Michael A. Terrell wrote:
BH wrote:

Randy and/or Sherry wrote:

A case in point. I just finished doing some touch up alignment on
my 1949 GE 10T1 B/W television. There are two gewhizband modern
television sets in the house and with rabbit ears, neither one
will pull in the NBC affiliate station which is about 50 miles
away. This old GE will pull it in (although with a goodly amount
of snow) with rabbit ears sitting in the basement.

Bill H.


The modern sets are designed for use on cable TV, unlike the tube set
was designed when stations were less common, and harder to receive.
More IF stages give more system gain, and allow you to pull a snow
signal in on the tube tv set.

As a cable guy I participated in a field test with a handful of
manufacturers in 1974-ish. Basically they were just entering the era of
adjacent channel tuners and overall sensitivity.
Even in 1974 the cheapest K-Mart model would have run rings around any
'tube' set.
There's unequivocably no reduction in reception capability in a "modern"
set because of "being designed for cable tv". If anything the opposite
is true. Front ends in tube sets had a noise figure on the order of 6-8
db in the best cases, nowadays a $19 K-Mart camping set will easily
comply at less than 2db, and a better 'home' set approaches 1db.
IF gain has nothing to do with "pulling a snow signal" and Michael A,
you should know that.
All that being said, for a tinkerer yanking a signal out of the air and
actually having it look good on an old b/w toober is worth about 40 db
of congratulatory signal increase....20db because its b/w and another
20db as a "celebration" that the old dinosaur actually works.

-Bill