On Aug 19, 4:12 pm, "Brenda Ann" wrote:
wrote in message

oups.com...

On Aug 18, 7:06 pm, American Insurgent wrote:

I live in Clovis, California (just outside Fresno), 180 miles from
Sacramento, and get hdtv on channels 3, 13, and 58 almost every day,
using a Channel Master 1160A antenna mounted with rotor on a 20-ft
mast. Some days I also get channels 10, 29, and 40 from Sacramento.
Reception is usually strong enough in the mornings and at night. I
have also, on occasion, received hdtv stations from the bay area, 200
miles from me.

I used to live in Paradise, a few miles from you. We put a large UHF yagi up
in a tree and aimed it for San Francisco. We could get a fair picture in the
morning and evening, but nothing but snow during the day. Because of a
mountain intervening, we really didn't get much signal at all from Sacto.
Our best signal was from "Perfect 36".


You probably had a sunrise/sunset effect, if I call it something Ace
will scream at me so I'll just leave it at that. Channel 36 put out a
powerful signal for 20 years until the early 2000s. When I was a kid
in the 1980s a standard tabletop rabbit ears antenna with a loop would
pick it up quite easily in Roseville, 140 miles from San Jose. Even if
San Francisco stations weren't coming in, 36 would come in. Then
around five years ago they abruptly vanished. I suspect that the old
transmitter croaked and the station replaced it with a much less
muscular unit.

I always thought it was a shame that 36 had such crappy programming
for the signal they put out. They were an old fashioned independent
station-lots of old movies and cheap reruns. 36 had very little self-
produced programming. The self-produced local show had largely
disappeared from most TV (except PBS, and even they got most of their
stuff from WGBH) by 36's heyday. The advent of satellites and VCRs
meant that stations could fill airtime without resorting to producing
much of their own stuff.

It also meant that the stations could operate 24 hours, instead of
shutting down after the 11 pm news and going back on at 7 am. By the
late 80s stations were signing off only once a week for transmitter
maintenance. A few years after that, they perfected the science of
staying on while doing maintenance, and all TV became 24 hours. I used
to love staying up late in the summer (when there was no school) and
watching the stations sign off Sunday night for maintenance. By then
it was one of the few ways they could express themselves. Channel 40
in Sacramento had 2 minute opinion programs for a long time, until
people got too dumb to tell opinion from regular programming or to
recognize opinion when they saw it (what's this?), and the station was
rendered unable to express management's opinions.

By the way, I decided to manually enter EVERY SINGLE CHANNEL into the
TV to see what popped up, and got a couple surprises. Univision is on
channel 18, just like the list said, although weak. There's a
Christian station on HD Channel 48 that's not on the list. Apparently
it's the HD service of analog channel 29, which once ran a short lived
family programming network called Pax. Today, it's running a network
called Ion-on a mind boggling FOUR channels. One is Ion, one is
"qubo", apparently a Christian children's network, one is Ion Life,
and a fourth is "Worship", apparently Christian music videos. Channel
13 runs a second channel for sporting events.

Entering the analog channel into the box will cause the first
subchannel of the HD service of the analog station to pop up-IF you
have already entered the HD channel in. I got no signal on channel 29
until I manually went to HD channel 48. The Samsung box goes up to
channel 69, even though I read once that HD only went up to 62. If you
look at the HD channel list, it turns the order of stations that had
been accepted for 60 years on its head. There are very few VHF
channels anywhere, and in Sacramento, Univision is on channel 18 while
ABC has been exiled to channel 61. It's gonna result in a lot of
disorientation until people adapt. But I'm the guy who was thrown for
a loop when CBS and ABC switched channels with each other in
Sacramento, so what do I know.