...there was an awful lot of antenna range cut-and-try. My mother's beach house still has a shed full of various aluminium pieces, many of them part of a range

...there was an awful lot of antenna range cut-and-try. My mother's beach house still has a shed full of various aluminium pieces, many of them part of a range of semi- or fully-built customised Yagi designs, the legacy of years of my father's cut-and-try attempts to optimise very marginal UHF television reception.