For me personally, growing up in the town of Drogheda about 40-50 km south of the border with Northern Ireland, we could easily pick up BBC 1 and 2, UTV and Channel 4 a bit more weakly. Even nowadays if I go back there you can get BBC Radio Ulster but it usually begins to fade as you head south to Dublin.
My mother who grew up in Waterford in the southeast of Ireland also remembers picking up programmes from BBC Wales in Welsh across the Irish Sea.
Nowadays due to television providers like Sky many other parts of Ireland have access to British TV channels. But back in the day it really depended on your location.
Have you had similar experiences picking up foreign media in the border regions of your country? What is coverage like in general? And has it changed over the years?
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I live close to the border and catch radio signals from Spain (Galiza), stuff like Si Radio and Radio Galicia. If, for whatever reason, I have to drive even closer to the border, towards places like Melgaço or if I drive beyond the Lindoso damn, the signal will become progressively clearer and without bouts of white noise.
As for TV signals, nowadays, with TDT being the standard for tv’s I don’t get random spanish tv signals on my television anymore, although most cable tv packages will include assorted european channels, including a handful of spanish ones anyway.
In Helsinki Finland estonian tv was and is still available over the air.
As a kid in 70s I remember that there was black and white (not pal) tv station with poor picture, in the 80/90 we moved to cable and they are not there any more.
Found 2008 article that claimed that 7 estonian dtv channels could be received quite easily.
For many years, starting from 1994, we had 4 Czech channels and 2 German channels (ARD, ZDF) on our TV. I don’t know how it’s nowadays because I don’t have a TV and my parents have like 50 Czech channels, so they don’t watch German channels anymore.
In the Netherlands it was very common te receive German and/or Belgian tv station depending on your location. Later when cable tv was rolled out channels like ARD, ZDF, Begian public tv stations, BBC1 and BBC2 where usually included in the most basic subscription nationwide.
I come from Frankfurt, so I’m relatively far away from all the borders of Germany, but I always listened to US radio as a child.
How do German young people get to listen to US radio…? AFN Wiesbaden, The Eagle Music worth fighting for! The radio of the US armed forces was free for us and the music they played was really very good and much better than the German stations, especially AFN plays much more music. And it was good training for my English, I also learned important things for my life. The US Marine Corps recommends studying at the University of Maryland or if you date or want to marry locals, you always have to be careful that they really love you and don’t just take advantage of you to get a green card…
As long as there was analog TV we had Austrian and Swiss TV channels here in Southern Germany, even in cable as in my state the law said that the channels that can be widely received over antenna must also be featured in cable.
With the advent of digital TV this stopped, no more pumped up signals to reach the mountain valleys. Then the German TV lobbied to have them removed from cable as well as Austrian TV had all the good shows and movies and sport events without commercial break so they always had a lot of German viewers
When I was a kid (that was when TVs still had these antenna thingies on top of them), the coverage of Austrian TV and Radio (ORF) was better than the German one. Which was awesome, because they had the far superior kids programmes.
We still recieved ORF 1 until some time in the 90s, which was neat because ORF had Blockbuster movies and sports events on that would only run on private networks with endless ads in German TV. On ORF you could watch the same movie without any ads.
Unfortunately the German private networks managed to get OFR 1 tossed from German airwaves later. But we still have Austrian Radio stations on car radio. FM4 is still pretty good.
I live in the surroundings of Barcelona and I can pick up almost daily French and Algerian AM band radios, and some summer days also Morrocian and Italian signals. On the other hand, I’ve never seen any foreign TV channel in the analogic band.
Not a thing anymore.Whole terrestrial TV receiving is losing its share every year. Now somewhere around 50%. When I was young having west german or austrian tv was a thing. These days people are having 60+ channels from their phone operator with additional features and not having to care if their tv is still compatible with what is aired.
This doesn’t really count because it’s not receiving signals from neighbouring countries but in Berlin we still have the radio stations of the 4 powers. RFI for France, SNASputnik for Russia, though I didn’t check if that was still available, BFN for Britain and AFN Berlin for the US. Those are usually not the only stations in the specific languages of course but the traditional ones.
Of course during the wall you could listen to the other side’s radio and also got the tv channels.
When I was a kid we could pick up the German channels in East Germany 😉
Still to this day the polish radio stations have been better reception than the German ones where I used to live in Germany.
Hubby is from the island of funen in Germany and they watch German television when they were kids in the 80/90s. My friends who grew up in Copenhagen region watched Swedish channels. We still have Swedish, Norwegian and German TV channels as part of our TV broadcast.
Don’t know with todays technology regarding “picking up signal”.. anyways in norway in the 70s/80s picking up signals from sweden was the “window” to the world and quite common in the regions bordering sweden. In such a way that those antennas used were named “Swedish-antennas”. Was quite a “revolution” geting swedish tv in a time when there were only 1 tv channel in norway…. and that swedish tv channel had a lot of stuff norwegian tv didn’t send. Surely it “swedified” the norwegian audience of that generation…
I live like 90 km from Czechia and have access to 15+ Czech channels since I remember. When I was bored as a kid, sometimes I watched it and tried to catch some words similar to Polish.
I wonder why they have such a strong transmitter directed towards Poland.