Anybody use an antenna for TV?

[ftwildernessguy]

I have had it with paying more money every year to the lousy cable company for poor service and a bunch of channels I don't want in the first place. So I'm going back to basics and back to the antenna. I'm doing the research now and loving it, but my wife is just shaking her head. Looks like in my area I am going to need a long range antenna with a signal amplifier. Anybody use antenna? How far are you from the towers and what do you use? How is your reception? I have an HDTV converter I bought for the trailer but will use it in the house since my TV has an NTSC tuner.

 

[kmccain]

We went to NC a couple weeks ago. They have to be switched over to HD in Sept so we put our converter box on & I tried it today in the yard and our reception is better with it.

I think you'll be sorry this winter when there's nothing else to do, everything keeps going up.

We don't have time to watch the movies if you rent them! We only have the basic cable. Its a small price to pay for entertainment

I am with Fortwildernessgal!

 

[VACAMPER]

Jim, i've been considering this myself. Johnny and I do not watch very much television. We're basicly paying all that money for cartoons. We get great reception for local channels because we are way up on a hill. We just have a cheap antenna.

 

[Shan-man]

I bought a pretty decent amplified antenna to try to use in unison with my Dish (so I could save $5 per month local channel charge) and, even though I am within 15 miles of downtown I got spotty reception. When the signal was good it was incredible... every bit as good as HD satellite. But the picture tends to drop and skip. That's the real trouble with digital. You either get enough data to draw the screen of you don't, and when you don't it's not a little snow that you deal with but a hiccup in your program. To make matters worse, when the signal drops I get a big box in the middle of the screen saying the signal was lost, and that box persists for several seconds even if the signal comes back. I pay $5 extra now!

 

[2goofycampers]

I feel your pain Jim, every time the Dish bill comes in I say I can't believe it costs this much $ to watch TV. We live too far away to get a signal without it, so we are stuck.

 

[LarryJ]

I have had it with paying more money every year to the lousy cable company for poor service and a bunch of channels I don't want in the first place. So I'm going back to basics and back to the antenna. I'm doing the research now and loving it, but my wife is just shaking her head. Looks like in my area I am going to need a long range antenna with a signal amplifier. Anybody use antenna? How far are you from the towers and what do you use? How is your reception? I have an HDTV converter I bought for the trailer but will use it in the house since my TV has an NTSC tuner.

Even with the converter boxes when the real changeover happens I think a lot of folks are going to be surprised. What most don't realize is that probably 99% of the new DTV channels are in the UHF not VHF band and if you can't get good UHF reception now for stations located around where your current VHF stations are then you're not going to get very good tv reception. UHF is very good, but has it's quirks like weather and I live about a mile from a final approach path to Dulles airport and when using the converter box I can see a plane on approach and see the signal break up for a couple of seconds. I only live about 30 miles from most of the stations and I'm just hoping that they are not yet transmitting full power and I have a top of the line UHF/VHF antenna and it's still marginal where I'm at. VHF works great and I don't have the local channel option yet on my DirecTV service, but that will probably change next year if things don't get better when the official switchover happens.

Larry

 

[ntsammy5]

I tried it earlier this year just to see if it would work - not too well - we have DirectTv and service is pretty good - I hate Time Warner so if that was my only option I might live with an antenna.


Oh, make sure you remote it though...... don't want any incoming!

 

[big kahuna1]

Whats an antenna?

Went with HD 1080P and will never go back to plain ole regular TV.

 

[des1954]

We have DirectTV and love it. We just upgraded to HD & I cannot believe how crystal clear the HD stations are!! The only thing lacking is "smell-a-vision"! We did have an amplified antenna for the local stations and it got crap reception - and you know how flat Florida is! So I bit the bullet & pay an extra $5/month for the locals. I can't even imagine trying to get reception with an antenna if there are hills or mountains in the way.

We had CATV until it finally dawned on us we couldn't take cable to FtW! That was sometime in the mid-90's!

As the commercial says.... friends don't let friends watch cable!

 

[bradisgoofy]

I'm really on the losing side, here. We have Dish Network, (had it for years), basic cable (for high speed Internet), AND an antenna (for local stations). We added the antenna to get the HD local channels when we got our first HDTV (we now have five including the two in the Coach). Just so you know, the bat wing antennas on most campers works great for digital channels and HDTV without adding anything.

Jim, we have a high end Winegard that the home owners insurance paid for after a bad storm. We are 50 miles from the antenna "farm" for all the channels out of Lansing, Michigan so we don't need to move the antenna rotor for different networks. We get signal strengths of 99 to 100 out of 100 so we are very happy with the setup.

 

[ftwildernessguy]

I tried it earlier this year just to see if it would work - not too well - we have DirectTv and service is pretty good - I hate Time Warner so if that was my only option I might live with an antenna.


Oh, make sure you remote it though...... don't want any incoming!

I plan on setting up at night on top of my neighbor's house. That way, he'll catch any rounds meant for me.

 

[PanFanAL]

I lived with just an antenna for about six years, but this January I went with Dish. My reception had just gotten horrible. I don't understand how the same channels I watched as a child off an antenna have gotten such bad reception. The towers haven't moved. Anyway, the Dish is not that expensive, and the picture is awesome.

 

[YodaGirl]

We don't have cable. We've had Direct TV (it went out anytime it sprinkled) and we've had cable, but it just wasn't worth the money to us. Plus, once I quit work to stay home, we had to save money somewhere.