The frugal way to do TV...

[Fumesucker]

In much of the country, particularly in metro areas, you can pick up a great deal of TV programming over the airwaves for free.

A lot of people seem to have gotten the idea that you have to have cable or satellite in order to watch TV, this is not true, free over the air TV is still available. In a lot of cases there are many more channels than before the digital switchover, some stations actually carry half a dozen or so separate channels.

What may surprise you if you have an HDTV is that the over the air signal you get direct from the station can often have a much better picture than the one you get from cable or satellite unless you are paying considerable extra for the HDTV cable/satellite box (even with that it's not on all the channels).

All you need is a TV with an ATSC tuner (digital) or a converter box for older TVs that don't have the digital tuner, the other thing you will need is an antenna, it's the antenna that's really important here so that's what I'm going to tell you about. Just about all the flatscreen TVs these days have the right tuner so it's not a big worry unless you have an older tube style TV.

If you would like to know what broadcast TV channels are available at your particular location there is a website for that..

http://www.tvfool.com/

When you use the site enter your address and it will give you a radarish looking display that tells you what direction the stations are from you and how strong they are, the chart below is of a fairly fringe location, lots of stations but most of them are hard to get because they are weak due to it being at the bottom of a valley, you would need an outdoor antenna for most of the stations on this chart. Channel 51 is the strongest station since its line comes closest to the center of the display. In some cases you can move just a hundred yards or so and get a much better signal, TV signals are mostly line of sight and are strongly dependent on terrain. There's about ten or fifteen stations that you have a good chance of getting in this location without extreme measures.

I'm going to put up another post on this OP to talk about antennas..

[Fumesucker]

1. On antennas (antennae)..

The real trick to getting good over the air TV and saving that cable/satellite bill is the antenna, in a lot of locations you can use indoors right by the set, it's even possible to build your own fairly decent antenna for very little money if you are at all handy.

Antennas Direct has some good models, for an outdoor unit the DB4 gets excellent reviews on Amazon and costs under $50, it will make a huge difference in your reception if you are just using something like rabbit ears.

http://www.amazon.com/Antennas-Direct-DB4-Multi-Directional-Antenna/dp/B000EHYG9K




For an indoor unit the Terk HDTVa is pretty good and will pull in stations in a moderate signal strength area..

http://www.amazon.com/Terk-Amplified-High-Definition-Antenna-Reception/dp/B0007MXZB2/ref=sr_1_23?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1325978244&sr=1-23



And here are instructions if you want to make your own antenna.. There are lots of others on Youtube and on the net in pictorial/text form.

&feature=player_embedded

Getting the antenna as high up as possible will give you the best signal, if you are having problems picking up the stations you want the first thing to do is raise your antenna in some way, you also need to make sure it's pointed in the right direction, many antennas are directional and will pick up markedly better when pointed correctly.

You will need coaxial cable to connect the antenna to the tuner (TV set or converter box), coax doesn't like to be crimped or sharply bent so try to avoid kinking it.

I encourage you to ask questions if you want to do this, I'm a lot better at dialogue than I am at just expository text and I'm happy to answer anything you might want to ask.

I've done this for friends that are well out in the boonies and couldn't get any TV at all before and have eight or ten channels after a homemade antenna was put up and properly adjusted..

[Tsiyu]

9. I am on dialup

so I can't watch videos.

Can you explain the basics of the coathanger antenna?

I don't need TV, really, but a friend's outdoor antenna is giving him fits, so I'd love to tell him a cheap way to get some signals.

Thanks!

[Fumesucker]

10. Here's an extremely simple but fairly effective homemade antenna made from one piece of wire..

You can read about it here.

http://www.diytvantennas.com/dipole.html

Here's another somewhat more complex but still easy to make antenna.



Another diagram of the same antenna.



And here's a picture of an antenna made to that specification..



None of the dimensions are critical, if you are off a quarter inch or so it's not going to make a significant difference, it is important however to insulate where the wires cross over each other in the middle of the board and also to make sure there is no insulation on the other places the wires are supposed to join.

There are a lot of different TV antenna designs that can be made at home, this just happens to be a decent one that's easy to make, the

A lot of outdoor antenna problems can be traced to bad coaxial cable connections rather than the antenna itself, the balun and the coax should be new (balun stands for "balanced to unbalanced" and is a standard gadget available at Home Depot or even Walmart).

Hope this helps your friend..

[Tsiyu]

11. Thanks!

I am going to bookmark and show him these designs. i have a few of those balun thingies around here so maybe I will get him one made myself and surprise him.

You're sweet to help out

[Fumesucker]

12. My pleasure..

[ad2atlga]

27. DIY Antennas - I have made several of these, and get excellent UHF reception, but VHF is not as good

I get over 50 channels in the Atlanta Metro Area with these bowtie antenna designs. I get most of the VHF channels, but they tend to flicker and go out at times, I want to improve VHF performance, I have tried adding a copper element .. well I tried to post a picture of it, but can't figure out how to do that. Any suggesting on improving VHF reception?

[Fumesucker]

28. What you want is a folded dipole tuned to the frequency

It depends what channel in Atlanta you want, apparently only channel 8 WGTV is actually at VHF frequencies, all the rest are really UHF even though they show up on your tuner as the low channels, 2,5 and 11.

A tuned folded dipole to channel 8 (183 MHz) is about 31 inches long, it will look like the top image in my OP and the total length from one tip to the other will be 31 inches. Then you want a two way signal splitter used in reverse to act as a combiner for the two antennas. The two cables from the antennas to the combiner/splitter should be the same length and the two antennas, VHF and UHF should be mounted one above the other.

[cbayer]

2. You are so right.

We currently not only get all the TV we need or want OTA, we even get more of what we want than most paying customers. We get a whopping 12 PBS channels, making it possible to catch all those great shows at a wide variety of times.

Not everyone can do this, but those that can should check it out.

[Curmudgeoness]

3. I agree. I went off of cable as soon as the stations

converted to HD over the air. I have an old console TV and needed a converter box, but it is no big deal and I got it when they were doing the rebates. I was pleasantly surprised at how much option I have. I do miss some of the shows on cable, but not enough to pay the prices that were increasing annually by large increments. I also find that I can watch many of those shows online, so I am not completely out of touch with them.

Everyone who has done this is in awe of my antenna---a small Amplified Quantum Antenna. I have no idea how it works, all I know is that it is plugged in to an outlet. Others have all sorts of large antennas around their rooms just to get a signal. I have no idea what the electric power does for it. It cost me less than one month of cable.

http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=quantum+antennas&oe=UTF-8&cid=17010805155524913065&os=tech-specs

[onestepforward]

4. Thanks so much this!

I'm cutting off cable in a few days because they want to raise my rate another 25%.

This information is priceless

[Fumesucker]

5. Searching through the reviews on indoor antennas on Amazon, this unit stands out for great reviews..

http://www.amazon.com/Paper-Thin-Leaf-Indoor-Antenna/dp/B004QK7HI8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1326019770&sr=8-1

Evidently it's made in the USA too!



Mohu has some good instructional videos on their website, I recommend watching these to learn more of the ins and outs of digital over the air TV.

http://www.gomohu.com/

http://www.gomohu.com/videos/

[freshwest]

6. Those are great ideas. How about local and building interference? When I lived in very rural area...

On a high hill, I was able to get stations from Houston to Dallas to Nevada and even a Southern Californian station on an unusal evening. Those frequencies were all caught by my 'gold' many vaned antenna set up on a pole.
Any kind of electrical storms, or tornado activity between myself and those areas, made it almost impossible to see or hear clearly.

In town, though, it apppears that the signals are worse, or when I moved to another area outside the city and in the mountains of the PacNW, it was useless. Not only were television broadcast frequencies impractical, radio and even cellphone service was unreliable.

Do the two devices suggested overcome local static? I'm always considering going off line but would like to be able to keep up. Where I live right now, my radio won't get much of anything. I can get a limited set of stations, but nothing I really want to hear.

[Fumesucker]

7. Digital broadcasting is a good bit less prone to static..

If you have had a satellite dish on during a heavy rainstorm you may have seen how it pixelates out or freezes and then the signal just goes away. Normally you have either a very good picture or nothing with very little in between.

Satellite broadcasts are digital, now terrestrial TV broadcasting is digital also and gets the same benefits.

Digital broadcasting is also highly resistant or perhaps even immune to "ghosts", which is signal reflection off relatively nearby objects.

Rather like the way it's possible to play a somewhat scratched or dirty DVD because of error correction algorithms in the DVD format, digital broadcasting can correct for signal errors to some extent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATSC_tuner#Error_correction

Error correction is a technology that is used by the ATSC tuner to make sure that any data that is missing can be corrected. For instance, sometimes interference or a poor-quality signal will cause the loss of some data that the ATSC tuner receives. With error correction, the tuner has the ability to perform a number of checks and repair data so that a signal can be viewed on a TV set. Error correction works by adding to the signal before transmission some extra information that can be used upon reception to fill in gaps. Therefore, error correction has the opposite effect of compression—it increases the amount of data to transmit, rather than reducing it like compression does, and it improves the quality and robustness of the signal rather than reducing it. Compression removes redundant (and some non-redundant) data, while error correction adds some redundant data. The reason for using error correction rather than just using less compression and keeping the redundancy that was already there is that error correction systems are specially designed to get the maximum benefit out of a very small amount of redundant data, whereas the natural redundancy of the data doesn't do this job as efficiently, so with error correction the net amount of data needed is still smaller.

[freshwest]

8. Thanks for your time and the excellent information.

[dimbear]

13. A few trips from a brutal fringe area.

I needed a pretty elaborate setup to get much going. Rotatable multibay antenna, masthead amp, and so on. One thing worth knowing is that the set top boxes seem to be better tuners than some of the new TVs themselves are. I know that the one actual digital TV I own only gets one channel all by itself, even with plenty of signal, while the set top boxes bring in a dozen.

Anyway, don't be afraid to experiment with your setup. I know my best reception comes from pointing the antenna away from the stations instead of toward them--my signal is being bounced off the side of a mountain.

And when it rains and snows, the signal just goes. At least it's free.

[Fumesucker]

20. I've done some more research and found out something about the converter boxes..

The converters that were covered by the government rebate had strict standards they had to meet so they are very often much better receivers than the actual HDTV sets..

I didn't go into the masthead preamp in my OP but for fringe reception that can really make a big difference.. Keep in mind though that not all preamps are created equal, the critical measurement for a preamp is the noise figure, you want a preamp with the lowest noise figure you can afford, below 3db is best, some even get down below 1db..

A 3db noise figure doesn't sound like much but it means the amount of noise is actually doubled..

The preamp will to a big extent set the performance limits for your entire system, don't scrimp on the preamp if you're in a deep fringe area...

Here's an interesting article from a manufacturer on getting TV signals at a remote location, these people were getting stations from over 200 miles away in the evenings and nighttime and over 100 miles 24 hours a day..

http://abilityhdtv.com/info/79/

[dimbear]

21. Interesting article, thanx. Most of my equipment is ChannelMaster, always open

to new possibilities. The concept of adding additional antennas and amplifiers is complicated, it depends for its success on the type of modulation employed. Up until now I hadn't heard of this concept (multiplexing antennas) working successfully for HDTV. It's easy to see why it wouldn't work on the older analog TVs because of ghosting, phasing problems, etc.

It's a shame every additional unit (amp, antenna, combiner) is going to set you back about 200 bucks.

Of course that's not many months of cable.

[Fumesucker]

22. Cable or satellite is an insidious financial drain...

It doesn't seem like all that much until you start to add it up, it can be $1000 a year or more, that's enough to buy a top flight antenna system and get stations from all over..

[kestrel91316]

14. I tried 2 different converter boxes and neither one gave me a picture.

TV now sits, unusable. I refuse to pay for a TV signal aka cable.

[cbayer]

15. Where is your attenna? And what kind are you using?

[kestrel91316]

17. I used rabbit ears for years. They went into the trash.

I may try the converter again but they are impossible to find and I can't keep throwing money away on them.

[cbayer]

18. We use a $30 antenna from Radio Shack (TV is already HD ready). It makes a lot of difference.

[RKP5637]

23. I've been using these converters from Amazon.com with great success. For a number of

reasons we have a lot of old analogue TVs in great shape. I have 7 of these boxes and they've worked flawlessly. Zinwell ZAT-970A Digital to Analog TV Converter Box (for Antenna Use) http://www.amazon.com/Zinwell-ZAT-970A-Digital-Converter-Antenna/dp/B001DVZXC0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1330582527&sr=8-1

[Fumesucker]

16. It may not be completely obvious how to hook everything together..

If you saw nothing but snow on your TV there's a good chance you didn't have the connecting cables and/or the TV correctly configured.

When the TV "sees" the converter box you should get a menu up on the screen, if you're not seeing the menu then your TV does not know the converter box is there.

[Little Star]

19. This is a great post, thanks. k&r

[uppityperson]

24. We got DirecTV because of hills blocking signals, but pay $1/month for it.

Turns out there is a special you can add on, local channels, in many places. With an extra PBS, we get about 10 stations, and since it is bundled into our phone bill, we get money deducted so end up paying $1/month for NBC, CBS, ABC, fox, a couple independent stations, 2 PBS. It is nothing exciting but hey, it works and we can afford it.

We were told about it at the place we got our original box from. You have to ask for it as it isn't on their website.

[guardian]

25. THere is always Hulu.com n/t

[RebelOne]

31. You could get a lot of programs on Hulu for free.

Now there is a monthly charge for just about everything.

[dimbear]

26. RCA preamp TVPRAMP1R

For the folks way out in the boonies, you will need a masthead amplifier. Consider this RCA unit, newly arrived on the market, which has several advantages over the ChannelMaster unit which was the standard. It is cheaper, first of all, and also has separate UHF and VHF inputs, which is important to you if you need both antennas. Check your local list of stations, but be careful to check the real frequency not the alias frequency.

And to show that capitalism works, this unit has driven down the price of the ChannelMaster amp.

Caveat: made in China. What isn't?

Costs about 30 bucks.

[sendero]

29. Good info here...

... but I'd like to add a wrinkle. I live in the country and get a few over-the-air channels. But I do most of my viewing using the internet along with a Roku box. A Roku basically puts the "smart" into your TV. It connects to your TV using an HDMI cable like a DVD player or game station would. You generally connect to the internet with your wireless router. Where I live, my internet service is basically a big wifi, but it works well enough for TV most of the time.

It lets you watch a boatload of free stuff, but mostly I watch from Hulu ($8 a month) and Amazon Prime (about $9 a month). So for about $17 a month I no longer have to pay DirecTv or Dish $40 - $100 and I am totally satisfied with my viewing options.

[NMDemDist2]

30. we've been doing Roku for years, but i just ordered an Amazon Fire TV box

it'll be here Tuesday

[Jetboy]

32. Wood board with old wire clothes hangers cut, bent and attached to it, each other and then the tv.

I get a about 15 channels for free.

Also, you can watch many many old tv shows and movies for free on Youtube.

[Sherman A1]

33. Thanks for Posting!

[xmas74]

34. I'm finally dropping my cable at the end of the month.

I'm sick and tired of the bill. My kid is a teenager now and she really doesn't watch over the air. She watches Netflix and Hulu in her room on her Roku.

I'm getting an antenna. We have a smart tv in the living room and each bedroom has a Roku. $16 a month for netflix/hulu plus and $100 a year for Amazon Prime and we'll still be saving money.