History of Television Antennas

This website contains a history of antennas used from the 1930's. Some look very similar to what we are using today. Some don't.


www.earlytelevision.org/postwar_antennas.html

Has anyone every used the Finco 400-A that can pick up all channels 150 miles or more away?

Back in my high school days in Carlsbad, New Mexico we had one mounted on our house and my grandmother next door had one, both mounted about 65 ft AGL.

SUPER antenna!! I was able to receive channels from all the Midland/Odessa VHF stations except channel 2 (interference) from 125 to 150 miles on a regular basis.

Our regular stations were channels 6, 8 and 10 which were 35, 65 and 85 miles away respectively and we had a crystal clear picture on all of them 24/7 (except they signed off about 11:30pm and back on about 6 am).

Part of the effectiveness of these antennas is their co-linear design, the horizonal elements are all in the same line, but are not all directly connected to each other, but are a set of arrays which give the antenna a much wider frequency rance while maintaining the effectiveness of the dipole basic design.

On several occasions I was able to watch KAMC ch 28 out of Lubbock Texas at night, thats 175 miles away on UHF.

My avatar is one with the optional reflector.

If ANYBODY has one of these GEMS, I'll trade my Funke PSP.1922 straight up for it (in good condition of course - no junk).

I've attached a page from and old Allied Catalog (predecessor of Radio Shack) with several of these on it.

Wally

That is a really cool and informative website. I spent my whole weekend there. When I was a kid we found an old Dumont chassis that had a socket for the color converter.
Dad said it was for the color wheel.:eyecrazy Wish we had kept that!

Back in my high school days in Carlsbad, New Mexico

How come Carlsbad? Is he never good? :D

Since I went to school at NMSU, I'll let that one pass.

Wally,
Thanks for taking us down memory lane. Most/All of us grew up with the sound of planes flying over our heads and flipping a switch to turn on a light, radios, telephones and Tvs, but all of these things are incredable inventions that we all just take for granted... it kinda makes the computer not so awesome now :busy:

Mike