[Scan-DC] More TV DX

[b_thom at juno.com]

>From the DCRTV.com mailbag.
http://www.dcrtv.com/mailbag.html

Calling all DXers and skip junkies... For no good reason, at about 6:25 pm I turned on my handheld Casio analog TV and scanned the airwaves. Down around Channel 2 (this thing has continuous tuning and no good indicator) I got a signal that is the most erratic I've ever seen. Plus, the TV has a real hard time getting horizontal sync; something that was never a problem with this set in the past. The picture will pop in for about half a second at a time; never got color or sound. It looks like a news program; at one point it had what looked like a map of France. I'm thinking trans-Atlantic skip. Is that unreasonable? ~~CA in BC (7/16/08)

In checking with my sources, the station on channel 2 which the poster saw was likely CMBA-TV in Havana. It's the key station for Cadena Tele Rebelde and reportedly runs 132KW visual. It;s also known to call itself "Tele Habana" on-air. There are a few other channel 2's in Cuba but they would be called LPTV'a here in the 'States. The Cuban networks we're likely to see via Es are: Cubavision, Tele Rebelde, Canal Educativo, and Canal Educativo 2. One thing DTV took away is the reiprocity of Es. When the Cuban stations were seein in the U.S. during the analog era, U.S. TV's were being seen in Cuba. Very interesting place to DX from... (7/17/09)

Three small comments: 1) That long-distance Channel 2 with a map of France could have been CBFT in Montreal, where they have NOT converted to all digital. This is just an alternative theory to the one about it being from Cuba. 2) When The New York Times sold its FM radio station, it got $33M for moving from 96.3 to 105.9 MHz from Univision, and got $11M for selling the new frequency to WNYC, a station which says it doesn't even have the money to purchase it, since it's going to start begging for donations to pay for it. Wasn't $33M enough to help get them out of debt? Did they really need the extra $11M that badly? They could have continued to try to run their radio business on 105.9 (since clearly they have known how to program and bill classical music for over 60 years) and would have only lost listeners in Suffolk County and near Trenton, and Times people don't care about them anyway, they just want to be heard on the Upper West Side and Scarsdale ;^) Plus a couple of more repeaters in addition to the ones they already have would have worked out well. A change in frequency clearly makes sense moneywise. Selling it to a non-profit that can't quite afford it just sounds panicky. 3) The Washington Times's American Morning on WTNT actually is an interesting idea, an aspiring-to-be-national all-news-and-opinion morning program where the personalities have personality. Yes, sometimes they are predictably opinionated, but the idea itself (and the way it's done here) is a good one; it's like the NBC Today Show with no cooking segments and on the radio. BBC Radio 4 (and its predecessor, the Home Service) has been doing it since 1957. -- Carl in Olney (7/17/09)


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