The T.V. antennas' swan song

As so-called cord-cutting, the dropping of cable TV subscription plans, continues to accelerate, it is apparent that replacing such a plan with an antenna to get free television isn’t exactly commonplace.

It’s not that the antennas aren’t readily available, in the local Walmarts and Canadian Tire outlets, for example, it’s that purchasers of these quickly realize many have specious claims, and that’s aside from the perceptions the buyers have about their capabilities.

Some readers in this space hearken back to the 70s and 80s, when pretty much any house in what we now call Metro Vancouver had an antenna on the roof. With topography being a factor in television signal reception, some houses sported especially tall antenna masts to pull in those American channels. A very few locations could pull in the Big Three from Seattle: KING (NBC), KIRO (CBS), and KOMO (ABC).

Most of these antennas, consisting of a few elements, were aimed or directed to pull in one or two stations besides the local signals from CBC and CHAN/BCTV. Particularly popular was KVOS in Bellingham, basically set up to serve the Vancouver market from American soil.

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Some houses sported particularly fancy antennas, having names such as Channel Master, with motorized directional control and many elements and more sophisticated electronics to aid in pulling in more remote stations. 

Along came cable television in the 70s, initially at monthly pricing as low as $5, and within a generation, nearly all those antennas and their masts were gone. They became superfluous, a forerunner of the electronic junk, or e-waste, so prevalent today.

Yes, you may see a handful or two of those old antennas still standing on Vancouver-area rooftops, but for the most part, they look battered, and whatever is left of their 300-ohm twin lead feed to their long-gone TVs is likely blowing about in the wind.

However, what you may also see are a few houses sporting a newer form of antenna. These are the visible, roof-mounted bowtie-type antennas with a mesh backing, sometimes mounted in pairs. In my own neighbourhood, there is just one. The owner gave up his cable TV subscription years ago and draws in around twenty channels, mostly American, along with a handful of BC channels.

These bigger antennas are often to be found for a few dollars on the Facebook Marketplace. People buy one and then find their home is not ideally located to pull in many channels, or they can’t find channels exclusive to cable. I have a couple of these antennas for experimental purposes and cannot pick up any of the Vancouver channels, as I’m located on the back slope of a hill, which obscures the line of sight to the North Shore mountains, where the key local transmitters are located.

Therein lies the rub! Over-the-air (OTA) television requires a line of sight from antenna to transmitter. We no longer have old-school analogue broadcast television where the set could decode weaker signals, albeit with noisy images. Digital TV signals are an all-or-nothing proposition. Either the signal is decoded, or it is not. Either you can view a specific channel, or you cannot. Oh, there are exceptions, such as a rare phenomenon called tropospheric ducting, which may give a brief viewing of a remote station. I’ve experienced this with the FOX station in Tacoma, bringing in a clear signal on occasion.

This brings us to the antennas being sold in the local big box stores, and also often available at negligible cost on the Facebook Marketplace. These smaller antennas are meant to be attached to windows, and they are usually accompanied by outlandish claims about their capabilities. To be sure, they will pull in any reasonably close local stations broadcasting over the air, but to have stickers on them showing cable-only services, such as CNN, TSN, BBC, etc., is simply misleading and wrong.

Additional claims about 4K, ultra HD, free channels and the like are simply the manufacturer being disingenuous. 4K content is available only on cable or streamer services. It is not broadcast over the air. Yes, OTA content can look a little sharper than the equivalent channel over cable, mainly due to signal compression algorithms which make it possible for a signal cable to carry hundreds of channels into your home.

Then there is the claim about distance. Look at the image accompanying this column. It’s for a $20 antenna, second-hand. An outlandish claim of 2200+ mile long range! That really would be amazing if it were indeed possible. Los Angeles is barely a thousand miles from Vancouver. I could be watching those police car chases on KTLA without the need of a cable TV subscription! It’s pure nonsense, of course. 

Will OTA television even exist a decade or so down the road? We can see a possible answer already in some European nations where the transmitters have been switched off, and all programming is via cable or internet streaming. Canadian broadcasters have so far been turned down when requesting to do the same.

Here in North America, analytics estimates have cable subscription households dipping below sixty percent. For some, YouTube has become their only source of TV-style programming. In terms of daily minutes watched, according to a recent survey of twenty international markets, YouTube recently surpassed Netflix, although we should point out that Netflix itself, through various documentary channels, remains the single biggest draw on YouTube.

Consumption of media in all forms, including the content of this very newspaper, is in a constant state of flux. Just as “free” internet-based news has all but decimated print journalism, so has streaming media fired broadside salvos into the radio and television business models.

In that respect, the occasional OTA antenna we see in our daily travels may just be a quaint reminder of a time that once was.

Following up on our Magnifica Humanitas column. It is somewhat ironic that certain AI engines are quite good at providing summaries of the latest encyclical, the first of the papacy of Leo XIV. Check here for two overviews, one of a thousand words, the other of five hundred words. Reading either, or both, may serve to draw you into the full document, which is linked here as well: https://techwise.petervogel.ca.

Follow me on X (@PeterVogel) or on Bluesky (petervogel.bsky.social).

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