I assume people wanted to ditch their antennas because Victoria has poor line-of-sight and poor airwave reception?
I remember that! It would just pan back and forth all day. Channel 10 I assume.
Yup, it kicked in once they shut down broadcasting for the day from M-F, and on weekends when there no programs were scheduled. Back and forth, back and forth rinse, repeat......of course no matter what dial or metric you wanted, usually the temperature if it was summer, whenever you tuned in "naturally" the mirror / image of that dial had just disappeared off screen so you had to sit there for 45 seconds to a minute until the mirror finally rotated and displayed that dial again....
It was quite the technological leap when they finally retired the old dears and replaced them with an early-days computer-generated graphic (in color!) - the "big leap" being you could graphically see all on one screen time/temps/ wind direction/barometric pressure - ***with the added bonus!!!*** - that it also included the Environment Canada weather forecast, which of course was just as inaccurate then as today