Leo's Articles - The Writings and Ideas of Leo Crocker Rogers

Topic: Dailies

Full Circle But With Less Value

Leo Crocker Rogers

It was about 1947 in the Navy town of San Diego, California. My dad had built a t.v. set from the ground up. He cut aluminum stock, drilled, and filed it to shape a chassis. He wound his own transformers and wired the set to a schematic he had found. Getting the yoke to properly focus and the horizontal sweep transformer (the fly-back transformer) not to screech in our ears were all a part of the deal.

This was a time when there was one t.v. station west of the Mississippi and that station was not in San Diego. It was in Los Angels some 130 miles north as the crow flies. Our family was the only family in San Diego to have a t.v. set. Certainly, they were not for sale.

For the Rogers’s family to receive the Los Angel’s signal, we put a folded dipole, with perhaps a reflector or two, antenna on the roof of our house. My dad made the antenna by carefully measuring the physical lengths of the aluminum tubing and then filling the tubing with sand whereby to bend it to shape without cracking the tubes. In later years, I remember that Yagi antennas were of this configuration. In any event, we placed the antenna on a pole sticking up from our roof. Dad would yell to me from inside the house for me to turn the pole to obtain the best reception. "It is better now!!" was the repeated 1947 refrain.

When the best picture was obtained, what we saw was a 3 inch test pattern, an Indian with a circles.

Indian Head Test Pattern

The hours of broadcast were nil, but our neighbors came anyway. They could not believe what we told them about the picture being sent from L.A. The Rogers’ family was famous.

Well that was a few years ago, perhaps as many as 60.

Now, t.v. sets have larger display screens, provide images in color, and are available from WalMart. The reception has been good all these years with most large cities having t.v. towers for local reception.

That is so in Phoenix, Arizona, I can see the t.v. transmitting towers upon South Mountain – pure line of sight about 16 miles away. And until June of this year all reception was good.

Then in June of 2009, the BIG BANG occurred. The switch to digital t.v. was mandated. Immediately, my t.v. reception went to pot. The digital signal was like a moth in a hurricane: Ambient temperature made reception pixilate, so did rain, so did day verses night, so did wind. Sometimes the sound was not in synchronization with the video. Also, one setting of the antenna received about half the t.v. stations. To get the other stations, I had to adjust the antenna and then download the stations again. Sometimes, the adjust-the-antenna/download/look routine took three tries. And even then not all stations could be received. But that was using my rabbit ears antenna.

The solution was to harken back sixty years or so. I have had to install a Rogers/Yagi type folded dipole in my attic to get decent reception. And you guessed it. We are once again yelling, "Is it better now?" as my friend rotats the antenna, and I watch the signal strength meter.

My dad, who has passed on, would likely smile at the progress of our t.v. industry, and say, "Full Circle but with less value." I say. "Long time to come such a short way."