The Yagi lives on...

It's yagi... a slight modification of which makes me think it's been long since I watched the yogi bear series on Cartoon network or even heard the ramta jogi song from taal and... guess am 'wave'ring from what i actually wanted to say about the one-quarter wavelength spaced elements of the veteran Yagi-Uda beam antenna.

Ah yeah...coming back to the antenna, it's rare to spot this 83 year old war horse in the common houses of the metros... wait it's not completed... in Chennai. It's been quite a while since I amply remember seeing a functional yagi-uda antenna. The attack of the cable operators & the dish antennas have long displaced the yagi and all that can be seen today is a part of the beams (yes common place term, any EC engineer reading this & still remembering the parts of the yagi - Gomen nasai) at places where people have not even bothered to remember they had the yagi.

Interestingly, last few days that I've been going around the residential colonies of Arlington Heights, I was able to spot...well.. let me count...26 in-shape Yagi-uda antennas (operational I guess) in 39 houses making it an average 66.67% chance of spotting an Yagi in the neighbor. My survey might be insufficient to state that the US neighborhood uses yagi-uda more than the Indian neighborhood but then it's enough say that you can visually spot more yagis here.

Those were good days when we had to run to the terrace to adjust the yagi and shout downstairs to check if the transmission was good. Mom anxiously waiting for Surabhi, dad for the DD news, bro for the sunday morning cartoons, granny for rangoli & the entire family for a nice cricket match... will we ever see those days? Now that we can record live television, pause & see various angles... we would never have to run upstairs to adjust the set of cross beams - 'Uda' diya humne 'Yagi' ko!