Why have rabbit ears?

[Radio]

When I bought my portable 12 vdc TV I also picked up a set of $8 "rabbit :rabbit: ears" antenna for it.

Advertising on the packaging suggested having a set of rabbit :rabbit: ears around the house is a good idea for when the cable goes out, as in storms or what ever. And I would agree, getting the power turned back on is a priority but the cable can be out for days...

So add rabbit :rabbit: ears to the list of stuff on your prepper list.

It does always amuse me during a good winter storm when the weatherman comes on the TV and says "250,000 homes are without power" during wall-to-wall coverage of the storm. So I'm like... well? who is watching this then if no one has power?

[N3LYT]

It's part of the magic rabbit ears, we don't need no stinking power. I was listening to NPR with my IC7000 and a 6 meter beam this afternoon!

[Radio]

When your city is covered in 3/4" of freezing rain/ice, which will bring down all sort of trees, power lines, phone and cable and all that...the media takes over all the local TV channels with wall to wall coverage while almost all radio programming continues on as usual.

Practically everyone has a battery powered radio, and practically no one (except me! :D ) has a battery powered TV. So with a million people in the dark, who is watching all that TV?

We do have one clear channel AM station here, WSB, and they are all news. Everyone knows when the crap hits the circulator that's where you go for info. But it still amuses me that all that TV coverage is going out when so few actually have a working TV to see it with.

[NN5I]

Wade, it is a mistake to think there is no one to watch it. Next time you see a report like "100,000 without power", examine the description to see how wide an area that covers. Likely there will be millions of people in the area, and only 100,000 in the cold and dark.

That is because, generally, weather (for example) causes hundreds or even thousands of local outages. That's why it takes so long to get them all back on line -- gotta fix them one by one.

There is practically no kind of single power outage that would take long to restore, because there are multiple paths to any local or regional area, and all it takes is some switching to isolate any single failure to a small area, while feeding the surrounding area from some other direction. The ability to do this is not an accident; it is the result of hard planning.

Huge numbers of local neighborhood-wide failures, on the other hand, require huge numbers of repair crews and take a long time.

There can be system-wide failures that put everyone down. In the Northeast Blackout of August 14, 2003, nearly the whole northeastern quarter of the USA (45 million people) was out, along with a huge area in Canada (10 million people). Within about 36 hours nearly everyone was back on the grid.

In the Northeast Blackout of November 9, 1965, most of NYC was darkened, along with parts of Michigan, Ohio, and other places; but some of Brooklyn and several counties on Long Island and in New Jersey were spared. Before 7:00 am the next day, all of NYC was back on line. Other areas took longer, but nowhere did it take half a week.

But when there are thousands and thousands of local outages, as in big ice storms taking limbs off trees for example, it can take weeks. These never put down whole metropolitan areas, though, and usually not even entire neighborhoods.

So, if the TV station has power, so will many of its watchers almost always.

[N3LYT]

True but when we had the ice storm in Maine in 98 the only ones with power were in the metro area with underground power. I remember a comment in QC Canada where the ice brought down high tension towers a woman asked about when she might have power again and was not happy with the answer she asked what she should do the lineman said "move".

[Radio]

In any case, I'll be watching on my 12 volt TV with its $8 rabbit :rabbit: ears.

:)

But since I bought the generator not a single snowflake has fallen anywhere near my house. The guy at the store said that would happen.

[N3LYT]

People just don't realize how amazing a generator really is until they have one!

[wa8yxm]

It does always amuse me during a good winter storm when the weatherman comes on the TV and says "250,000 homes are without power" during wall-to-wall coverage of the storm. So I'm like... well? who is watching this then if no one has power?

Well...I had a UPS that could power the DVR for several hours,and when I finally got home I have a spare 5KW that I am sitting upon just now (Thank you Mr.Onan) so I was watching :)

And With a good roof mount OTA antenna..You do NOT need Rabbit ears.

Though,,Bugs Bunny....Does.