For ten years, my commute took me along Route 128, no longer dubbed “America’s Technology Highway.” On my way home, if I wasn’t stopping at Sight & Sound, the LaserDisc store in Waltham, I would sometimes hang out at You-Do-It Electronics in Needham.
As you can see, there’s a TV transmitter tower near the store. There are more of them on the other side, as those guy wires show. The Yagi directional outdoor antenna I have on the porch is pointed precisely at those towers, some 15 miles away.
I’m sure the engineers working at those nearby TV stations helped to keep You-do-it in business all of these years, but now the store is scheduled for closure. Boston and America’s Technology Highway aren’t what they used to be.
Oh that is a tragedy. First Radio Shack, now YDI. I’m sure I’m part of the reason, in that I did most of my shopping of that sort online for the past, hmm, 15+ years. Thank goodness there’s MicroCenter, which is in fact closer to me, but YDI was really a hobbyists’s dream.