Television reception in the car

[Panrock]

The car aerials sold for 'television' in those days were exotic looking things, presumably coming from Japan or the US. They were probably wide-band, and seemed to assume horizontal polarisation.

Of course in those days (the early '70s) FM radio on Band II was horizontally polarised. I considered myself an early adopter of VHF/FM in the car (a 1960 Rover P4 100) and, in an attempt to get omnidirectional reception, replaced the single sloping whip above the centre of the windscreen with two such whips side by side in a 'vee' formation. They should have been duplexed together but were simply connected in parallel. Each one was pulled out to be a quarter wavelength at 90-95 Mc/s. 

Despite fitting screened plug caps and trying numerous other measures, I never got the reception from Wrotham really free of interference, at least on London streets. It didn't help that I tended to listen to Radio 3 (then still the Third Programme?), which had lots of long silent gaps. My set (and probably all sets then) had no interference absorption circuitry.

Steve