Good morning all. I’m typing this post from my iPhone so beware of spelling errors. I just wanted to share something interesting, at least to me. I just last week started playing around with our 32″ LCD TV and found it to have a built-in HD-Digital Tuner. What does that mean? Well, it means that I don’t have to have that handy little converter box in order to get broadcast TV since the digital changeover earlier this year. So, I was bored one day and found an old single pole antenna that came with an old TV we had. Remember when all TVs came with antennas? Maybe, not. But they did! I just slapped that antenna on our TV downstairs and started a channel scan… What’s this? WSMV in full 1080 HD?! I couldn’t believe how clear the signal was! The setup was ugly but it worked! So, I started looking for a better looking solution and tried out an amplified antenna from Target. It was a Phillips antenna with a built in powered amp. It didn’t work any better than my cheap little antenna without an amp. So, I figured the solution to get the most and best quality of channels was to replace my sat dish (which we don’t use… See post on canceling our TV service) with an outdoor antenna.

So, I searched the web. I was determined not to out one of those big airplane skeleton looking things on my roof. I was happy to find the terrestrial digital DB2. It is ultra small, but does a great job. I just slid the sat dish off and the antenna on. Fiddled with the aiming alittle and voilà! Free TV! Well almost free, the antenna was $38.00. And I had to re-terminate some of our coax cables, but it works great. We get every broadcast channel is digital picture and most are in HD. The rest still look better than Charter ever did!

And let me clue you all into something, if you didn’t already know.  Since the digital changeover…  Broadcasters, which means anyone who owns an broadcast antenna, have found themselves with these little “sub” channels.  Meaning, what used to be channel 5, is now channel 5-1.  That allows these broadcasters to lease their sub-channels, i.e. 5-2, 5-3, etc…  So, now small time cable channels are able to lease these channels and be broadcast over the air, without having to build a broadcast tower of their own!  So instead of just getting the big 3 over the air (ABC, CBS, NBC), we get about 15-20 channels, including a 24 hour kids cable channel called Qubo. 

So, tired of paying those cable and sat companies big bucks each month. Well, maybe you should think about dropping them, going with netflix for $8.00/month, and getting an antenna…  Trust me, this ain’t your parent’s old rabbit ears and tin foil!