https://youtu.be/M9IiTxGB5I0

Well worth a look at pre-aggregation TV in the country!

It was better TV - plenty of local programming plus the pick of the crop from the Sydney channels. There was far less garbage and more of what people ultimately wanted to look at.

I lived in Tamworth in the mid-1990s. There were two channels. NEN9 (local commercial channel) and ABUN7 (ABC). Televisions were also far easier to tune than even today with automatic tuning.

I remember being on holidays with the kids in the late 70s, early 80s.

It was outside ratings period for the Sydney channels but the regional channel ran great movies, even though their telecine was the one newsroom camera pointed at a screen! (Yes you could tell!)

All those rural stations are shut down now. Paul Ramsay, the former owner of the Prime Network was committed to local content. When he died about eight or nine years ago his body was barely cold when the network decided it was the end of time and consolidated all broadcasting operations in Canberra. The remaining few local news bulletins are all produced in Canberra too. NEN9's station is now a car dealership. As far as I can recall, CBN8's building has been bulldozed but I am not 100% sure.

Re CBN8, I did see a picture of it about to be dozed.

This is the downside of things - a bunch of American urban explorers came out here just to walk through Prime's former Wollongong station. What a waste of money and time. I wouldn't go as far to say they aimed to trash the place as this had already been done by others but one wonders about peoples' motivation sometimes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4tZvDjiacE

I remember well Wollongong WIN-4 (where WIN-TV started from) and the ABC on 5A. Newcastle NBN-3 and the ABC again on 5A. Sometimes at my location the two 5A signals would interfere with each other. My father would stay here to watch the Sydney cricket matches from 5A, back when you couldn't watch the local match on TV.

In the 90s, just before being moved to UHF, a great time for DX-TV, I could watch the stations at Taree (8), Grafton (11) and Gympie (1).

Have to admit that I'd never heard of CBN Orange until just now.

Re the DX TV, I recall doing a new colour TV install at Beacon Hill. It was high summer and before SBS Ch 0 had commenced in Sydney.

Running through the dial here's what I got:

0 NZBC (evening news - "the prime minister, mr. muldoon...") via sproradic - e
1 Gympie
2 ABN 2 Sydney
3 NBN 3 Newcastle
4 WIN 4 Wollongong
5 ABC Newcastle
5A ABC Wollongong
6 nothing
7 ATN 7 Sydney
8 Taree
9 TCN 9 Sydney
10 TEN 10 Sydney
11 Grafton

I had to warn the client that this bit of magic they thought I had performed would not last!

ABHN started on 5 and shifted to 5A when many of Newcastle's radio stations converted to FM.

ECN 8 was at Taree. NRN11 was at Grafton. I don't remember the rest. I do have an old analogue TV channel list - Electronics Australia listed them all a few times back before aggregation but I don't have those magazines handy.

Like Robert, when I was a lad, Dad would turn the antenna from north to south when the old broadcasting blackouts were on for the cricket. We'd pick up WIN4 no worries from Concord and we weren't even line of sight to the Knights Hill tower. It probably had something to do with the fact that rural transmitters were 200kW instead of 100kW as per the capital cities.

WIN 4 had good coverage, good enough to reach into Lithgow Valley in the early 60s. The other stations we got were 3 and 5 from Newcastle.
The antennas were big Yagis on a twenty foot guyed pole on the roof. Snowy but good enough to watch Doctor Who and the cricket.

Next came a channel, I think 7, repeated in Lithgow from transmission from Orange. I built a log periodic antenna from Electronics Australia articles for that which sat on a box outside the loungeroom window. So came Bonanza.

The biggest sensation was the Kennedy assassination which we saw footage of a couple of years after I heard about it on my crystal set.

Looking at Ian's list, Channel 6 gave me the ABC from somewhere.

After SBS had moved from 0 to 28, I was repairing my father's TV, and it was sitting on a table in the middle of the room with rabbit ears. When I switched on to CH 0, there was NZ plain as day in colour, broadcasting a cricket match.

I have a hill behind me, so it was difficult to get WIN-4, so the antenna was pointed to the south-west, and this gave a colour picture with a little snow. I assume the signal bounced off a hill. It was actually easier to get Newcastle. Once WIN moved to UHF, reception became impossible.

The DX-TV time produced some remarkable coverage, even UHF skipped in, one day CH 69 at Wyong was visible. The new UHF stations just starting up at Newcastle romped in.

Channel 1 at Gympie called themselves Sunshine TV (at the time).

However, when digital TV came along, suddenly no more DX, since any kind of reception requires a strong signal.

At my Hill Top location, I can get Sydney and Wollongong at all times, even though the maps say that no reception of TV is possible.

When I switched on to CH 0, there was NZ plain as day in colour, broadcasting a cricket match.

Bearing in mind that NZ didn't have Ch 0 on their dials, I wonder what channel it was. The carrier for that channel would have to match ours alloted to Ch 0, not hard I suppose but very odd that a picture signal would make it all the way at that high a frequency. NZ would be about 2,000km away.

I believe it's NZ CH 1, which is (or was) 1MHz below our CH 0. I guess the TV wasn't quite correctly tuned to 0, but with no broadcast there, who would have known?

NZ have since abandoned VHF TV entirely.

Our Ch 0 was their Ch 1.

Re why and how you could pick up these signals, I can do no better than refer you to the following link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sporadic_E_propagation

The first time I saw this was in about 1970, on a service call at Seven Hills in Sydney. After fixing the TV, I noticed a test pattern as I flipped through Ch 0. I thought I saw "NZBC" on it even though it was well down in the snow so I asked the 9 year old sitting on the couch if she could read those letters.

"N Z B C" was the answer.

I asked her if she realised what this meant and explained that she was looking at a signal that had come all the way from New Zealand.

"Oh", she said, not at all impressed.

Ian & Robbbert.

You were picking up what was NZBC WNTV1 transmitted from Mt Kaukau (pronounced Mt Coco) near Wellington.