Cable television did not come to the areas of Kommiecticut outside of the cities and larger towns until the mid-1980's. By today's standards, those CATV systems were primitive and limited. Prior to that we had what was available over the air and in those days it was standard broadcast, not HDTV. I grew up in the sleepy little dairy town of Ellington. It is located in the northeastern part of the low lying flat Kommiecticut River Valley, so we had no obstruction of TV signals. Our house had a large VHF/UHF directional antenna on the roof mounted to the chimney, and it had a rotor system. We got the local CBS, ABC, NBC, and PBS affiliates from Hartford, New Haven, and Springfield. At night we could pickup Channel 19 and Channel 10 out of Albany and Channel 6 out of Providence. In the summer when atmospheric skip would occur, we could occasionally pickup Channel 38 out of Boston which had programming not available in our normal market. This is what sat on top of our 25" wood cabinet Sylvania color console TV.
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| The antenna rotor control head from Radio Shack |
When installed properly, the antenna was oriented to the compass points on the dial. I believe it came with a sheet of decals with all the channel numbers (2-13 VHF and 14-83 UHF). Once you knew where to point the antenna for a particular channel's best reception, you put the corresponding number sticker on the dial face so you could find it fast in the future. On this particular model, you would spin the dial to the desired location, and the motor pointer would follow one tick at a time. It was moved by a solenoid mechanism, so at each tick mark it made a loud "bzzzzt!" noise about once per second. It was really annoying if you were turning the antenna 180 degrees or more
There were 3 sets of cables that came down from the antenna and went into the house as well as one bare aluminum ground wire that went to a ground rod for lightning protection. One cable was for the VHF part of the antenna and reception, another was for the UHF part of the antenna and reception, and the last cable powered the bi-directional rotor motor. The controller dial did not go 360 degrees around so as not to wrap the cables around the antenna mounting pole, eventually breaking them.
If you did not have a directional antenna with a rotor system, you either had an antenna pointed in one direction, a weaker omni-directional antenna on the roof, or at worst a set of rabbit ears sitting on top of your TV. Rabbit ears were OK in a big city with multiple TV stations located nearby, but otherwise sucked.
The first job I ever had was working for a TV shop in East Hartford. We did sales, service, and installations. I was 18 years old and installing rotor antenna systems on peoples houses. We sold the Channel Master brand of antennas and rotor systems. The control box on those did not use a solenoid to move the dial, but a nice silent smooth motor. An install could take a few hours, especially the ones that were not just replacing an antenna or adding the rotor, but having to do the entire shebang. One hard lesson I learned was about putting the ladder on the van roof rack properly. I did not do that once, and had the ladder hanging too far off the back of the van. I put it through our warehouse window as I backed the van up in our parking lot. The boss made me fix the window.
Leave a comment if you remember such a device from your youth.
