNZ site and VHF-III towards the TV3/4 site. Another example is where the main site broadcasted all four analogue channels (back in the day) but the relays only did 1-2 channels, sometimes you would find two antennas -- one for the relay to get the best pictures for the channels it did carry and another for the main station if they really wanted to watch show not carried by the relay!

It's a bit too subtle for some, as reflected by a couple of angry comments. Not wasted on me though. :o)

I put up tv aerials for a living and I completely agree , licence free for 3 years . I also look at aerials when I don't need to.

Agreed. Only boomers and the mentally ill are still watching TV 😂

@@MattyEngland Only the mentally ill, and some children, still say 'Boomers'.

​@@MattyEnglandI agree I'm mentally ill! Watching wheel of fortune and Benny hill caused it!!!😂

@@oldbatwit5102 It's a very common phrase to describe people who refuse to take up new technology. :) It's even reached as far as my country, New Zealand! "OK, boomer" is a common response when older people try and enforce their old ways.

@scottlarson1548 "That was what you had to do to get good TV reception there." I wish it were possible to get good TV nowadays, I might renew my TV licence.

As someone who grew up in and around a notoriously hilly town (Cork, in Ireland, if anyone's interested), I knew straightaway the answer to the question in the title. Our TV reception was the pits, and not being in a cabled area, we had to wait for the advent of satellite before we could see a decent picture. On radio we could only get the 2 national stations in mono, and only intermittently at that, but a 5 minute walk brought a whole plethora of pirates into line - of - sight...

@@richiehoyt8487 In the U.S. most television stations in hilly areas have "translators" which are just small repeaters that fill in areas that the main signal can't reach. Where I am I can receive two translators as well as the main signals they're repeating.

@@scottlarson1548 Thanks for that... I probably should have clarified that we do have those in Ireland as well, but my hometown is _particularly_ bad for hills - picture Rio, or San Francisco - so there were inevitable pockets. (The standing joke was that the reason why Cork girls have such good legs was on account of all the Hills... 😐🥱) They probably do have better infill coverage now, this being 30 years ago, especially with the advent of digital (as you know, unlike with analogue, digital reception tends to be an 'all or nothing' deal). The particular address I lived at where I said I could bring in a whole bunch of radio stations with just a few minutes walk, happened to actually be a few miles outside of the city, and we had this great big lump of a hill immediately behind the house. It did actually come as quite the surprise to me though when I learned that as important as distance from the (VHF/UHF) transmitter was (Inverse Square Law, and all that), it was the presence - or absence - of obstacles that was key. As for where _you_ are living, I shouldn't be surprised if you've had to invest in a rotating mount for your antennae (or aerials, as we call them). Not necessarily a bad thing I suppose, if it means you're able to bring in more channels. That's of course if you even still watch terrestrial TV! I remember being amazed as a kid at how many TV channels the average American was able to take for granted, just 'over-the-air' - even if it was a case of, as Bruce Springsteen said, "18 Channels, and nothing's on..." (Or _something_ like that.) The dead hand of governmental inertia meant that for much of my life we only had two terrestrial TV channels, (though one _could_ get British TV in 'overspill' areas) and in fact for most of my childhood only one! (If I'm repeating myself, I apologize.) Even now, I think we only have four or five. Of course, as a number of people have noted in the comments, with so many ways to watch nowadays, much of the audience, especially the younger cohort, don't bother to watch terrestrial TV anymore, or even TV at all! This has resulted in something of a vicious circle where you have 40 channels of (mostly still) free content; but it's all Murder She Wrote re~runs and endless infomercials flogging back~scratching, steam cleaning gew~gaws. "Operators standing by to take YOUR order, _NOW!_ " Yeah, it's gone to the dogs here too, if not to the same extent. It puts me in mind of the episode of Breaking Bad (must be 10 years ago now, if not more 🤦🏻😔) when Jesse Pinkman goes to the house of a junkie couple who've ripped off one of his accomplices of much of their 'merchandise'. There he discovers a child, filthy with the dirt and almost autistic from neglect, who is there on his own, without a sitter. Jesse is really upset (possibly the penny is dropping that this is what his stock~in~trade does). However while he is shocked at the squalor, what _really_ outrages him is that the TV only gets the terrestrial stations (or possibly, basic cable.) He even _says_ it to 'Spooge', the kid's dad - "Decent TV is a human right, Goddamit!" Right up there with nutritious food, and clean water... Hieararchy of Needs, Man; Hierarchy of Needs!🙄😕

@@richiehoyt8487 Don't have time to read all this sorry....

Thank you very much!

The drone shots are the best. Lewis should be an expert at aerial photography now...

You haven't lived until you've gotten drunk and watched Battlestar Galactica dubbed in German, subtitled in Croatian, in glorious black and white in a hotel room in Zagreb!

@spaceflight1019, that's enough to make a guy go on the wagon.

Thanks for noticing

That also reminds me of Hunstanton, in Norfolk. Despite being in the East Anglia region, the strongest signals come from straight across The Wash, from the Belmont transmitter - although I have seen a few aerials that are possibly Waltham? Even the Sandringham repeater mast is not used that much, and in areas where I have seen aerials on the Sandringham mast, there have also been aerials on other main masts (probably Belmont).

You get the same channels. Just the wrong regional news and also no BBC 3 HD on Welsh transmitters. Instead you get S4C HD

Any source for that happening in the 80s? That's the time "before the wall came down" and the time I remember. In my place you'd officially form and register a club with the people in the house (or even village) to improve national (read: east german) and international (understand: west german) TV reception. Massive Yagi groups (4x20+ elements for UHF) with purpose built pre-amps where the norm and usually cost was shared with the neighbours in said clubs. I keep reading about "antennas in the wrong direction" being removed in the 60s, no own experience, wasn't born then.

​@@thes764 If I recall correctly even TV tuners in the Eastern Bloc were hardlocked into Eastern Europe frequencies, so to receive Western broadcasts you had to modify the tuner.

and the teachers would say 'Did anyone watch Bugs Bunny last night?'

@@jimbotron70 You recall incorrectly. Not only were the TV bands identical in east and west Germany. The East German colour TVs even decoded the western PAL signal, in addition to the eastern SECAM. I used one through most of the 90s. Only things it was missing was a remote and extended cable TV channels, both of which I worked around by hooking it up to a VCR. I wonder what part of the eastern bloc you remember... The east was bad enough as it actually was, no need to make things up.

@@thes764 This is what I've read at the time, I never lived in the Eastern Bloc.

Where are you?

@@mellonians Netherlands

@@Rob2 ah yes! That makes sense. Taking advantage of that nice flat country of yours and introducing SFN's everywhere!

@@mellonians It does not depend on the flatness of the country...

@@Rob2 absolutely it does. I'll bet you (and I'd be very interested to actually check) that because of your topography you have nowhere near as many transmitters per capita or per 100km² than the UK therefore it's much more economical for you to line feed your sites and introduce regional SFN's and make much more efficient use of spectrum. Something we only do when we absolutely have to. We also don't have the luxury of being able to do that because different transmitters are currently on different grouped aerials so a lot of houses would have to change theirs. Like I said I'm just going from my experience as a Brit but you have more technical luxuries because of your topography and population distribution.

That helps explain why poor DVB signal can be fixed by chaining amplifiers/“signal boosters” together; while ATSC generally can’t. Fascinating they had a failed 2.0 and 3.0 which would’ve worked better.

Kind of similar for me in Sawley, near East Midlands Airport (In Derbyshire, but also got Nottingham and Leicester as Neighbours, and Staffordshire not far either), in that in days of old, we used Sutton Coldfield and sometimes still do to this day, although Waltham and it's relay at Kimberly, Nottingham, is our main transmitter.

Fly into Ringway and you'll often be flying over there.

Thanks so much as always Daniel!

I'm pretty sure I know women with broad bottoms

Broadbottom girls, you make the rockin' world go 'round