>>I was thinking about that the other day. I wondered when exactly all of the tv antennas disappeared from the landscape. It used to be that every house had a tv antenna on the roof. When you moved into a home, unless it was just built, there was always an antenna in place and you could get tv reception immediately without cable.
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>Not in any neighborhood I ever lived in. Maybe it's the big city thing, but most people I knew before cable just used rabbit ears.
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>Tamar


Depends on where you lived.

If you were in or near a city, rabbit ears would get all the VHF network channels and a couple of UHF ones.

If you were out in the boonies, you really needed the antenna on the roof to try to pull out distant (all of them) stations.

We had a vacation house in the center of New Hampshire when I was a kid - it was buried in the mountains on a lake. With a BIG antenna on the roof we could pull out a couple of network stations out of Maine (there was nothing in NH) along with lots of static. On the other hand, our other house was just outside of Boston - rabbit ears pulled in about 8 channels including UHF IIRC.

I remember seeing antennas on houses in downtown Boston. Never could figure out why. I think they could have received all the available channels using a piece of wire.