A while back, I spoke with Lori about the idea of getting rid of our cable. As our discounts have ended, our bill has slowly creeped up to $123 a month for cable and internet. The way they structure things now, it is harder to get onto a discount without signing a contract service agreement. Anyway, we both had some reservations. Even though 95% of our TV watching is on networks, there were a few shows that we watched on the cable. Additionally, Lori and I very occasionally enjoy channel surfing and watching something random (usually on Food Network in Lori’s case). Despite this, we decided the saved money might be worth it, at least to try for a while.
This left two problems: Getting reception over the air and replacing our beloved DVR “box”.
I will cover replacing the DVR box more extensively in another post, but the long and short of it is that it basically will cost about $500 to come up with an acceptable solution that is not laggy and does not require tying up one of our computers or our network all the time. This is a bit of a hard expense to bite, but even if we went back to cable, we would save $9.95 a month in DVR fees and eventually break even. Also, it will allow us to bring Blu-Ray into our house without paying a premium price for a standalone player.
First though, I wanted to share my experiences thusfar in getting over-the-air HDTV. Our HDTV has an ATSC tuner (the type needed to pull in HD channels), but I never understood how it worked. Whenever I opened it up, it had like two blacked out channels that were not even network names for our area (KABC and something else). After some research, I realized that with HD, you have to scan for channels first. I realized that I did not have an antenna though. In the past, for analog TV reception, I have jury-rigged one from a coat hanger, or even more primatively, from a paperclip. I knew those gave weak signals though and did not even know if they would work with digital broadcasts. Then I remembered that I have a UHF/VHF signal booster from college (the signal to our apartment was really bad because they split it so many times). I combined these two into a small paperclip boosted antenna (I have heard that a booster is no substitute for a decent antenna, but I figured what the heck did I have to lose?).
After a scan, I had 6 channels show up: CBS and two weather related subchannels and PBS and two subchannels (South Carolina TV and something else). The CBS channels were choppy (but hey, I was watching free HDTV for the first time!!!) and the PBS channels were ‘no signal’. I upgraded from a paperclip to a paperclip wrapped around a metal clothes hanger and retried it. After this, CBS and its subchannels were completely watchable and with a little adjustment PBS and the subchannels were coming in pretty good as well. I could not get it to find anything else though.
The next day, I decided to play with it a bit more, after some more antenna adjustments, I eventually got it to rescan and get 11 channels. CBS and 2 subchannels, PBS and 2 subchannels, NBC and 1 (weather related) subchannel, CW, Fox, and My Network TV. The CW and Fox channels came up as no signal when I actually tried to view them, but I was able to get variable reception on the remaining 9 channels. This leads me to believe that a proper antenna will be able to pull these channels well. I have ordered one to test that out.
The catch of course is that we are moving in June. I am going to have to go out there with a small TV, digital converter box, and antenna to try it out, but I believe I will be able to get tolerable reception with an indoor antenna. Failing that, I do not know what I will do exactly. We could go outdoor, but the up-front costs of that might make this adventure more expensive than it is worth.