Comments on: why does Blonder-Tongue offer two new indoor boosters? (Dec, 1962)

By: Arglebarglefarglegleep

Arglebarglefarglegleep — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 05:28:36 +0000

The signal off the air waves often wasn’t all that great . Cable tv or CATV was originally Community Antenna Television because a really good antenna was worth paying to use. Cable basically is the same thing except you get them to descramble satellite feeds for you as well as distribute local broadcasts.

I remember dealing with ghost images, snow, weird sound, passing airplanes passing overhead affecting reception, the whole nine yards. If you had rabbit ears on your tv, somebody walking around the house could affect reception. There’s a lot of comedy skits from back then involving making someone hold a set of rabbit ears while doing all sorts of poses and gymnastics.

A motorized antenna would help with a lot of these when you marked on a cover plate all the good locations to adjust the antenna for each channel.

By: KD5ZS

KD5ZS — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 19:41:23 +0000

The vacuum tube makers countered by introducing the nuvistor.

By: mc

mc — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 00:54:56 +0000

Did you notice they had transistors working at UHF frequencies in 1962? That’s impressive.

By: KD5ZS

KD5ZS — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:32:53 +0000

Now you would use a GaAsFET preamp to do the same thing. At least today we have players as an alternative to putting up with expensive cable or satellite with our TVs. I preferred it back in the days where everything came over the air and was free!

By: TomB

TomB — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:14:46 +0000

Ben H. Tongue’s website is here: http://www.bentongue.com/bht/bht.html. He is into crystal radio sets. Info on Blonder Tongue is there too: http://www.bentongue.com/bht/bht.html.

By: George

George — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:21:16 +0000

Darned automatic smileys, now I don’t trust numbers…

Channel six became eight, fifty-five moved to forty, and sixty-one moved to twenty-two.

By: George

George — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:18:48 +0000

The first set-top box, the booster. On our 17 inch Motorola we had a Blonder-Tongue booster so we could receive channel 6 (eventually changed to in New Haven, CT. It was daisy-chained after a Blonder-Tongue UHF converter so we could receive the new-fangled channels 55 and 61 from Springfield, MA.

Eventually everybody was able to get rid of their boosters and hook up to cable, another set-top box.

So here we are in 2010, still we’ve got boxes connected to our TVs, the only difference is the receivers are flat and thin, so there’s no room for the boxes to sit on top.