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I was very familiar with Lexington in my younger years (1970s), though I've long since moved on. I know at the time, cable was very late getting to Lexington, they didn't even have three commercial TV stations until WBLG-62 (now WTVQ-36) came along in 1968, and many people had large towers on the sides of their homes to get Louisville (3/11) and Cincinnati (5/9/12). Does anyone still do this? And are any of those towers still around? Is the reception easier or harder now that we have digital instead of analog?
I haven't counted recently, but you can get a couple dozen channels just with regular TV nowadays, no special antenna.
You see satellite dishes of course from time to time, and some people use cable, a lot of people just stream TV nowadays through Roku or similar devices....and you can download the apps to Louisville channels if you wish. But why would you really want to? I grew up in Louisville, but Lexington's news channels are more than adequate.
Location: New Albany, Indiana (Greater Louisville)
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The first house I lived in in west Lexington had an antenna a previous owner had installed on the ceiling. With it that house could get Wave3 and sometimes WHAS 11 out of Louisville. It was mainly of interest if there were severe storms moving in from the west, otherwise you can watch the same national shows on Lexington stations. That was with an analog signal, the new digital doesn't travel nearly as far.
I haven't counted recently, but you can get a couple dozen channels just with regular TV nowadays, no special antenna.
You see satellite dishes of course from time to time, and some people use cable, a lot of people just stream TV nowadays through Roku or similar devices....and you can download the apps to Louisville channels if you wish. But why would you really want to? I grew up in Louisville, but Lexington's news channels are more than adequate.
Just for variety, in case some Louisville or Cincinnati stations had subchannels that weren't carried in Lexington. Also, some stations pre-empt network and syndicated programs, our local ABC station in Columbia SC (WOLO-25) pre-empts Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy for pastime, usually connected to sporting events. If you have a good, high-gain antenna in Columbia, you can get Charlotte and Augusta, the distances are similar to Louisville and Cincinnati from Lexington. Stations in those cities might not pre-empt those shows on a given night.
The Lexington situation was a holdover, as I said, from when Lexington only had two TV stations, and full network schedules for all three networks was only available from Louisville or Cincinnati. Also, both WLEX and WKYT (and later, WBLG/WTVQ) were UHF, and reception was more difficult, that coupled with the inadequate UHF tuners on TV sets through the 1980s. Some might have preferred to get good, solid, hard signals on Louisville and Cincinnati VHFs, along with the "interest factor" of getting news from two larger cities. Franklin County didn't move from the Louisville to the Lexington TV market until either the late 1970s or early 1980s, I'd have to look up an exact date. As far as I am aware, some Cincinnati stations are still carried on cable in Georgetown, Paris, and WXIX-19 is also carried in Winchester and Mount Sterling. Lexington used to be a very small TV market.
The first house I lived in in west Lexington had an antenna a previous owner had installed on the ceiling. With it that house could get Wave3 and sometimes WHAS 11 out of Louisville. It was mainly of interest if there were severe storms moving in from the west, otherwise you can watch the same national shows on Lexington stations. That was with an analog signal, the new digital doesn't travel nearly as far.
Ceiling, or roof? You can install an antenna on a ceiling, I suppose, if it is a flat horizontal antenna such as a yagi, find some way to suspend it from something. What I had in mind were those 30' masts you would see on the sides of homes, with VHF yagi or log-periodic (the best) antennas, sometimes combined on the same boom with UHF corner reflectors, or separate UHF antennas which could be either yagis, corner reflectors, multi-bay bowties, or even large parabolic reflectors (the best for UHF). Stations received would usually have been Louisville WAVE-3, WHAS-11, and possibly WLKY-32 and/or WDRB-41, and Cincinnati WLWT-5, WCPO-9, WKRC-12, and possibly WXIX-19. WXIX was long a very popular independent station either OTA or on cable everywhere east of Shelbyville and north of I-64 to the WV state line, and was even carried on cable in Huntington and Charleston WV. Great movie station!
I guess you can tell I'd like to have that kind of antenna mast and array here in Columbia SC. If I had that, I could get similar results from Augusta GA, Charlotte, and possibly even Florence/Myrtle Beach (MB itself would be a stretch). At that point, my HOA would pitch a fit, and antennas longer or wider than one meter don't enjoy FCC OTARD protection. OTARD says that the antennas have to be for "local" reception, but hey, if the antenna is 1 meter or less, and if one of my locals just "happens" to be between me and Charlotte or Augusta, well, that can't be helped We have already had an OTA antenna or two to go up in our HOA, fairly discreet little contraptions, haven't heard of it being a problem. People are cutting the cord!
Digital reception versus analog reception is a mixed bag. On the one hand, "you either have it or you don't", there is no snowy-picture factor --- in difficult reception areas, people learned to be very forgiving of suboptimal signals. As long as you can lock the signal, you're good to go, no matter how far away you are. As a practical matter, though, distant reception tends to be difficult, one reason being that stations are horribly short-spaced compared to analog days. I really think the FCC got a little too happy reducing the spectrum to channels 2-36 (and channels 2-6 are rarely used in digital), and of course there were the stations that wanted to sell their spectrum and piggy-back on another station's signal using channel-sharing. I really think we're going to end up not being able to receive any signals outside our own local markets, due to short-spacing (signals from two distant cities essentially cancel each other out halfway between) and reduced power in some cases.
Last edited by IM42A; 01-04-2021 at 06:25 PM..
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We have already had an OTA antenna or two to go up in our HOA, fairly discreet little contraptions, haven't heard of it being a problem. People are cutting the cord!
