The frugal way to do TV... [View all]

[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..