Kicking the cable TV habit saves my household over $1300 per year. At my prior house, the Comcast cable bill for Digital Preferred service, with two HD boxes and NO DVR ran $113 per month. No HBO, Showtime, or sports upgrade is included in that princely monthly sum. Giving up CNN, ESPN, HGTV, FoodNetwork, and local city council meetings is a small price to pay for such big savings.
Last fall when I moved out of downtown, trying to get Over the Air programming was horrible with any combination of rabbit ears or set top boxes. The solution proved to be only about a $50 outlay. I bought a Terrestrial DB2 antenna and stuck it in my attic on a piece of scrap closet rod. These new age antennas are small, only about 2′ square. Reception was good 80% of the time, until the leaves on the trees came out this spring. With a digital signal, it is all or nothing, either you get reception or you don’t. According to the manufacturer, you can lose 30% of signal strength with attic placement vs. outdoor. With the help of antennaweb.org and Google maps I positioned the antenna to get the best reception possible. You should also consult antennaweb.org to see how powerful an antenna you will need, based on your distance, topo, and obstructions. The same antenna was useless at my parent’s home in New Jersey, despite being about the same distance away. I think the mountains and trees required a larger more powerful antenna.
So last week, after having problems with Saturday’s Stanley Cup Broadcast, I spent about 90 minutes Sunday morning relocating the antenna outdoors onto a scrap piece of EMT conduit and running the coax cable from the roof to my basement, where the 3 TV feeds terminate.
You may be able to tap your cable feed if it is a coax cable and NOT FIBER OPTIC into your house, making installation even simpler. Also, don’t do this if you are getting Internet service through your cable company. Tap the cable feed after it branches off to the cable modem. When buying coax cable, make sure it is RG-6 spec rather than the older RG-59. If you are a do-it-yourselfer, this is a pretty basic project, only requiring a drill, wire cutters, a handy knife, perhaps a fishtape, and some zip ties. I use screw on F connectors and splitters at cable junctions, all widely available along with the coax cable at local hardware stores like Ace, for a lot less money than you’d spend at Radio Shack.
I get CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, ION, and a couple of independents. My TVs are 720p resolution and frankly the picture and sound are indistinguishable from cable TV. So TV can be free! Signup for the $9.95 Netflix plan to get the latest movies or head to your local library for an even better deal.
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