[mobilene]

This was one of the most wicked cool things I've read in a long time.

I grew up in a TV market that was UHF only (South Bend, IN) in the 1970s. TVs from before about 1963(?) didn't have to have UHF dials. So a company named Blonder-Tongue (Blonder was pronounced like blunder) produced UHF receivers you could attach to your TV through the little screw tab things on the back, the predecessor to the coax input. I had never seen Blonder-Tongue referenced anywhere except in nostalgia articles about my hometown.

[walrus01]

Blonder tongue was a well known vendor for regional cable tv network (analog) operator equipment, supplies, electronics. I think it still exists in some form for video mixing/live studio broadcast equipment.

https://www.blondertongue.com/

[wolrah]

I work in a lot of nursing homes and their in-house "cable" systems are almost universally a rack full of DirecTV receivers connected to a rack full of Blonder Tongue NTSC modulators. I would have to assume similar systems were common in all sorts hospitality environments in the past, and only survive in nursing homes because most of the residents don't care about HD and might not even want it.

[Scoundreller]

Also white labelled so e DishNetwork receivers with a few mods: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBf3dZUAImk

[qingcharles]

The is probably how all jails and prisons are running their systems, too. Lots of these places still running CRT 4:3 TVs too. The 4:3/16:9 issues are rampant. And obviously the picture quality is just like you remember from the 1980s.

[walrus01]

On a only slightly related note, there's a thriving collectors market on ebay and other places for "clear plastic" see through enclosure prison CRT TVs since they're both a novelty, and nobody makes CRTs anymore. People buy them to hook up to like Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo bare metal hardware for retro gaming.

[qingcharles]

It's getting harder and harder to bring them home. The prisons are trying to keep the items inside the system, even though the prisoners actually bought the items outright.

[lazide]

Like industrial equipment - you know it’s going to be good when it has an absurd name (company or model). Assuming it’s been around awhile.

[Kon-Peki]

Ah yes, South Bend is too close to Chicago, too close to Indianapolis, too close to Detroit... No VHF frequency left to allocate! The biggest problem is Chicago. South Bend is on a subcontinental ridge, with an average elevation nearly 300 feet higher than Chicago, and with all the transmitters in Chicago up 1500-1800 feet above ground and close to the lake, overcoming the curvature of the earth limitations on VHF propagation is fairly simple. Anyone in South Bend with a large antenna on their roof would easily receive all the stations.

On the upside, that meant having two versions of CBS and NBC (I don't remember an ABC affiliate in South Bend) plus the couple of other stations. My cousin got his start as a weatherman on NBC in South Bend simply by them needing someone to fill in from time to time and him being essentially the only person they could find that grew up in South Bend but had gone off to study meteorology at a university that was very very good for meteorology.

[JJMcJ]

Just for completeness, the screw tabs were for an antenna, the notorious rabbit ears if you were close to the stations, or one on the roof if you were farther away.

[veunes]

It's funny how certain brands or bits of tech can feel almost legendary in one place but totally unknown everywhere else