MIKE ROSS wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:

 MR> "Roy J. Tellason" bravely wrote to "MIKE ROSS"
(14 Mar 04 
 MR> 20:07:35)  --- on the heady topic of "{at}%^{at}#$%^ veroboard"

 RJT> MIKE ROSS wrote in a message to Peter May:

 MR> Obviously before the advent of cable, TV front ends had a tougher
 MR> time of pulling in the signal. Those early TV's were also better at
 MR> handling multipath

 RJT> Do you think that current stuff is made more for attaching to cable or
 RJT> whatever than it is to attach to an antenna?  I wonder how it's going
 RJT> to be when all that digital stuff finally hits the stores...

 MR> One would correctly assume the more expensive top of the line 
 MR> models would have better tuners

I don't know if that's necessarily a correct assumption.  I remember
hearing that certain brands had a better "front end" than others,
 Zenith and Sony in particular,  but not that this applied to any given
models.  This was also some time ago and I don't know that this would still
apply.

 MR> but most of the cheaper TVs radiate so much noise from their own 
 MR> microcontroller circuitry as to make off-air signals nearly 
 MR> unwatchable on some channels.

That's another aspect of it I hadn't considered.  The last time I was
working on TV sets there weren't any microcontrollers in there.

 MR> When did the FCC start allowing this kind of TV to be sold? The 
 MR> Reagan years?

I think that they only worry about stuff that would radiate beyond its own
cabient and interfere with _other_ gear.  No regulation of how well (or
not) something works...

 RJT> While I'm at it,  I wonder how those various tv cards do in this
 RJT> regard?

 MR> The tv cards are good but need a really clean pc rfi wise since
 MR> most are real pigs, especially monitors and other peripherals. You
 MR> can check this out by turning up the volume on your sound card to
 MR> max. The noises in the background are being detected by the audio
 MR> chain transistor junctions on the sound card.

I wonder though whether they need a good strong (cable level?) signal,  or
will work off a hunk of wire as an antenna?

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