TV antenna

[schellem]

OP here. Thank you everyone for the input.


I have been without cable for 6 years and haven't missed live television except for the nightly news. I grew up watching the CBS evening news with Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather and Roger Mudd. DF and I watched the news every evening when we came in from doing farm chores and I miss it.

Thanks everyone.

Well if you have not seen the evening news lately you might want to watch it somewhere first. All of the major network evening news shows are probably more than half commercials now. It's awful how they tease you with upcoming segments that only get played after 3-4 rounds of commercials. The later part of the news is typically 1-2 minutes of news then 3 minutes of commercials. I have quit watching.

 

[Jerry1]

Try this. It shows how someone made a satellite dish into an antenna.

https://imgur.com/a/5ORVZ

There’s also antenna that look like satellite dishes, like the one wmc1000 uses, that you may be able to get away with.

What a pain. I’m thinking I may end up in a condo at some point, but HOA rules are one thing I’m not looking forward to. Maybe you could appeal to the HOA to address whatever issue they have with OTA antenna. I agree, you probably don’t want people putting up a mast but if the allow satellite dishes, there must be some middle ground. Good luck.

 

[OldShooter]

[grinchy]

Yes, Mohu makes a great antenna. DW convinced me to spend a little more on their indoor/outdoor antenna ($150-$300) and had it installed in our attic. It's amazing, small, and nobody sees it! The reception is great. Had the contractor run the coax cable to our first level to a coax splitter that was requested when the townhome was built and, voila, we have live antenna TV with, IMO, great picture throughout the house. They don't sell the model we got but ... look around the site, www.gomohu.com, ...

A good example of hucksterism. Flat panel antennas are old news and anyone can add a preamp to any antenna. There are better (but larger) antenna designs that will work where a flat panel is inadequate and they may not even need a preamp. As I mentioned earlier, once the signal is marginal on the line-of-site path it is nearly at the no-signal-at-all point. Modu's claims of 60, 65, and 70 miles are nonsense unless the conditions (flat country, no buildings in the way, few trees) and MSL antenna heights are specified, but the unwary customer won't know that of course.

I'm glad @FIREarly is happy, but my bet would be that there are many other antennas that would make him equally happy, probably for a little less money.

Try this. It shows how someone made a satellite dish into an antenna.

https://imgur.com/a/5ORVZc ...

Wow! Quite a piece of work. I wonder if he has any idea at all how a parabolic reflector works. My bet would be that he has simply added wind resistance to a perfectly good antenna.

[/grinchy]

 

[ArmchairMillionaire23]

There's also one on the FCC website:
https://www.fcc.gov/media/engineering/dtvmaps

Thanks for the link.
I tried the FCC site. I got the same info from them as what I got from Radio Shack when we bought this place (right in town, but in a valley) 12 years ago:
(see attachment)

No channels available. Radio Shack told me I could get two channels if I was willing to put up a 265 ft. antenna.

So FireStick™ it is...

 

[statsman]

In addition to a metal roof, if you have solar foil on your roofs sheathing or tacked on it will also be an impediment to attic mounting.

That would be our issue (radiant barrier). Pretty standard on most recent new house builds here in Central Texas.

But after checking the DTV map at the FCC website, I might be overthinking our needs.

 

[Davidhelp]

#51 News presenter: "The world will end but first a word from our sponsor"

 

[ERD50]

[grinchy]

Originally Posted by Jerry1 View Post
Try this. It shows how someone made a satellite dish into an antenna.

https://imgur.com/a/5ORVZc ...

Wow! Quite a piece of work. I wonder if he has any idea at all how a parabolic reflector works. My bet would be that he has simply added wind resistance to a perfectly good antenna.

[/grinchy]

Yeah, that article would be better titled as "I attached my new antenna to my old Satellite dish mount, and used the existing cable".

There was no comparison of reception with/wo the dish, I also suspect it's not adding much (focal point looks all wrong). It might even be hurting reception.

I mean, sure, use the old mount and cable, that makes sense. But he makes it sound like the dish itself made the antenna a million times (I believe that's the current value assigned to "badass") better.

-ERD50

 

[Davidhelp]

This site shows many antenna reviews and other details.


Antenna Man
https://www.youtube.com/c/AntennaMan/videos

 

[Lewis Clark]

" A rough formula for calculating the distance to the horizon is:SquareRoot(height above surface / 0.5736) = distance to horizon"

So if you get up 50 ft, the horizon is 50/0.5736 = 87 miles.

Should this be about 9 miles after the square root is taken?

 

[FLSUnFIRE]

I know it didn't cover the entire country (yet), but this is exactly why Locast made so much sense. And probably explains why it had to be done away with.

I think the courts got this wrong. I get why cable companies hated it... they are hemorrhaging subscribers but not the networks. The networks could count me as an occasional viewer for ad revenue but not now. Now, I don't view any of their stuff and I'm not going to open an account (paid or free) for any network's proprietary service. I don't watch much TV anyway... really just like local coverage during storm season.


Instead of local AM TV news, I just listen to news radio with my coffee.

 

[Time2]

Should this be about 9 miles after the square root is taken?

Yes, I should have taken the sqrt, the proper result is 8.7 miles.


Here is another formula 1.22459√height.

1.22459 * SQRT 50 =1.22459 * 7.071 =8.659
https://sites.math.washington.edu/~conroy/m120-general/horizon.pdf


Here's an online calculator,
http://www.ringbell.co.uk/info/hdist.htm

 

[sengsational]

To address the problem of starting with a relatively weak OTA signal, then loss of signal when splitting to many TV's, you can have tuners in the attic (very near the antenna) and your downlead, instead of being coaxial cable, is Ethernet. That gives you a signal that doesn't degrade for long distances. But this solution does require an external box to select the channel (your TV's tuner isn't used). I've got HD HomeRun tuners in the attic and Kodi software running on a Raspberry Pi. That works great. Takes some tinkering, though. So not quite turn-key, but pretty close. No coding, just some configuration that could take an hour or a month, lol!

 

[Amethyst]

Same here. Three newspaper subscriptions do it for me. Of course, even the major papers are 50% clickbait now

Well if you have not seen the evening news lately you might want to watch it somewhere first. All of the major network evening news shows are probably more than half commercials now. It's awful how they tease you with upcoming segments that only get played after 3-4 rounds of commercials. The later part of the news is typically 1-2 minutes of news then 3 minutes of commercials. I have quit watching.

 

[youbet]

Wow! Quite a piece of work. I wonder if he has any idea at all how a parabolic reflector works. My bet would be that he has simply added wind resistance to a perfectly good antenna.

My bet would be that you don't have a clue..........

 

[youbet]

Yeah, that article would be better titled as "I attached my new antenna to my old Satellite dish mount, and used the existing cable".

There was no comparison of reception with/wo the dish, I also suspect it's not adding much (focal point looks all wrong). It might even be hurting reception.

I mean, sure, use the old mount and cable, that makes sense. But he makes it sound like the dish itself made the antenna a million times (I believe that's the current value assigned to "badass") better.

-ERD50

You may have completely missed the point of the article ERD50. Satellite dish antennas are allowed where the author is located. Yagi's, logs, etc., for line of sight propagated sigs are not. So the author disguised a yagi or log (can't tell for sure) in front of the now passive dish and won the game. He's just faking having a satellite dish (allowed) and actually has a directive ground/skywave uhf antenna of some sort.

If he removes the passive/unused dish, he now has a not allowed directional TV antenna.

 

[ERD50]

You may have completely missed the point of the article ERD50. Satellite antennas are allowed where the author is located. Yagi's, logs, etc., for line of sight propagated sigs are not. So the author disguised a yagi or log (can't tell for sure) in front of the now passive dish and won the game. He's just faking having a satellite dish (allowed) and actually has a directive ground/skywave uhf antenna of some sort.

If he removes the passive/unused dish, he now has a not allowed directional TV antenna.

Sheeesh.........

[-]I did miss that.[/-] [edit]No, I don't think I missed that (see below). [/edit]The title could have been "How I disguised my antenna with a satellite dish", if that was the point. But the title is "I turned my satellite dish into a badass HDTV antenna".

Actually, re-reading the posted link, I don't see any reference at all to trying to disguise the antenna as a satellite dish, only that he used the mount and cable.

And I was under the impression (as others have said - see post #49), that HOA cannot ban an outdoor antenna.

So please point out where I missed anything about antennas not being allowed - or take that "Sheeesh........" back, please.

I think it was statsman (post #43) with the HOA problem, not the author of the linked article. Did you get those two confused?

further edit:

Here's the entire text from that link. Where does the author state anything at all about trying to hide the antenna with the satellite dish?

Pulled the cone off my DirecTV satellite dish and mounted an RCA ANT751 HDTV antenna instead. The antenna sells for $52 on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/RCA-ANT751-Qu...TF8&qid=1379456131&sr=8-1&keywords=rca+ant751

Secured the ANT751 to the satellite dish using the included U-bolt and two nuts. Used the included brackets to get it nice and snug.

DirecTV already had coaxial cable running from my living room to the satellite dish. I used the included coaxial transformer on the antenna and just screwed in the existing coaxial cable.

The finished product! Luckily my old DirecTV dish was already pointed in the right direction for my local channels. Used http://www.antennaweb.org/ to confirm.

Already had DirecTV coaxial cable running into my living room through my basement. No need to replace and drill new holes into my house.

Plugged the coaxial cable into my TV and viola! Used the "Channel Manager" to scan for local channels.

Perfect signal reception! Took less than 30minutes to install and I save roughly $82 a month!

-ERD50

 

[youbet]

]The title could have been "How I disguised my antenna with a satellite dish"

It could have been a lot of things, but it wasn't.

 

[statsman]

I've got HD HomeRun tuners in the attic and Kodi software running on a Raspberry Pi. That works great. Takes some tinkering, though. So not quite turn-key, but pretty close. No coding, just some configuration that could take an hour or a month, lol!

The whole "Just connect an antenna to your TV and you will have local channels" idea overlooks the entire picture (no pun intended). Even if you have strong signals from all towers you want, you still have to deal with how to get local channels recorded. And as you indicated, it becomes a bit more tricky if you have multiple TVs to feed a TV signal or an OTA recording to.

That's our issue. Our closest antenna farm is 17-18 miles away, and it appears getting stable TV reception won't require an outdoor antenna. Add a quality indoor/attic antenna, along with a good OTA DVR (say Tablo) with hard drive (internal/external), and your initial costs can exceed $300. All for something we don't record very often. This past year my DW recorded *zero* TV shows/movies from a broadcast channel. Now, she does record the NBA finals, which have been on ABC.

 

[jim584672]

I have a $30 DVR that records fine using a USB hard disk, clunky but it does the job.

 

[RobbieB]

I would erect a large rooftop antenna and when the HOA says "take it down", file a Federal lawsuit and have some fun!

 

[pb4uski]

The whole "Just connect an antenna to your TV and you will have local channels" idea overlooks the entire picture (no pun intended). Even if you have strong signals from all towers you want, you still have to deal with how to get local channels recorded. And as you indicated, it becomes a bit more tricky if you have multiple TVs to feed a TV signal or an OTA recording to.

That's our issue. Our closest antenna farm is 17-18 miles away, and it appears getting stable TV reception won't require an outdoor antenna. Add a quality indoor/attic antenna, along with a good OTA DVR (say Tablo) with hard drive (internal/external), and your initial costs can exceed $300. All for something we don't record very often. This past year my DW recorded *zero* TV shows/movies from a broadcast channel. Now, she does record the NBA finals, which have been on ABC.

I have an attic antenna and a Fire TV Recast OTA DVR attached to it that feeds either live TV or recorded DVR programs to any of our 4 tvs (each TV previously had a Fire Stick so there was no cost there. Snce the Recast uses my home wi-fi feeding TV signal or an OTA recording to multiple tvs is simple, not tricky at all.

My initial costs were $40 for a RCA yagi antenna, $150 for a refurbished Fire TV Recast. If your tvs don't have Fire Sticks then those are ~$30 each.

I figure it would have cost me more than $150 to have coax run to each tv so the Recast was a deal and the OTA DVR was gravy.

 

[JoeWras]

The whole "Just connect an antenna to your TV and you will have local channels" idea overlooks the entire picture (no pun intended). Even if you have strong signals from all towers you want, you still have to deal with how to get local channels recorded. And as you indicated, it becomes a bit more tricky if you have multiple TVs to feed a TV signal or an OTA recording to.

That's our issue. Our closest antenna farm is 17-18 miles away, and it appears getting stable TV reception won't require an outdoor antenna. Add a quality indoor/attic antenna, along with a good OTA DVR (say Tablo) with hard drive (internal/external), and your initial costs can exceed $300. All for something we don't record very often. This past year my DW recorded *zero* TV shows/movies from a broadcast channel. Now, she does record the NBA finals, which have been on ABC.

We are light OTA DVR users, especially since most of the shows we watch drop on Hulu the next day.

We do use it. I got a refurbished Dual 64G from directly from the company for $99. No external hard drive required. It has enough capacity for us in our light use. Tablo frequently offers sales of equipment, especially of refurbs. We have it for 18 months now and it is working well. Our primary use is to pause or time shift, especially the news. I'll turn on the news and let it buffer, and fast forward through most of it for weather and sports.

I suspect they have a pretty high return rate due to people not getting the reception they want. That's an antenna problem, not a Tablo problem. Looks like pb4uski also has a refurb for the Recast. It was likely returned for the same reason.

 

[statsman]

If you know what you're doing and/or are willing to compromise, sure, you can save on the costs. Many people don't know what's required, or they want close to what they had before, especially those who have had cable, satellite, or Internet (i.e. Uverse) TV services for all of their adult life.

Those just now deciding to cut the cord are likely to purchase new, assuming they don't look at the total cost and potential antenna issues to receive and record their local channels and decide against it. You can go with Hulu or YT or fubo for the local channels, assuming they have the rest of your desired channels.

If someone has been doing this for a while, I sometimes wonder if they've forgotten how frustrating it is to cut the cord. Or maybe it was just intuitive to them from the beginning. If it were just me, I would get an antenna and skip the DVR. I only use broadcast TV for local events, like severe weather forecasts. DW is another story.

 

[REWahoo]

If someone has been doing this for a while, I sometimes wonder if they've forgotten how frustrating it is to cut the cord. Or maybe it was just intuitive to them from the beginning.

I cut the cord in Dec of 2018 and I recall it was liberating, not frustrating. It was a similar feeling to retiring, only on a smaller scale.

We were spending $80+ a month on Dish and I just ran the numbers showing we've spent an average of $30/mo on streaming over the past three years. As we've learned more about what services we want or don't need, our cost has declined from $39/mo in 2019 to $23/mo last year. Lots of opportunity to take advantage of $0.99/mo deals and other discounts throughout the year. Note: having good OTA reception has helped hold costs down to get sports and local news coverage.

 

[CRLLS]

FWIW, I was doing some work on a TV on my dining room table. I had no "antenna" to connect to for testing. I ended up using a piece of wire looped around a chair. Being 30 miles away from the transmitting towers, I didn't get my usual 60-80 OTA channels that I get with my attic antenna though. I did get a few, very week signals, enough to test out the TV. Remember those old set top UHF loop antennas? That's what I was replicating.

And as for the dish conversion antenna, I'm not sure that the dish was adding anything to his signal strength. The dish is focused to the satellite anywhere from 10-20,000 miles above the equator. I don't think the ASTC broadcasting antenna is in that line. I suspect that he was just using the dish as the mounting device for his antenna. Perhaps he was disguising the antenna with the dish, or not.