Television: Ditching Cable for an Antenna

For a long time, we had cable TV, and it was good. Then, the price got too much and the content got too thin. Bye-bye, cable TV.

For some people, spending over seventy dollars a month for television is nothing. Mind you, the only perk was that we were able to not only pick up all the local channels in High Definition, but also about twenty other channels, such as Food Network and HGTV, as well as the hundreds of other channels we never watched. And so, the decision was made to get rid of cable TV, and so I went down to the office just down the street, returned the equipment, and had it shut off. We still get our internet through this cable company, but that is all… actually, they lowered our rate because we said we were looking into cheaper alternatives, which knocked almost twenty bucks a month off of that bill rather quickly. It never ceases to amaze me how existing customers can get the introductory rates simply by threatening to leave! Try it.

So, without any picture coming from our rather large television now sitting in the living room just waiting for us to pop a DVD or Blu-Ray in, or maybe even play the Wii, I decided to see if the TV had a built-in antenna. Turned it on, hit Channel Search, and waited. Nothing. So, I got online and checked out what I needed to make this work, found that it had a built-in digital tuner and came across some video of a woman making her own antenna out of a tin can, a nail, a coax cable with one end stripped and some duct tape. I had all these materials and decided, what the heck, I’d give it a try. And wouldn’t you know it, it worked. Yes it was ghetto, but if I pointed it in one direction, I got four channels, and if I pointed it just a couple inches in a different direction, I got three other channels. I went into the garage, grabbed about a foot of copper electrical wire we just happen to have a box of from installing grounded outlets in the office, formed it into a circle, and attached it. Success! Other channels!

This set up was good for about a week, until we decided to break down and buy a real antenna. So, back onto the internets went I to research indoor antennas, ranges, reliability, and most importantly, price. Once I found one that I liked, with customer feedback that was mostly positive for people in our situation anyway (about ten miles from the signals), and at a price I could justify, I went to the store to make the purchase. As luck would have it, there was only one of the model I was looking at, so I picked it up and held onto it as I looked at the others and compared, since it was the only model that was both on their website and in-store. One was cheap and ugly and had no power, and the other was expensive and ugly and did practically the same thing. Pleased with my selection, I purchased it and went home to install.

After plugging a coax cable into the antenna from the TV and plugging the power cord into the surge protector with the rest of the television components, I hit Channel Search, first without extending the rabbit ears, and picked up about ten channels. So far, it worked just as well as my ghetto antenna. Now, extending the rabbit ears all the way, I hit channel search again, but this time, twenty-five channels popped up, which is all of our local digital channels, plus two analogs that are still broadcasting. Yeah, we have TV again!

Now, for some reason or another, I got it in my head that our smaller twenty-inch TV we had in the bedroom also had a digital tuner built-in, and so I hooked up the old ghetto antenna to test it out, but the only channels it got, and with a lot of noise at that, were the two analog channels, which means that it doesn’t have a digital tuner, and those can be spendy for those of us who didn’t take advantage of the government coupons because we didn’t have the foresight that we were going to ditch our pay-service for free-service. Oh well, it is big and bulky anyway, and really, we don’t need a TV in the bedroom anyway. Besides, I’ve noticed we sleep better without it.

Tomorrow I will talk about the pros and cons of Over The Air Television.