free tv the way it was meant to be

sabwa

First it was black and white tv and then color and now DTV. With DTV it what i always dream of. No more static picture. And each channel able to broadcast 5 separate programs. It's amazing. Already some new new networks has made free tv more intresting, (THIS,RTV, NBC Universal Sports) there a lot more room for more networks and it's sparking clear for free. Just think when cable came alone we payed money for the clarity more channel but we realized we could only watch one channel at a time and the bills increased from 3 dollars in the seventys to over 100 dollars in 2000. We now have them where we are in control. All of the greedy cable and satellite networks that get paid both ways by you the consumer and commercials are no longer in control. free network do just as good and don,t cost you a penny from commercial support only. Just think if we all stop wasting money paying for cable and satellite the greddy station would broadcast over the air for free to make money like CBS FOX NBC ABC and the rest. Its no reason to pay them when commercial advertisement already pay them. Clarity is no longer a issue. And the program on cable and satellite you pay for are also on free tv. Bottom line if you stop paying for cable and if they want to make money they would need to broadcast OTA like the free network. Don't pay for something you can get for free. ESPN can broadcast all it 5 broadcast on one channel OTA . maybe in a years time every one will realize this because some people live and die by cable. Since HDTV come alone I don't miss cable or satellite. Oh with the money I saved I brought a new 52 inch HDTV. Best and max reception get a out door antenna. I brought mine at radio shack 2 years a go for twenty dollars. the same antenna today has doubled and will triple in time once people understand HDTV. Cable and satellite only give you one channel of each local to get them all you must have a good antenna. You will be amazed. Lastly get the antenna now while it cheap. The longer you wait the more it will cost you money.

BrewerGeorge

While I agree with you in principle, I think you overestimate the growth potential of OTA. There's just not enough room in the radio spectrum for all the channels cable/satellite provides. If one market tried to fill the spectrum with 20 or 30 channels, the neighboring markets would have huge problems with signal interference. The cool thing about cable or satellite is that they don't have to share the bandwidth with competing channels.

Now, I'd love to see three or five more channels added, but my choices (History, TLC, Discovery, Food) might not be the same as everybody else's - even my own kids (Disney, Nick, Cartoon). The thing we pay for with cable is choice, the ability to pick our own favorites instead of having to watch other people's favorites.

OTA IS awesome, but I doubt it will (or even can, technically) replace satellite or cable.

crabby_bob

I don't think OTA is going to overtake cable or satellite services any time soon for a few reasons. First, DTV is not available to everyone. There are hundreds of thousands of people in every local TV market that can't get a usable signal. Second, many people who currently subscribe to pay TV are not going to spend money to install and maintain an antenna system. They're not going to want to go back to having a ten foot poll with a big hunk of aluminum on top of it strapped to the roof of their house. Just having someone install the antenna could pay for several years of basic cable. Third, pay TV is constantly evolving and will always offer something not available OTA.

I know a lot of people who pay to watch TV. A lot of them complain but they all give me blank stares when I start to talk about OTA. Then they ask about ESPN or NFL Game Day and the conversation is over.

Small Engine

Over the last 20 years I have tried both Dish networks at my house...sure I miss Deep Sea Detectives, History Channel, Glen Beck and other programing but I dont miss those monthly bills The more I invest in my home antenna program the more channels I get

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Antennas are like Real Estate.. its all about location.. location.
http://www.tvfool.com/?option=com_wr...bc2786867f8eb2

JB Antennaman

Here is what I just finished posting on another forum:

The BEST vs. the LEAST EXPENSIVE?

The best antenna is one that will receive all channels well - with the least amount of drop out and interference.

20 miles is not the real issue, the issue is how many watts does the station produce, how high is their transmitter antenna, how high is your antenna and is there any stations near you that produces a higher amount of power that could drown out your signal.

I was talking with a engineer yesterday about a situation in Waynesboro Virginia where he had a friend that is a electrical engineer for GE Faunac that owns a house down in town. A local PBS station has a transmitter antenna less than 20 miles away and you can see the light on the top of the transmitter from this persons house. He has a old but good Channel Master antenna and cannot receive even one DTV signal.

At the same time, the engineer has a cabin in the George Washington National Forrest that is beside a hill and in the middle of a Forrest of trees and he has a decent signal.

The answer is that the transmitter has a reflector above and behind the antenna stick on one side that reflects the signal in a certain direction better than others. Without the reflector, the signal just drifts off into space. With the reflector - it shines brightly in one target area and then not as well, but good in the other directions.

Because of the reflector, it creates nulls and voids - where you can't get a signal - even though you can see the transmitter antenna. When that happens, the best you can do is climb up on the tower and move the reflector a little to try to get it to produce a usable signal in the direction you wish it to go.

Distance is a factor, but antenna height and reception is two goals of any antenna system.

UHF - trees, hills, mountains, valleys, buildings more than 4 stories tall, leaves on trees, other signals, rain, airplanes, migrations of birds, swarms of bugs - anything that gets in between you and the signal will block the signal. No matter how close or far away.

VHF - is now low power. Stations that you received well before, sometimes no longer comes in at all.
VHF is more susceptible to interference than UHF, but VHF works better in urban settings because it will go up one hill and down the next, it will go a little better through buildings and trees and things that you have in a city.

If the FCC would have removed all VHF signals, then you wouldn't need to buy a combo UHF / VHF antenna.

Winegard could sell you a YAGI stick $59 antenna and it would work well from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

They could use the money that they have to spend for development of better antennas in the VHF range on making the best UHF antenna and would dominate the market.

Consumers would only need to buy one antenna and a rotor and point it in the right direction to have the best television reception.

What's the best antenna for you? The largest one that you can put on your roof, with a antenna rotor.

If it has too much loss between the antenna and the television, then you need a good RG 6 Quad Shield coax wire and a pre amp to match.

VHF low signals are hard to receive and UHF high signals are almost as bad.

We went through all this one other time, back in 1958 when over the air television boomed and people bought television sets and antenna's and experimented until they found a set up that worked for them.

You just have to remember that back then, some city's only had one or two television stations. When you wanted to watch television - you turned it on and when you were done, you turned it off.

Television took the place of walk in movies. To see a movie, you had to spend $.25 or $.50 and you walked into a movie theater. You sat there for 1 hour and 15 minutes to 2 hours and you watched a movie.
Then you went home and there was nothing else to do.

When television came along, people quit going to the movies and stayed home. They could spend $300 - in 1958 money and could buy a television and spend $25 for a antenna and $10 for a rotor and get entertainment up to 24 hours a day.

$300 then was like $5,000 today!

50 years later, we take for granted what we got for free over the air! We expect good service for sometimes nothing more than the price of a new television - $300.00 When the television doesn't work anymore - we throw it away and we buy a new one.

But when it comes to buying a decent antenna and wire and set up, we refuse to pay someone to come and install it for us - because for years we could hold a coat hanger out the window and get reception and so we figure that there is nothing to putting up a television aerial and that all you have to do is buy something - anything, no matter how much it cost and it should work for you.

Then when you buy it, and it is the wrong side and it is hooked up wrong and there is no rotor to point it in the right direction - we come on the internet for help. Usually some kind hearted person will give advice - which we won't take - because we don't want some big ugly antenna on our roof and we don't want to spend $80 on a antenna rotor and we don't want to be bothered with having to turn it every time we want to watch television from a transmitter in a different direction.

In the end, we take the antenna down and we give it to the garbage man or we sell it at a yard sale and we pay for cable. Now we are back to 1955 when we paid to go to the movies and only were entertained if we had money.

All I will say is for you to say thank you to all the rich people out there that bought wide screen televisions, that wanted HD tv for free and encouraged our law makers to change the way we broadcast television and made it harder for us to watch.

While you are at it, you can thank all the people with the cell phones too - because they were the direct beneficiary of the taking of the higher frequency UHF channels.

Welcome to 1958

JB Antennaman

The person asked a simple question - they said, we have cable television and can receive all but one station on cable and we want to put up a antenna that will receive that station from a distance of about 20 miles.

They didn't take into account where they lived or what power level the station was transmitting on. Just the distance between the transmitter and the receive antenna.

Here was the end of my post:

The problem with saying that you only want to watch one television station is that once you turn the television on and you find a station that you like, you will want to watch it.

If the reception for that station is anything less than 100%, you will get aggravated because you can see it but it doesn't work right. That will make you want to watch it even more. Before long, you will find that on the nights that Deadlest Catch or Ice Road Truckers or American Chopper isn't on - that your cable / satellite TV will be shut off and you will be watching the OTA television, even though you have cable and 250 stations.

Over The Air television is going to give it one last shot at being number one before they give up the ghost and become all infomercials and news - just like AM radio.

Here is the end of my post here:

I was born in 1964, that era is considered to be the end of the baby boomers.

Why do I think that so many babies were born between the end of WW II and 1964? Because there was no television!

We can blame some of it on depressions and recessions and the rest on boredom. You worked had all day and you came home and you ate supper together and you took a interest in what your children did in school and what your wife did at home. You spent time with your family and at night you went to sleep together.

Then along came television and all of a sudden, people didn't have to go out on a date. People didn't have to get dressed up to go to the movies to watch a show. People didn't have to spend their money to watch a movie. They stayed home and in time they got bored of each other and felt unappreciated and in time the divorce rate boomed and people didn't stay together very long and they didn't even bother to get married.

Mom got a job and bought TV dinners and people sat around the boob tube and watched television and got dumber by the minute.
Soon the standard of living got so high that mom had to get out of the house and get a job - just to make ends meet.

Then you ended up with a bunch of stupid kids that looked just like Bevis and Butt Head. They sat on the sofa all day and watched television and played video games and got fat and didn't do anything and pretty soon they refused to leave the nest and get a job, work or do anything. Now we have a bunch of kids that wants top dollar to start work and a hamburger in McDonalds costs $6!

Octomom's that has babies like a gerbil and doesn't even have a job and the poor sucker that goes to work every day pays higher taxes so she can live a decent lifestyle and have better health insurance than the person that works.

Unemployment will reach 10% across the US by the end of the year.

The states are going broke with all the money going out and nothing coming in. The federal government is going broke with all the money going out and nothing coming in.

smdp1

dang dude, did you have a bad day or something.....I love ota...and vhf low isn't hard to receive...nor is vhf high.....the stations that are on those frequencies are actually easier to receive in the outlying areas than the uhf because of the propogational differences in the frequencies used....uhf is in most cases sketchy at best where line of site is not atainable, but vhf (especially low vhf) often does quite well even deep valleys. Yes people have to buy the right antenna for their location...yes they have to point it right and yes it depends alot on the broadcast power and height of the antenna of the station in question..., but it doesn't mean that the situation is as hopeless as you make it sound, nor is it usually as hard as you make it sound.....and this is comming from guy who bothered to have a tower built and buy the best antennas that I could find for my situation forking over hundreds of dollars, but honestly, I could have had ota for much less if all I wanted was Huntsville....its los here even 60 miles out thanks to them being on a mountain top and all you need is something like a 91xg on a 20' pole for great reception....for awhile I used a 4 bay generic on a 15' pole with rg59 coax serving 4 tvs with no booster....a crappy setup by my standards...but it actually worked just fine for Huntsville...but I wanted Nashville stations too so I went a little crazy, but I got them....no one setup my antennas for me, I did that all myself with advice I got from here and a little common sense. It has survived 1 direct lightening strike to the antenna with no damage to anything....the only lightening strike that hurt me was the one that hit the power lines out in the field. So for those who might read the last post and be discouraged....don't give up hope...research your specific situation...its really not that hard to setup an antenna for ota in most cases.

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my antenna is bigger than yours...lol couldn't resist

spokybob

And you are sure about that?

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Bob

NonMcTubber

I may live in a rural area, but I get OTA reception from quite a few cities, both very large and not all that large. And there are quite a number open channels that would cause no cross channel problems
for other people in my general area. So I am looking forward to the day when more entrepreneurs decide to go into the television business, especially those stations catering the niche tastes. As it is, I already receive all the major networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, CW, ION, PBS, and some independents mainly catering to religious programming. More duplicates of those, PBS excepted, basically have no appeal to me and can only act to reduce the revenues of
both duplicate networks.

But in an area of perhaps a million people, it would be nice to have a sports channel, a science channel, something like CPAN, or the like that currently only come on with fee based subscription delivery methods.

__________________
High definition is not the definition of my life.
But knowledge is power and HD does have some potential to increase content variety and choices.

spokybob

That was called the Z channel is Southern California about 30 years ago. It failed. People did not want to pay for service they thought should be free. I liked it though because I could watch unedited movies and some Dodger games. I still pay for programming not available on OTA. It's all about choice. I gave up cable when they discontinued one of my favorite channels. DISH has everthing I want in addition to my OTA.

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Bob

jim5506

There is NOTHING wrong with a little of your so-called GREED.

Yes, "greed" breeds entrepreneurship and invention, providing services and products that we percieve we need, or actually DO need.

So what if cable is 30 times what it used to be, you have 100 times more channels. Our first cable system had 13 channels.

If you don't want to pay the freight then get off the truck, but don't besmirch those who do pay and much less those who sell their wares to them.

Look at Cuba, no profit there (officially), but un-officially the underground economy is all that keeps the country from sliding into the Caribbean.

Capitalism is the natural order of things, if you eliminate it here, it will pop up there.

If cable or Satellite or even TV stations price themselves out of the market, someone will slide in and undercut them and they are self-regulated back in line.

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Receivers: DishNetwork ViP722k; DishNetwork ViP211K; DishNetwork ViP211; DishNetwork 301; 2 - TiVo Series 2's; Accurian 6000; Samsung SIR-T351; Panasonic ShowStopper 2000; ATI HDTV Wonder
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sabwa

Hey most of you is missing the point. Just think why pay for anything you can get for free. As long as you pay they will take your money. But we a consumer control the market. If you don't buy it, (what do you think ESPN TNT and the rest will do? A go out of business B pick a free channel to broadcast or what. HD is a good thing don't waste it. With OTA HD there no reason for network to get paid twice by you and advertisement. We control that my friend. There are some that think paying is a good thing that's your choice. The 200 channels you pay you lucky to watch 10 of them the rest is junk most would not servive on the free market. But for us that understand TV should be free we enjoy OTA TV and not paying the 70 to 100 dollars a month bill, that our choice. You that want to pay for something you can get for free keep on paying your bill. There is quite a few few people that understand what i'am saying and agree with me. But what will cable and sat giants do if people stop paying and learn to enjoy OTA. Will they go away or join the free OTA tv to make money. You control that. Only some of them are worthy. And about the bandwith digital compression you can use all from 7 to 69 channels that,s already aligned. But that can be expanded. 6 is radio band and 5 and below will not be used.

If you want to see you market go to fcc.gov.maps. There you will be able to see the maps coverage of your stations.

When I introduce folks to HD that have cable and satellite they only receive the one local channel and did not realize some station broadcast a second third and fourth broadcast on one channel. Some went out and purchased state of the art tv and never knew of the 50 or more stations crystal clear. They rush out and purchased a outdoor antenna and cable and sat was history.

You that have reception your alignment to the tower. I live 70 miles from all local stations. My reception is 70 to 90%. I have a radio shack deep frenge antenna rated 100 miles with a amp. Only strong winds are a problem. It will take some of you a while to understand HD. I been gathering info on HD since the inception from the fcc in the eightys. Cable and Sat HD picture is second to OTA.

BrewerGeorge

You're missing the point.

Sure, most of us only watch 10 channels or so. The salient point is WHICH 10 do you watch?

Like I said, I'm Discovery, History, TLC, Science, Food, Outdoor, etc.
My kids are Disney, Nick, MTV...
My mother like the freaking shopping channels, gardening and crafts
My dad does golf and other sports, Military, etc
Lots of guys LOVE their sports channels
Lots of girls dig Bravo and E

The fact that they're all available on the cable/sat pipe lets us each choose our own favorite "playlists" so to speak, and watch the channels we like.

If providers were forced to pick the ten that everybody had to watch, they'd do it by market share (advertising dollars) alone. ESPN would definitely be one of them. (I HATE EPSN.) CNN, probably. Food? maybe. The Science or Military channels probably wouldn't make the cut, though, nor HGTV.

We're not paying to watch something/anything. In essence, we're paying for the opportunity to find what we want to watch out of everything available.


You're wrong about the bandwidth thing, too. The FCC carefully assigns stations frequencies so that two stations on the same frequency won't interfere with each other. If there were only one market, you could use the whole spectrum, but there are lots of markets with lots of overlap. That means city A can't use channel 15 for ESPN because city B 50 miles away is already using 15 for NBC. Spread that concept out across a flat map and each market realistically has 15 or 20 usable frequencies that would not be in danger of being drowned out by their neighbors. (Sure, sure, very directional antennas and rotors would help this, but then you're getting into the $500+ range for the setup and that's out of bounds for a lot of people. Not to mention that such an expensive system would then become the minimum system required for all people wanting any OTA signal - the extra expense would be required not to get additional channels as now, but to exclude all the noise from the neighbors so you could get anything at all.

electrictroy

Yes nothing wrong with greed.

It's why I force my boss to pay me $40/hour instead of working for free. People who set-up private businesses are no different - they need to feed their families just the same as we do. Bullshit, bullshit, and more bullshit.

My local NBC station was broadcasting on UHF58 and it was VERY difficult to get a signal due to trees blocking the signal & reflections off nearby buildings (multipath). Now they switched to VHF and the signal is 100% all the time. I definitely would not have wanted to stay with UHF.

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TV Band/whitespace Devices will block my Baltimore/Philly stations. No more channels 2,3,6,10,11,12,13,17,35,45,57,61,65

spokybob

My experience is just the opposite of yours. UHF 58 was easy to receive with indoor antenna. Now VHF-LO RF4 is impossible except with a large roof antenna. Yes, I have trees in my neighborhood also.

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Bob