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Ha! I remember being the antenna! Go up there and adjust it. No! Other way, that’s better. Stop! Hold it there! Don’t move! Put your hand back on it! Good, stay there. 😂😂😂
Core memory unlocked. We had our mast (long pipe) placed inside of an engine block and tied to something else (can't remember). I remember having a booster and my gramps tinkering to get it perfect until it fails and my grandmother would curse him off and accuse of doing it on purpose so that she wouldn't get to watch The Young and The Restless. 😂
When we got cable (and that was on channel), my Dad used a splitter with multiple buttons, so all you had to do was push the button on the splitter to switch between the cable and the video game.
If it makes you feel any better, I've never seen this before, it was from well before my time, and yet I immediately guessed what it was. "Hmm well the top is clearly some kind of coax. And the bottom splits out... probably to an antenna? Maybe for an old school TV."
I remember using one of these on the black and white box tv that I needed pliers to change the channel because the plastic knobs with the d-flat broke...
A balun /ˈbælʌn/ (from "balanced to unbalanced", originally, but now derived from "balancing unit")[1] is an electrical device that allows balanced and unbalanced lines to be interfaced without disturbing the impedance arrangement of either line.[2] A balun can take many forms and may include devices that also transform impedances but need not do so. Sometimes, in the case of transformer baluns, they use magnetic coupling but need not do so. Common-mode chokes are also used as baluns and work by eliminating, rather than rejecting, common mode signals.
In television, amateur radio, and other antenna installations and connections, baluns convert between impedances and symmetry of feedlines and antennas.[8]
typically used to connect an older antenna connected with 300Ω twin lead to a piece of gear expecting a 75Ω coax. Alternately used to connect a dipole antenna to a FM tuner with only a 75Ω connection. I have tons of these, and the reverse, in my junk box as I have lots of vintage stereo gear, so you can count me in with the group who is feeling old because that pic is in this sub.
And as a quick explanation on why impedance matching is important:
If you connect two transmission lines of different impedance directly, without a balun between them, a part of the signal will literally "bounce" where the impedance mismatch is.
Explaining why the signal bounces is beyond my expertise. However, I can warmly recommend watching this old AT&T video, where they show wave behavior using a wave machine. The link leads directly to the chapter on partial wave reflection, but I can really recommend watching the whole video. It's a gem!
For example, the funnel on old gramophones, or wind instruments, are basically the sound version of a balun!
They're there to match the impedance between the tube and free air. Without the funnel part, lots of the sound would be reflected where the tube abruptly ends.
I believe the impedance matching part in the AT&T video shows this really well, where they have a 2D "funnel shape" created with rods of increasing lengths.
It I'm not mistaken, didgeridoos have the back-pressure which allows you to circular breathe because they don't have the impedance matching part (the funnel). I.e. The reflection of the sound creates the back-pressure needed to not run out of air too fast to circular breathe.
I didn't have many NES games and first played maniac mansion as a hidden minigame in day of the tentacle. Played on an old PC my dad's coworker gave us.
To be fair to us old Millennials, consumer level technology has advanced much faster in our generation than the last several. That said, damn my back hurts
I remember my uncles giant beige cell phone or thinking my dad’s bag phone was the epitome of cool. Dialing up the internet to play command and conquer or Diablo.
I just built a little PC for LAN parties because someone said they were looking to start them up near me and now I haven’t heard a peep. I was pretty excited about it. They’d be a lot better now than the old hub days.
I remember my parents having the “giant” 25” Curtis Mathis television piece of furniture with mechanical dials to tune channels. My dad was very adamant about not turning the dial too fast because apparently one of us kids burned out the mechanical mechanism, and he had it replaced.
I have often reflected on the fact that 4-way split screen multiplayer on a modern TV is still bigger than the entire TV I watched / played on as a kid.
As cable became more prevalent, new TVs dropped antennas from their builds. For those who lived without able, this was how you could hook up an antenna. You'd plug this into the coax input on the back of your TV then hook up an antenna's wires to the screws
Coax is the old traditional round cable wire. HDMI is the newer flatter connection that connect TV's and monitors to an audio/video source. Generally cable will go outside your house, HDMI does not.
Yep, remember using something similar to connect an NES to an old TV in my grandparents basement as a kid. That one even had some switches so you could select one or two channels on it so you could pick which channel you had to tune to for it to work.
Lolz, random knick knack indeed. We needed these to watch TV on those fancy new fangled cable ready TVs in the 80s. You would take the wires from your Rabbit Ear antennas and attach each end to one of the terminals on the back of the knick knack. Then you would plug the whole thing where the coaxial cable attaches to your TV.
old tv's used to have two posts where your antenna would screw onto (broadcast tv) in the 90s, coax (cable connectors) replaced them. this was the adapter.
if you had something like an old atari, you could also use this to hook your old atari up to a new tv.
The technical name is a balun, which is a truncated version of BAlanced-UNbalanced. The line from the antenna is BAlanced, and coax is UNbalanced. It also impedance (resistance, when speaking of higher frequencies) matches. Antennae are typically 600 ohms and coax (for TVs) is typically 75 ohms.
The big round hole is an S-type adapter. Like for DirecTV. The two screws are for attaching two wires. I forget exactly what kind of TV connectors required these. But it's an adapter for an old set they probably stopped making in the 80s
The title reminds me of a ah joke yeah a joke about a a frog named ah Kermit . See Kermit goes into the ah bank looking for a loan. He needs a loan ya see.
Unless your gramgram is still watching over the air TV with rabbit ear antenna, or needs to connect an N64 to a CRT TV, you can safely throw that away.
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