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My dear wife and I, unemployed and unambitious in our old age, spend more than a few of our waking hours in our La-Z-Boy chairs in front of a fancy LG television. We watch computer stuff on it, and Netflix, but we don’t subscribe to cable or satellite. The little town in which we reside, in Galloway County, Wisconsin, is about thirty rolling, rural miles from the ABC broadcast tower in Madison, and we were able, for several years, with a cheap little flat antenna taped to our front window, to pull in a signal fairly reliably from that station and occasionally from a couple of others. We like to watch an hour-and-a-half of evening news programs, and Celeste likes a few other programs throughout the week, almost all of them on Channel 27, ABC.
Then, one day, I thought we might do better. I bought an eighty-dollar RCA attic-or-outdoor antenna that I thought I might install in our attic. The installation instructions were more complicated than I anticipated, but I assembled the thing and hung it from the metal curtain rod of our picture window just to try it out, and it worked so well that I decided to leave well enough alone.
It worked well, as I say, until it didn’t anymore. One evening last month, during a thunderstorm, the Channel 27 sound and picture disintegrated, became all crackles and confetti. When good weather returned, the channel did not properly return, no matter how many times Celeste ran the auto-scan and no matter where I moved the antenna and its lengthy connecting cable along the south-facing window.
Celeste is a good sport, a patient, look-on-the-bright-side person, and she did not particularly complain about the loss of our entertainment opportunities, but I felt bad for her when I realized, this past Monday evening, coming up on seven p.m. Central Time, that she had, the previous Monday, missed an episode of “The Bachelorettes,” which, if you don’t know what that is, you’ll have to ask someone other than me. I got the bright idea of trying one more possible broadcast signal enhancement: adding some old-fashioned wire coat hangers to the antenna and its cable, and, guess what, that seemed to work!
If you click on the little photo at the top of this Web page, you can see an enlargement of a view of the Fischer-Teale family living room, featuring the launch of the David C. Fischer Supplemental Signal Device, U.S. Patents Pending.
My project is close to completion, I do believe, but a few more tweaks may be required: I just now noticed in the photo, there’s an ailing houseplant that I hope will perk up when I figure out a way to open our drapes again to let in a little sunlight from time to time.
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