I just found one of those old switch boxes a few days ago. The boxes where the antenna and the Atari plugged in, and then you switched it to whichever input you wanted.
I heard this picture.
Oh man, that just gave me one HELL of a nostalgia hit.
I’d buy that for a dollar.
Do you folks in Burgerland still have those two prongs that screw into the back of your TV? We’ve always used round coax here in the UK.
Always? I find it hard to believe that the very first TVs in the UK came with a coaxial antenna connection.
And of course we don’t still use them. This adapter is from the 1980s, when they were being phased out.
They’re still a thing, kind of. TV Antennas are still inherently wired this way, and need the part in the picture (a balun) to convert the signal from the “balanced” 300 ohm twin antenna wire to “unbalanced” 75 Ohm coax cable.
Most TVs used to have the twin screw connections to hook directly to a roof antenna. But at some point (I’m guessing the 90s), more people got their TV directly from cable providers, delivered over Coax, so it made more sense for manufacturers to provide a direct coax input for the antenna.
So now, if you do have a roof antenna it probably has the balun integrated right into it, so you can take the coax (hopefully through some lightning protection) directly inside.
This was an adapter for old RF tvs that were mostly in use in the 80s and earlier. They were meant for use with an antenna. By the 90s coax and later RCA (composite) was the standard on most cheaper TVs. You’d probably see S-video or component video on higher end TVs. SCART, on the other hand, was completely unknown in the US.
