# Why did early TV antennas need so many low-tech modifications?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-early-tv-antennas-need-so-many-low-tech-modifications/837507>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [July 23, 2019, 7:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-early-tv-antennas-need-so-many-low-tech-modifications/837507 "2019-07-23T19:18:32Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![filmore](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/7993a0/32.png) [@filmore](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/filmore)\
**Post date:** [July 25, 2019, 4:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-early-tv-antennas-need-so-many-low-tech-modifications/837507/21 "2019-07-25T16:14:48Z")

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> [@Mr\_Downtown](#):
>
> The extension or retraction of rabbit ears was presumably to “tune” them to wavelength multiples, but few people understood and used them that way.

Although now I understand why the length of the antenna matters, I don’t remember ever hearing about that back in the 70’s and 80’s. With antenna’s being so important to TV watching, why didn’t antennas have markings or something so the viewer could optimize the length for the channel? For example, if you’re watching channel 7, the antenna should have had markings so that the length was optimized to receive the frequency of channel 7. The viewer could extend or shorten the rabbit ears to be the optimum length. A modification like that should add virtually nothing to the cost of the antenna, yet I don’t recall antennas ever having that feature.

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