The aerial forest dieback
09/17/2017
As car radios became more and more popular in the 1960s and 1970s, more and more car owners had to drill holes in their cars to install an antenna that could usually be pulled out by hand, which hopefully enabled largely interference-free FM reception. The antennas became more and more clever and, thanks to amplifier technology, also somewhat smaller, which protected them better against the nasty antenna kinks or car washes.
In the late eighties and early nineties, however, a new type of antenna was added. The increasingly widespread telephone in cars also had to collect its signals via an aerial and so some cars soon had two aerials on the trunk lid or on the roof.
Some of these antennas were quite neatly shaped, but all in all they disturbed the picture and you had to unscrew them again when washing the car.
But the manufacturers came to their senses and the telephone antennas also became smaller and smaller and could finally be integrated into a small shark fin on the roof, while some of the radio antennas were integrated into the windshields.
Nowadays, you hardly ever see a real antenna on modern cars, but the increasingly popular youngtimers still show it, the (small) forest of antennas, the functionality of which is becoming more and more important, because who still has a second or third generation cell phone today?
