Until around 20 or 30 years ago if you wanted to watch television you had to have an external antenna with a wire coming inside and attached to your television set. But then “cable” companies began to provide television service along with your telephone and computer connections to the outside world. In fact, if you look around town, one way to get a feel for how widely used cable service is, is to look for the external antennas on the houses in your neighborhood. While driving around the area — when I‘m stuck in traffic — I sometimes look for the antennas, usually mounted on the chimney, if there is one. The absence of an antenna is a good sign that the house is connected to a cable system, although some antennas can be mounted where they are not easily visible from the road.
But seeing an antenna is no guarantee that the house uses it for receiving television, of course, since some homeowners, like me, have an antenna on the chimney that hasn’t been connected to anything inside for at least a couple of decades.
I remember well the progression of technology that brought me to the system I use today, and the little changes in technology that meant progress. An obvious one was the change from old-fashion 300-ohm “twin-lead” to coaxial cable. Twin-lead was the flat ribbon-style cable that had two parallel wires separated by a plastic insulator just about 3/8 of an inch wide and always brown in color. This kind of wiring was all there was for most people who used an antenna to get their television signal. And if you had more than one set in the house, each one had to be wired separately to the antenna with its own twin-lead.
At some point, probably in the 1980S, television and FM broadcasts started to require the use of “co-ax” cable, that is a round cable that had a stranded conductor surrounded by a wire mesh that was separated from the central wire by insulation. There was also a layer of insulation on the outside. This cable is widely used today. It is characterized by its impedance of 75 ohms.
It’s easy to see that the presence of an antenna of any type does not indicate for sure that the home owner needs it for television. In my case, the external antenna is still attached to my chimney as it has been for over 40 years, although the mounting itself is different now than it was in the beginning. In fact, originally, the TV antenna came attached to the end wall of the house with a metal mast and brackets screwed to the roof gable. Only after we built the first addition to the house, which involved building a fireplace and brick chimney (built by the Reed brothers of Dutch Neck), did we have a sturdier place to mount our TV antenna — the chimney. In fact that chimney became our favorite attachment place for several electronic “services.”
What we call electronic services has changed drastically over the decades. In fact, the term “electronics” was a new word in the early 1950s. Until then there were radios, phonographs, and telephones. Some people had television sets, too, but just black and white, and with the outside antenna. The radios were usually just to receive AM signals from nearby broadcasting stations. (The AM means amplitude modulation, the type of broadcast technology then in use. It did not refer to “before noon.”)
If you wanted to listen to “serious” stuff like classical music or very authoritative-sounding news broadcasts, you used an FM radio, that is one that received signals with “frequency modulation.” Nation-wide “networks” of stations had just begun to take form. The main ones were National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS). Stations operated by NBC included those with both the Blue Network and the Red Network. Later on, one of these networks constituted the American Broadcasting Company (ABC).
Truly nationwide radio service didn’t start until after the end of World War II, and the same goes for television, but a bit later. So the presence of an outside antenna would not have been expected before then. One of the important factors in the use of both TV and FM antennas was “directionality.” That is, to get the best results from your antenna, you had to point it in the right direction. In the West Windsor and Plainsboro area that usually meant pointing it toward New York City, the source of most of the broadcast signals many people wanted to see or hear.
For us, a special need turned out to be our desire to listen to an FM station in Allentown, Pennsylvania. It was WFMZ, and it broadcast what turned out to be our favorite musical organization, the Allentown Band. One of the things that helped attract my wife and me to each other was our mutual love of band music. That is, music played by a group of instrumentalists without strings. That doesn’t mean we disliked music by a full orchestra playing Beethoven or Mozart, it just meant that there was something more exciting about hearing a Sousa march played by a really good band, such as that in Allentown. And besides that, the symphony could take nearly an hour, while the march took four or five minutes. It fit in better with whatever else you were doing early Sunday evening.
But to get the best FM signal from Allentown you couldn’t point your antenna at New York. You had to point it at Allentown, Pennsylvania. That meant we needed to be able to rotate our FM antenna to whatever direction we wanted. And that meant having some way to mount it with a rotating mechanism on the chimney, which is where it was after we had the fireplace built.
At the time, it was possible to buy an antenna rotator mechanism that consisted of a small, weatherproof positioning motor that could be mounted outdoors and which had provision for mounting a television antenna mast. The motor was connected to house current and was controlled by an indoor dial. The direction of the dial for New York from our location was 45 degrees for New York (north-east) and 315 degrees (north-west) for Allentown. After what was probably several weeks on the roof, I completed my self-designed installation of what was a coaxial mast with concentric, ball-bearing mounted aluminum tubes, one of which held the TV antenna and the other of which held the FM antenna. Each mast was controlled by a separate rotator motor with a belt drive and was positioned by a rotator dial inside the house.
The system worked very well, but after only a few years, my system was superseded by new technology that made the complex antenna system obsolete. Today that antenna remains unused on my chimney where it has been for at least 30 years. The indoor controls are still there, too. There are probably many unused TV and FM antennas everywhere today.
The transmission and reception of radio and television broadcast signals has been the subject of important advances in technology over at least the past six decades. But many who have enjoyed the benefits of the advancing technology over the years have also enjoyed some of the “hands-on” aspects of that technology, as well. This enjoyment includes what became known as LP (long playing) records and HiFi (high fidelity) sound.
The hands-on aspect reached its culmination in such things as Heathkits, where the electronic components needed to receive or play the best quality broadcast or recorded sound were built by the user. As an enthusiastic Heathkit builder, I’ll have more to say on that in the future.
