Antenna TV (Not dish)

Same here
I live in the country to far out for cable and no wifi
After frontier/Hughes sattelite internet that was always cutting out
I was always on the phone with them
Raised price from 80.00 to 150.00 for 10 gigs a month.
I tore the dish down and pulled all the boxes and wires out.
And left it in the rain in the driveway
And made them come get it
That part of the company soon went under by the way.
I discovered visible wireless so for 40.00 a month for unlimited everything
I get hotspot wifi and cell service.
I bought a 17.00 roku and watch anything I want
Occasionally I'll pick up disney/hulu
,hbo max, netflix or amazon prime for a month then cancel them
So including phone I'm 52-56.00 a month
Instead of 240.00+ for cell and Internet and programming.

 

If your stations are all coming from the same direction, a directional antenna works well.
I'm sorta lucky in that Boston is NNE from me and Providence is NW from me. I can point a directional antenna North and on good days get stations from both cities. PVD being 35 miles away and Boston about 60. I have one of those "fishbone" antennas that's supposed to be good for 100 miles . (Good luck with the mileage ratings, those are ideal laboratory miles)
I've tried a few omnidirectional antennas and they may work half way decent off shore but on land they prove to be quite directional and require a bit of experimenting to get them "pointed" the right way. Unfortunately you're right back to the benefits of a directional antenna which is what an omni is supposed to be avoiding.
Another thing I've found, is many, maybe most, maybe all, TVs need to be put thru their initial station acquisition / tuning modes any time you change or move an antenna. Maybe I've just had cheap TVs with crappy tuners. Plus, it can be a good habit to put a TV thru it's tuning mode occasionally because stations add and drop secondary channels and/or you may not have done the last tuning on a perfect weather day, which in many cases is not a perfectly dry, sunny day.
ANd, some TVs just have crappy OTA (over the air) tuners . A weak antenna and a weak tuner is not a good pair for weak signals.

If you're in a house with aluminum siding or foil-faced insulation you'll need to put your indoor antenna in a window to avoid Faraday issues. A window facing the proper direction may also be required.

 

I used a pipe and pipe mounts to get my antenna well above the roof but not quite above the trees. I used top rail for chain link fence pipe. It has a pretty good gauge wall thickness to help stand up to the wind. Originally it was strapped to my chimney but I removed the chimney, so now it is on wall mounts not quite as high as it used to be.
A lot of roof mount antennas should have guy wires and don't.

Even with the "fishbone" long range antenna I need a signal amplifier. Without it I get <no signal>.

 

Thanks, Dave,

 

That style is known generically as a DB8, they are very directional and this particular one does not contain any VHF elements, with some of the DB 8's you can aim each side in a different direction for different broadcast tower locations. TV signals are still broadcast on both VHF and UFH, an antenna optimized for UHF will not do well on VHF unless the VHF is particularly strong in that area.

 

I’d have a beer with you guys. Have you looked into tv service in NH? I know we are the northern fringes of getting OTA. We could get NBC,CBS,FOX,ABC and PBS. Everything else was too far to pick up. Don’t know if that has changed in the last 20 years or not.

 

All the stations we are interested in are within about a 90* range, and are UHF, except one, that is at ~36 miles out...and that one comes in just fine too, at least it does when the signal booster is on...but the antenna guy said that was more due to the length of the coax cable than anything else.

 

We still have a lot of places that there is little internet or cable service. We had redzone wireless internet for years, they sold out and turned into chit. Always going out for days or weeks at a time. Had to get spectrum for internet. Streaming tv is fine and we just have a basic plan, nothing special. It comes with spectrum streaming but we never watch anything on it. I only watch a couple shows. Will watch stuff if the weather is too chitty to work outside and I don’t have inside stuff to do.

 

Yeah, you can't stream really with bad internet. It's frustrating.

 

Yeah, always here people talk about and suggest apple tv, google tv, hulu, netflix, sling, roku etc erc etc..... and then we tell about our internet /lack of wifi and they're like oh well sucks to be you. What's really funny is when we tell the folks in the city that we don't have wifi and our phone is our internet...it takes stating it several times for them to comprehend...and then the look on their face...

 

That's one of the issues with rural living. Lack of infrastructure.

There will be starlink or other options in the near future.

 

Yes, we will have to be able to watch all the propagan....uh I mean programs.

Crazy thing is, my parents live in a more rural area than we do, and they've had wifi for years now...

 

ThomH123, thanks for linking that box, I didn't know such a thing existed. Do you happen to use one?

 

I actually use a windows pc with a tuner card in it but will be getting one of those tuners. There are several manufacturers. Tyler the antenna man on YouTube, linked in this conversation reviews several


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No water bill ( well), no sewer bill ( septic), ng is about $10 a month (cook with it, heat water with it, and dry clothes with) , and electric is about 120 a month.

High speed internet now we only have 1 choice. It was 75 a month, now 80. Working on trying to get att fiber here, which is less than half as much per month then the spectrum cable internet is. The neighbors have the att fiber, and you can see the att pedestal for fiber from my yard. So I'm working on that.

Starlink sounds good until you look at the required purchase of a very expensive setup box. It's only in test now in summer rural areas.

As with anything, there's pros and cons with literally everything.

 

And if you're like me, there's still nothing to watch, just an evening spent searching for "IT" and it may as well be a purple unicorn.
No catv for 12 years now, life's just too short to spend in front of the idiot box. We do ok with over the air dozen or so channels.