re: How Many of You 45+ Year Old Baws Remember Old School TV Antennas?

hell yea. that tower is called a roan tower. 60' tall is sketchy af
we couldn't get cable until i was 10 or so, just wasn't available out in the sticks. when we did i think it had hbo, espn and cnn. first remote control was me, parents made me hop up and change the channel on the tv. finally got a remote but it was corded. can definitely remember when the tv shut down at 1 am or whatever time with the star spangled banner and an american flag waving
kids today have no idea. the struggle was real

If you wanted to watch CBS mawmaw would turn the antenna pole with a pipe wrench towards Shreveport, NBC was Lake Charles, ABC was Alexandria. This was the 70's, early eighties. Had to be on Alexandria during the day for Mid-South Wrestling.

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Turns out it was a direct lightening strike on our tower.

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Odd stuff. I’ve seen 4-5 people in this thread call it a tower. We had one, and I shared the same experiences that have been mentioned in this thread, but this thread is the first time I’ve ever seen anyone, then or now, call it a tower.

My mom still has it up at the house

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The day we could pick up UHF channels was awesome. 26 and 38 out of new orleans .

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You know it, mid 80's when 38 pick up the Astros games were awesome.

Had one at our deer camp. Florida vs Florida St 1996 the wind blew it down about 15 minutes before kickoff. We used an old school climbing stand to put it in the top of a pine tree cutting the limbs as we went up. The second half was crystal clear. My wife thought I was lying about that until she asked my dad one day and he repeated my story verbatim.


Cool story bro…..

We just had one on the roof. I had to go adjust it when needed, which wasn't often. We only had three channels, two out of Columbus and one out of Montgomery.

Back in the 1980’s and 1970’s, Houma and Thibodaux cable systems carried KLFY since cable programming was in its infancy. Some systems only had 13 channels when they started and only had local channels.

Here was Callais Cable’s lineup from the early 1970’s from what I remembered seeing in a South Lafourche High School Yearbook.
2-WBRZ
3-KATC
4-WWL
5-Local CCTV/Shared
6-WDSU
7-???
8-WVUE
9-WAFB
10-KLFY
11-KHMA (short lived)
12-WYES
13-???

WGNO had to be one of the channels since they started around 1970, but I don’t remember the number. Also, no WVLA, WGMB, WNOL, KADN, WLAE, etc. Those channels did not start broadcasting until the 1980’s or early 1990’s like WGMB.

Eventually, systems upgraded and Cable Ready TV’s allowed more channels. Then you had descramblers to catch HBO and Showtime. Before fiber optics, some systems like Callais only had channels to 36. MTV was channel 36. In those pre fiber optics days, Callais ran the system with 2 microwave links to Lockport and Leeville because it was too far for the coaxial lines to work.

I can remember when Callais Cable's offices were in Golden Meadow and they had several satellite dishes including one large dish that had to be at least 30-40 feet across. By the late 1990's when they relocated to Larose, technology had changed so much that you could receive all the cable channels a system needed with one satellite dish called the HITS, Headend In The Sky.

With consolidation in the cable industry and switch to fiber optic networks and other advancements, things that used to take an entire room are now in a single rack. Heck some cable systems like Comcast pipe the local channels to centralized servers in another state and feed the entire cable system back via fiber optic cables. The only down side that if a cable gets cut between Louisiana and Colorado and a backup path is also down good luck watching TV or using the internet. That has happened at least 2 or 3 times in the last decade.

43 and hand raised.

Total eyesores