Cutting The Cord, Part 2: Antenna Madness!

If you remember the first time I introduced you to America’s Least Favorite Corporation and our cable provider, Time Warner Cable, we were trying to figure out how to reduce our entertainment bill while not cutting into our tv viewing options.  For six years, we’ve had a basic cable subscription, plus Netflix and Hulu, and all of the streaming NHK World we can handle with our Roku. I am trying to sever all ties with Time Warner… except as an internet provider.

Since most of what we watch streams over the internet, there was little holding us back from ending our cable bill entirely. Mostly it was due to two shows made for old people: Antiques Roadshow on PBS and Sunday Morning on CBS. Once I realized that PBS has a pretty amazing free streaming channel (seriously, if you like any PBS shows, they are probably there) then the only thing left was Sunday Morning.

You know Sunday Morning. It’s the show previously hosted by Charles Kuralt and is now hosted by Charles Osgood. It’s the perfect Sunday morning news show for people who hate the news. It’s relaxed with a bright outlook and reporters that prefer to tell you about the blueberry pie festival in Podunk, Michigan, or the Barefoot Contessa’s biography rather than whoever ISIS is threatening to behead next. Although they do manage to cram every dark event of the week into a virtual five minute horrorshow at the start, the other hour and 25 minutes are just a breeze, with stories on the arts, food and nature.

So for us, having cable has basically become a very expensive way to watch CBS Sunday Morning every week. This is literally the only show we want to watch that we can only watch over cable. What do most people do who still want to watch network television, but without paying for cable?

Get an Antenna!

As Part 2 in our saga of “cutting the cord” with Time Warner, today I’ll let you know how our antenna adventure went.

Before buying any antenna, you should know what you need. By looking up AntennaWeb.com, you can plug in your address and find all of the broadcast towers around you. The website helpfully tells you how far away each station’s tower is so you know what range of antenna you need to buy. Our two main towers are to the south in the Helderbergs, and to the east in the hills of Rensselaer county, both within 40 miles.

I did my research and ordered the most well-reviewed cheap antenna on Amazon that worked for that range. It is a stiff, flat panel that you basically tack onto your wall. It doesn’t look like an antenna at all, but people claim that they can get all kinds of stations, stations they didn’t even know existed!

So how many stations did we get? Three. And that was after fooling around with all possible wall placements. We got NBC, PBS, and a strange thing called MyTV which only seems to broadcast shows so old they might be in the public domain.

It wasn’t all bad. For the stations that did come in, the picture was perfect! Full HD, which we never seem to utilize on our tv.

Look at how perfectly rendered the color is on Johnny Weir’s jacket! (Yes, that is the Winter Olympics. Can you tell this experiment has been going on for a while?)

So while the picture was good, it didn’t get us the station we wanted, CBS. There’s a good chance the problem was our location. We are in the middle of a city, and our house is smaller than the surrounding ones, meaning we have no straight shot view of any broadcast towers. Clearly, we needed more power, so I returned the antenna, and got the next more powerful antenna: The same design, but it is amplified, meaning you have to plug it in, and it amplifies any faint signals picked up.

To help this antenna pick up CBS, I ran its cable all the way to the upper south side of the house! Yes, you can follow that cord out of the living room, through the dining room, up the stairs, through the library, down the hall, and into the bathroom, about the clearest shot we can get at the CBS tower.

Do you spot the DIY Charging Station from earlier?

This was just temporary, of course. I would have figured out a more elegant solution… if it had worked!

I go through all that trouble with a newer, more powerful antenna, and we still picked up just those three channels! So I returned that antenna, and upgraded to some real firepower.

Now that’s an antenna! That’s an antenna like antennas are supposed to look! This bad mofo can be mounted indoors or outdoors. And it’s big, so it can pick up a wide range of frequencies. You could probably pick up transmissions from Uranus with this antenna!

… OK, maybe not. And after installing this in the prime CBS tower location, we still couldn’t pick it up!! It picked up another one or two stations more than the wall-mounted antennas did, and that’s it. I was starting to worry that we’d never be able to cut our cable, so I looked more into the mechanics of antennas and frequencies.

UHF vs VHF – I had that covered. All of the antennas I tried received both of those. But what I didn’t realize is that some most VHF transmissions are on higher frequencies (Channels 7-13), but our CBS broadcasts over a low-VHF frequency. According to Channel Master, only about 2% of stations nationwide still broadcast over low-VHF. So almost no antennas are made today to pick up frequencies that low! And that’s why our antennas didn’t pick it up.

To pick up a low-VHF station, you have to buy a special giant antenna. Since low frequency radio waves are larger than high frequency waves, you need a large antenna to receive them. Try looking up low-VHF antennas and you will find that your selections are few, huge, and expensive. You’re looking at $100 minimum, and even then, we’d have no guarantee that it would work.

So what did we do? Stay tuned next time for Part 3 of Cutting The Cord and I’ll show you how we eventually did it!

Any antenna users out there?

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