The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I confess.  I have a TV.  Not a very big TV, not a drive-in theater size TV, just a TV that our friends find maddening if we want to watch a movie together but that seems plenty big enough for the mizzus and me.  I don’t want to build another house to make room for a 60 inch television.  But I do want to watch the news and a few shows.  And I don’t want to pay for cable or satellite.  Not that I wouldn’t want to watch 100 stations with the weirdest content imaginable just to get PBS.

So it probably won’t surprise anyone to know that I have an antenna on the roof.  Since everyone went to digital, the old antenna wouldn’t pick up anything.  Nada, zip, zero.  Thanks a lot, FCC.  The first UHF antenna would catch a few stations, not most, and even then you had to haul up to the roof, turn the antenna, climb back down and see if that picked up the station you were after and when it didn’t repeat the above.  Great exercise, not good viewing.  Like the internet, TV reception out in the boondocks is for the birds.  Sure, the providers promised high speed updates, but any fool knew they were lying.  And now that the pandemic has forced us all into quarantine, the internet with everyone logged on is reminiscent of the old dial-up days with buffering that lasts longer than TV commercials.

A week ago I did some buffered research on TV antennas, ordered one online and got it a few days later.  The old one, which actually wasn’t very old at all, had replaced the previous one that refused, no matter what compass direction I pointed it, to pick up PBS.  PBS, we learned through further internet buffered research, had a slightly weaker signal than any other station this side of Portland or San Francisco.  Close, but no cigar, so I figured get a slightly bigger antenna but maybe not as big as a large array telescope.  With high hopes and plenty of pessimism I hauled the new aluminum job up to the roof peak, attached it to the metal mast, pointed it in the direction of Seattle and Gomorrah, climbed back down the ladder and turned on the TV.  Wow.  The stations were really a lot crisper, all of them.

All of them except PBS.  Which didn’t come in at all.  PBS asks us for contributions all the time.  Maybe when they offer a repeater station instead of a cheesy coffee mug for a donation of 120 bucks a year, they might have a shot.  Until then, they can quit asking.

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