Dearth of antennas..?

[Bill, KD0HG]

My wife and I took a week off from work and did a highway tour of western Colorado and east Utah. Stayed at Colorado peach and wine country in Palisade along the Colorado River.

We drove through towns large and small, and the one thing I noticed was a lack of antennas..Those big old TeeVee VHF logs out in the country are gone, and there are no apparent ham antennas..You'd always see a stick with a TA-33 in almost any town. Maybe a pair of Cush-Craft 11s for FM. No more. No ham towers or even those Rohn-20 towers for TV, half-strapped to the rotten chimney of a house.

And very few home CB installations, too. It's been 10 years since I last saw a CBers 4 el. Moonraker. Used to be you'd see those 5/8 wave CB verticals installed everywhere.

Did cell phones and the internet kill off home radio?

Well, here I am on the glass ether..


Bill

[kb3ouk]

Must just be that area. Around here CB, TV, scanner, etc. antennas are everywhere.

[Todd, KA1KAQ]

Same here. The south has always been CB central and there is plenty of metal in the air too. It's always amazing/amusing to hear that 10m is dead while 11m is screaming. Maybe more hams prefer QSOing online? 

[K5WLF]

No lack of aluminum overcast here in North Central Texas. Ham, CB, OTA TV and leftovers from...who knows? Maybe the CO folks are too busy sampling the vino to put up an antenna 

[n2ffl]

It's always amazing/amusing to hear that 10m is dead while 11m is screaming.  

That never ceases to amaze me either. I guess the MUF hits a brick wall at channel 40 (yeah sure). I'll hear all sorts of 1 - 5 watt beacons on 10 meters but not a whisper further up the band. Haven't heard a peep around 29 MHz even when there has been some action further down the band. 

Around here (central coastal Jersey) there aren't many outdoor antennas to be seen except for the occasional corroded / broken ancient TV or CB antenna. Once in a while you'll come across a ham antenna but even some of those are old, corroded and broken.

Ron
N2FFL

[Pete, WA2CWA]

In the metro area, a lot of people have moved over to cable, and many have moved over to satellite, and the old TV antenna has been replaced with a small dish-type antenna mounted to a lower roof, to the side of a dwelling, and even a few feet off the ground. You don't need a 50 element JFD or Winegard-type antenna in today's world. I see dish antennas on homes all over the place. Even I took down by TV antenna several years ago. It's rotting in the back yard. I still see lots of CB-type antennas on cars and trucks tooling around the roads.

And for Ron: there's several developments in Tinton Falls where all the residents that have satellite reception have their dish antennas mounted about a foot up from ground level. So, in today's world, looking up doesn't always show you the true antenna picture.

[K3ZS]

When I was a kid my parents used to go to Ocean City NJ.   I always noticed that every home had a tall mast or a backyard tower so they could get TV from Philadelphia.   Now they have cable and you sometimes see one section of tower used to string a clothesline.