Oddity Archive: Episode 41.5 - TV DX-ing
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- čas přidán 8. 01. 2014
- The current "demo" episode of the Archive (hence the extra-short running time). This was actually done several months ago, but I'm only publicly releasing it now.
Examining the mostly outdated practice of scanning the skies for distant signals...and turning up very little.
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We occasionally used to pick up TV signals from France on our TV, sometimes unwanted too as it would cause ghosting of the two signals.
But analogue satellite was great too for that, perfect picture from as far as Germany, who would often show porn on daytime TV!
+Larry Bundy Jr Did we? I am suprised to hear that o_O We have strict policies on what could be shown when and where, at least now. Porn on daytime TV in germany, what could go wrong?
+Hentaischlampe It was dependant on where you lived I guess. Larry and I both live in the U.K.
*****
Nice!
I live on the North East Coast of England and in the summer, or during thunderstorms, I could get a whole range of Scandanavian, Dutch and German channels with picture quality ranging from perfectly clear and full colour, to slightly grainy to fuzzy black and white, all with an indoor set top antenna. And I once got Grampian TV in perfect sound and vision for about an hour or so (my region was Tyne Tees) during one stormy evening, all in the early 1990s. I never thought to get evidence on video, though, as I didn't know that there is a global community of weirdos out there who share my interests.
And now we are in a digital dystopia, where all channels look and sound the same, no matter what country you live in, there seems little point to it all.
Larry watches the archive?
Darn Digital transition makes it harder to have this fun
I remember my days living right on Lake Michigan.
Massive antenna on the roof, digital receiver, Channels from all over the northeast U.S beamed right into my little apartment in Wisconsin.
Although the keyword is digital.
I DXed as a kid in Erie, PA. I regularly picked up Buffalo, NY, Pittsburgh, PA, Cleveland, OH, Detroit, MI, and Canadian tropo from London, Hamilton, Kitchener, and Toronto. E-skip from Baltimore/DC and the New England and southern states were fairly common as well. I even pulled in WDSU New Orleans once on e-skip.
I doubt your DC and MD loggings were Sporadic-E, that would be a very short path for Es.
Cool! Aliens are DX-ing us from space right now,
I remember getting radio stations on ch 95, 96, and 98 on a tv from the 80's. LOL
That must have been cable. Some Cable TV systems used 88-174 MHz for TV channels instead of FM radio.
This is why some TV sets would display channels in the wrong channel positions.
I also used to engage in television DXing when I was a kid, before I knew the term. I live in New York City, and I used to try to get the Phillies games on channel 17 WPHL in Philadelphia.
I used to live for those rare tropo/e-skip moments (Which often happened between July and October, but could happen any time of the year.) My only TV DX moment happened in 1988 after KOMO-TV 4 Seattle signed off the air and I caught KFOR-TV 4 out of Oklahoma City for a fuzzy, ghosty 20 minutes....
2:10 Now you're lucky if you can get the local stations
2:47 Is that the RCA ANT-130B antenna? It looks very familiar
It's easiest to DX the lo-VHF channels, which are 2-6.
I can't get any analog stations with indoor rabbit ears, I have to use an outdoor antenna... But with that comes stuff like what I got this morning, a spanish cooking show. Nice video by the way!
2:58 Ben watches Candle Cove
I didn't have much luck DXing here in DC. The best I've ever done was WBOC in Salsbury.
Hey Ben. It's great what your doing. Love seeing someone explain where all this new techie stuffs, origins are from. I've thought about thinning my collections as I will never get to use any of it.
Anyhow just a note on this mini-sode. Would have been cool to ajoin it with old c-band scanning. That was always fun.
I think I did this accidentally with my Grandpa's radio once as a kid.
where I live there is a station that broadcasts old public domain movies and TV shows.
TV DX was so much easier in the analog era...Sporadic E-Skip was common on channels 2-6 in the Spring and Summer and the range was 700 to 1400 miles. Once it went past channel 6 it goes into the FM broadcast band...Search CZcams for TV and FM DX especially in the analog era. Most intriguing are the fewTV-FM DX that crossed the 'pond'. One of the most mind boggling was reception of WESH channel 2 from Orlando Florida received in Portugal! (I'd tried posting the CZcams link for you but it won't let me post it)
OTOH, you'll immediately know what station to put on your log.
analog rules makes me happy to see analog is still going out there somewhere, I always loved doing that as a kid myself radio and tv the staticy sound never bothered me I actually kinda liked it which to some may be weird bt I never minded any sometimes would get channel 12 that had anime and lots of other cartoons daily even robotix miss that show but happy to see it on youtube again.
Whereabouts? Curious as to where the channel 12 was located. All that stuff aired on UHF in the Boston area.
I used to do this late at night catching KTLA from texas. That there is a name for it makes me cry like a little girl.
I used to catch KTLA from San Diego, but that's only 120-something miles away.
Did you watch "Movies `till Dawn?"
Once, I got tv from Norfolk, Virginia from Philadelphia.
Farthest I've been able to do is to get Philadelphia's KYW-AM (1060) to come in 250 miles west in Grampian, PA. (A few years ago, not sure the exact date, about 9:00 pm EST, for about 15 minutes. Not sure what caused it.)
I use to pick up all sorts of TV stations, radio and phone calls on the UHF band usually after midnight.
When I was a kid coming home from my grandparents' house, we managed to pick up the AM station that broadcasted near their house in PA... while we were in IN.
Both KDKA (1020, Pittsburgh) and KWY (1060, Philadelphia) could be heard in Indiana about nine nights out of ten.
@@1L6E6VHF Cool! Did you ever catch 790 WAEB?
@@artistwithouttalent
Not a chance. They beam to the South-Southeast, out to sea.
KDKA has 50K omnidirectional, KYW is 50K, with a directional array that has (at night) two strong lobes, one going Southeast into Southern NJ, the other to the West, and the directional array actually beams more than 50k in that lobe.
Used to be, I would get CIGM in Sudbury, Ontario at night, until they moved to FM.
Now it's the lower sideband of CKLW 800, Windsor - about 30 miles Northeast of me, 50 kilowatts.
Back in the late 80s early 90s I would go to my grandparents and they lived on a hill and it was really good for reception they had a tv in the kitchen that had rabbit ears and i remember flipping through channels that we didn't get and seeing the shadow of distant tv stations i would see a tv logo or something i didn't recognize and this was before i knew of DXing.
Do ham radio enthusiasts chew the scenery?
...
Yeah, that was baaaad...
Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I was a bored kid, my dad told me about how he used to try to pick up distant stations on an old tube radio of his dad's. He wrote down the stations he heard. I thought it was pretty cool so I started listening for myself on an old Wards Airline multi-band radio on long, cold winter nights, when reception seemed to be best. That radio also had several shortwave bands which made it even cooler to a young nerd like me. I tried TV DXing but was never able to really pick up anything truly distant, but that might've been because we never had an outside antenna when I was a kid; rabbit-ears only.
Such nerdy hobbies lead to my eventually getting an amateur radio license years later. DXing is fun, regardless of what signals you're chasing - MW, SW, VHF/UHF or even microwave frequencies ( if you have the money)!
I once caught a station from West Virginia still broadcasting in Analogue.
The best "DX'ing" I have done is receiving Sacramento's NBC affiliate KCRA-TV channel 3 in East Oakland, CA. The Sacramento TV market is adjacent to SF's to the north. My family lived on the top floor in the northern corner of an apartment building, and we had a small 1989 Sears TV (bought just months after the Loma Prieta earthquake) with rabbit ears connected by twin leads situated in that very corner. We had a good line of sight for local SF stations as well as the area in general. Occasionally, KCRA-TV would come in with a distorted signal, as the signal is squashed in between locals KTVU channel 2 and former NBC affiliate KRON-TV channel 4. On several occasions, I also picked up Sacramento's former ABC affiliate (now CBS O&O) KOVR channel 13, and Salinas' NBC affiliate KSBW-TV channel 8 to the south (this would also come in with interference as it, too, is in between local ABC O&O KGO-TV channel 7 and PBS member KQED channel 9, coupled with the mountain shield that divides the Salinas/Monterey TV market from SF's).
I used to love doing this as a kid. We were in the Harrisburg Pa and Hagerstown Md market. My parents house is up on a hill so on a normal day, we also had Baltimore, DC, Philly, and Altoona/Johnstown. On a foggy summer morning, we'd get Scranton Pa and NYC pretty often. And depending on conditions, I've seen signals all along the east coast anywhere from Ocean City MD clear up to Boston Mass on hi VHF and UHF. Infact, Ch25 in Hagerstown was drownded out by Fox 25 in Boston. Never had as good of luck pointed west. I only ever saw Pittsburgh, Wheeling WV and Clarksburg WV one time. As far as extreme distance goes, I remember getting WWL ch 4 from New Orleans, a CBC station on ch 3 and Fox 6 from Birmingham Al.
969thewhip I live in the Scranton PA market and I can get WHP and WGAL from Harrisburg. On good mornings I can also get Philly, Johnstown and Pittsburgh. Have yet to see NYC
I did some dx-ing in the 90's. I manage to get some stations from Jacksonville, FL, Charleston, SC & Florence, SC!
I got a Peoria station in Detroit last month
I've done this!
Living in Green Bay, Wisconsin, I was able to pull in WJMN-TV (CBS) 3 of Marquette, Michigan (a sister station and semi-satellite to Green Bay's very own WFRV-TV (CBS) 5).
There was also another time when I was able to pull in WJFW-TV (NBC) 12 of Wausau/Rhinelander, Wisconsin.
I remember I could pick up Montreal and I lived in the boonies in Vermont, Montreal was about 80 or 90 miles away. Great reception in the winter. And when I was younger I had this old reconditioned radio I got from Roses, at night it was able to pick up CB, I can hear it but I couldn't respond to it used to freak me out as a kid.
As a pre-teen I had problems sleeping and that's when I started listening to AM radio. I discovered Coast To Coast AM and The Midnight Trucking Radio Network (before it became a right wing gab fest). On cloudy nights I could pick up WJM (I think) from Detroit and "The Big One" (I forget the call letters) out of New Orleans. I lived in eastern Iowa and always found that pretty cool...
I'm guessing you meant WJW (8) in Cleveland.
WJM was a fictitious Channel 12 in Minneapolis, on the Mary Tyler Moore show.
You can be able to pick up channels just as long you have an amplifier, a rooftop antenna and a digital tunner to recieve more channels from far away. So far I have picked up some of the following channels. Just as long as the converter box stores the channel box ID along with the subchannels. So far It the remaining channels that I have pick up only appear for a brief period because of poor singal reception. Should I need to get a singal booster or another antenna because the singal itself blocks because of nearby buildings or trees.
There was a brand new analog TV signal in Sacramento County
I used to do a bit of TVDX back in the day. I had one day in the NW where the e-skip was rolling in all day, from Mexicali, LA, SF, Sacramento, and Phoenix. Another day, it was all from the midwest: Goodland, Lakin (both KS), Lexington, Omaha (both NE), Watertown, and Rapid City (both SD). There's also been some days where it's been all tropo openings (picking up Omaha, N Iowa and Minneapolis from Kansas City, Or openings all the way into UHF (Eugene and Seattle, to Portland). I am not in a situation, now, where I can TVDX well (no portable digital set, and the techniques for DX are a bit different than with analog), though in time, I may get back into it again.
I thought I was crazy for doing this back when I was younger, but just like you, I only did it because local stuff sucked :D. I still do this today with analog, but rather then bunnyears, I use 6 console RF connectors spiderweb out and taped to my wall. I still find a few channels :). Fyi, Sega's RF adapters work the best!
Is there any analogue signal in the air in the north east section of the us around toronto as of january 2015 ??
I did AM DXing back when I was a kid too, mainly in the early 90s, and I also didn't know it had a name. I had a Realistic Patrolman multiband radio (I actually still have one, but not the original), and given the right atmospheric conditions, I could pick up broadcasts all the way from Utah and Colorado from my home in Oregon - though usually the stations I got were from Washington and southern Oregon..
The last remaining analog station here is a Spanish network. Heard the FCC will make the low-power analogs go away by September 2015. Back in the 80s, I got stations from Colorado and Kansas on my parents' roof antenna in California a few times.
The remaining low-power analog cutoff time has been extended indefinitely, the one station here has now been showing color bars for the past few months.
We still got an analog station here in Tucson, AZ that carries Daystar. I get a kick that they upgraded many of their stations around the land to digital, but not their Tucson station. Makes me wonder how many can actually watch it. Seems like Daystar is losing $$ daily by keeping this analog.
2:57 - Hey! I know that show! I think it's called "Echoes of the Big Bang".
Once, when camping in the countryside in Wales I got ‘The Voice Of Cuba’ on long wave, does that count?
Longwave? Longwave isn't used for broadcasting in The Americas, only mediumwave and FM (87.9-107.9 MHz).
My guess is that the Cuban broadcast was a very strong shortwave signal, that mixed with *a harmonic* of the local oscillator in your set to put a 455kHz signal into your radio's IF chain.
1L6E6VHF My apologies, I mean shortwave
I can receive an Analog station from about 30 miles from Chicago which is also on 87.7 fm. It’s a horrible signal but it’s cool to see it and listen but it’s a shame it’s shutting down in the next few years
@OddityArchive Do you know there's a porn parody of the show you catched on Univision? XD
we still have an Antenna (not hooked up) on the rook but we also have a turner that turns the Antenna, that's all I know. do you know anything about it? something like that?
MichaelHansenFUN
An antenna rotator. Useful if not all of your regular local stations are in the same place.
That antenna will still work with a digital TV. You may have a problem if the antenna is designed only for VHF and your local UHF signals are weak.
(Most people today have the opposite problem- cute little UHF-only indoor antennas that can't get VHF).
kind of unrelated but as someone who’s DXed a bunch of NWR (NOAA Weather Radio)/AM/FM stations over the past couple of months in south central NC, if i had a certificate for each station i DXed, how many of those would i get lmao
Occasionally there is a religious channel that broadcasts in analog on channel 74; for the fun of it I did a channel scan on my TV with the rabbit ears hooked up and found it. (Full disclosure; I live in northern upstate New York) they only broadcast on certain days during certain time slots, but I've never bothered to figure out when.
jakethreesixty
Your set is in cable mode. Actual channel is much lower, in the mid-twenties somewhere.
See if there’s Digital TV DX-ing, because I can’t seem to get anything on my digital antenna.
TimeTravelinc
Digital TV DX does exist - but it is more difficult than analog TV DX was, because a DTV signal needs to dominate the channel it is on.
Too, very few TV stations actually broadcast on the low-VHF channels (2-6) affected by sporadic-E skip (for example, the station in Detroit known as Channel 4 actually transmits on channel 45, and sends a PSIP signal to tell you it's 4). Thus, most DTV DX is by tropospheric refraction on UHF.
Of course, you will need either a digital TV (most sets 2007 or newer) or a digital converter box attached to an older TV.
Did you live in Denver, CO Oddity?
EAS CEC Beautiful Aurora, actually.
n the 90's II picked up a station in a state next to me using rabbit ears. I doubt I can do that with dtv.
You still can - though the signal needs to be above the threshold at which enough of the bitstream is above the noise level.
In Manistique, MI, I received Milwaukee and Chicago DTV stations - but that was completely over Lake Michigan. Some Milwaukee stations were seen with an unfurled jumbo paperclip as an antenna.
So it's called DX-ing, eh? I managed to get a signal from an either an Indiana or Michigan based TV station back in the 80's (can't remember which) on a Analog TV in my aunt's apartment on the 3rd floor during the Summer.
TimelordR
You likely saw South Bend (IN) TV stations, which also serve the Southwest corner of Michigan and and Northwest Indiana. They carry both news and commercials from Michigan as well as Indiana.
In the summer, UHF TV signals can often cross over Lake Michigan. Manistique more often can receive good signals from Milwaukee and Chicago in the summer than "local" stations 6, 10 and 13 (though 3 serves Manistique).
my father did something smillar
at least he told me so
he did a lot of cool stuff before i been born
Well he managed to get Mexico! The X first letter means Mexico TV/radio station. Canada is "C" US east with the exception of KDKA Pittsburgh is "W" US West with the exception of WACO (yes, Waco Texas) is "K".
I can still get a few channels on analog.
Something Funny: Just About A day Ago, I Tryed To Pick Up Analog TV Om This Old Daywoo From About 95'. I Hooked It Up To The Direct TV SATELLITE DISH And STILL Didn't Find Anything!
Hello from KRAM ColdRockAmerica Channel 69! You have DX'ed us but good...
I live in Canada I still get a few channels on analog to end my grandparents camp is in thessalon Ontario Canada they picked up Digital TV stations from Green Bay Wisconsin the bay 2.2 Weather Channel
You picked up WBAY-TV 2, our ABC affiliate. I live in the area, so that's how I know.
Pepillo Origel in univision chanel 36
I get New York city am broadcast in eastern nc
Found a signal in NY go to my channel its on channel 6 in the Bronx
Well youtube channel first but the real channel is 6
The signal on 50 wasn't "leaking" to channel 36.
When you entered channel 36, an oscillator made a steady "dead carrier" on channel 43. It's supposed to mix with channel 36 to produce a signal at about 42Mhz that can be amplified and made to produce picture and sound.
Well, the channel 50 signal mixed with the local oscillator instead (since you have no channel 36), and sent an "inverted" signal of channel 50 through (resulting in loss of sound).
If you punch in channel 50, the oscillator will be at channel 57, which will mix with channel 50's signal, and give fine picture and sound (er.....imagen y sonido).
How do you know this
@@checkerboy3469
In my teenage years, I would sometimes find discarded TV sets from the vacuum-tube era, and bring them back into operation (back then, even some drugstores, as well as electronics stores, had tube testers and tubes!)
I bought a book on TV servicing, and learned about the design of all-channel TV sets - the UHF tuner was a frequency converter. It converted the UHF signal to the disused Channel 1, which the UHF converter was attached to.
This is why UHF TV stations in the same area could not be 7, 8, 14 or 15 channels apart, it would cause interference inside the set.