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Blonder-Tongue antennas, stupid question:

2131 Views 4 Replies 4 Participants Last post by  mrow2
I remember this name from when I was a kid playing with antennas on my roof trying to hang myself with twinlead, and the service guy from the appliance store telling me (my folks were screwdriver-impaired, so I carried this responsibility) we needed to get a new $70 antenna from them so the people on the 5 day old RCA 21" TV wouldn't be green. In fact, the tech had tweaked one of the internal chroma pots so that the balance was leaning green rather than centered (I found out later, after we gave 'em 100 bucks for the antenna install). Probably trick #14B in their How To Cheatem and Lie book. My first experience (of way too many) dealing with crooked business people. OK stop laughing now.


My question is to do with Blonder Tongue Antennas..... Are they made of gold and platinum? What is it about them that justifies $200, $300, $500 prices? I see that undoubtedly they are well made but it seems like that might carry a 30% premium, something like that..30% more to be better than the next best, whatever that is. Then there are units like the XG91 for something like 70 or 80 bucks and the CM 4228 which is so old the guys that designed it are dead, i.e. it's capitalized itself thousands of times, sells for $50-$70 bucks and they show great specs. What gives?
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B-T are professional products, used by cableco's, TV stations, etc. Better materials & design.
Anything that isn't built for the cheap, mass produced consumer market will be considerably more.

MATV & CATV antennas use either solid or actual tube elements vs rolled types that cheap consumer models use. The guage of the aluminum is greater. Also, hardware is usually stainless steel.


When one mounts a number of antennas a few hunderd feet up on a tower, that lst thing you want are bent elements due to weather or birds sitting on them.
Old RCA TVs were notorious for developing green pictures. It had nothing to do with the antenna.


I use Blonder Tongue antennas on hoighrise buildings because of their ruggedness, but as far as signal quality is concerned, they don't develop better signals than do most consumer grade log periodic or Yagi antennas, and inexpensive consumer grade UHF antennas will outgain them.
Hi Mike In this instance, the tech definitely went inside the set, turned something and I saw the pic shift from a normal range to a green range. The B&W screen controls were fine, this was for color bars only. Since I'd never seen a bar generator before, I trusted him and didn't know enough to complain (was all of 14 or 15 at the time), didn't know to call the store, parents out of country, and we looked at green faces for a month before the folks broke down and got the Colortron antenna. Then the tech went back inside the set, said he "made an adjustment which should make it even better" and took our $100. The pic was good using the old antenna, nonetheless the new one would have been needed eventually. This set looked great til it started needing repairs then the techs fouled it up pretty good after that point. Wonderful, true colors right up to the first real service calls. What is amazing is that we regarded a 21 inch tube as large.
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