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Aynone know anything about Antenna television?
hypernova:
I'm smack dab in the middle of Cincinnati and Dayton, so I've got channels both way. Since Cincy's a bigger market, I opt for it.
I use a Clearstream antenna outside. It's a great antenna. I also use a Motorola amp/4 way splitter. Works great.
hypernova:
At some point (though I've been saying this for a few years) I plan on moving the antenna higher on the house to get a bit better reception. I need a ladder to do so, though.
In the meantime, electrical interference does play a role. Lawnmowers are brutal on the signal for certain stations. There are two main stations-CBS and ABC that come from the exact same direction, and only about a .1 of a mile difference. ABC comes in perfectly fine, while CBS has struggles-a few times during a half-hour program you'll get a blocky reception glitch and occasionally a complete loss of signal for a brief second. I tried running a new cable straight to the TV in the basement, but for some strange reason, the one station that does have trouble coming in originally (CBS) does not work AT ALL, while again, ABC works perfectly fine. These stations are one degree off in the same heading at the exact same distance. This just confuses the hell out of me. NBC and FOX are also in the same 6 degree field of view. The only difference I'm seeing is ALL of my stations within my area are UHF, while the CBS in Cincinnati is the only VHF. Just looked it up, and VHF is a stronger signal, but UHF stations typically use more power to put out stronger signals since the base signal is weaker. UHF waves also typically penetrate obstacles like walls and such better, though that shouldn't matter much to me since my antenna is outside.
Lawnmowers are running right now, so I'm using Dish to watch the Elite 8 games, even though it isn't in HD. (I could've had HD local, but they would've had to install the dish on the roof, which I'm against-it would've given a view of the correct satellite.)
ark_ader:
--- Quote ---I got tired of pay $80 a month
--- End quote ---
My brother gets his for $25 a month and he has two boxes and the HD unit.
Better than screwing about with the aerial.
It is a buyers market, you have to whine and complain to get the best deals.
markronz:
--- Quote from: ark_ader on March 25, 2012, 03:37:59 pm ---
--- Quote ---I got tired of pay $80 a month
--- End quote ---
My brother gets his for $25 a month and he has two boxes and the HD unit.
Better than screwing about with the aerial.
It is a buyers market, you have to whine and complain to get the best deals.
--- End quote ---
Yeah but free is better than $25. Most of what I watch is on free broadcast tv anyway. Anything else I can download or watch on Netflix.
I hooked up my amplified splitter the other day. It mostly resolved my reception issues now. There's one channel that has a very intermittent hiccup, but otherwise, all 14 channels are working great!
Now I'm onto the DVR part of things. I've been trying to get my tv tuner card to work with my computer lately and I can't get it to. I installed it into my main pc first, that's running Windows 7 Ultimate, and it worked just fine. But I decided I'd rather have a several PC dedicated just to recording TV rather than taking up resources on my main computer. So I installed it onto my old old PC then, running Windows XP. It's a 800Mhz Athlon processor. It worked on here too, although recording TV pretty much made every other operation on the PC halt. I would sort of like to edit out the commercials on the same machine, so I opted to put the TV tuner card into my other old PC. It's a P4 3.0 Ghz processor running Windows XP. And for some reason on this PC, none of the software thinks the video card is working. I've reinstalled Windows, I've tried a different version of Windows (MCE as well as normal XP). I've uninstalled the drivers, reinstalled them. Nothing seems to work on this pc. I think I'm starting to go bald from all the aggrivation it's causing me. If anyone has any tips for me to get this tv tuner card working, let me know. It's a ATI HDTV Wonder PCI card. Otherwise, I guess I will keep playing with it. At least I have regular TV to watch in the mean time!
markronz:
Hey guys! Resurrecting my old thread here. Lately my antenna hasn't been doing that great. There's still like 10 of 14 stations that work great, but it's those last 4 that are choppy. It seems to vary on the time of day or any number of indeterminable factors. Sometimes it's OK, and sometimes it's crappy. I don't know if it's interference from lawn mowers or what. On my main TV in the living room, it gets the best reception. The coax leading to it isn't really any shorter than any of the others, and this TV is the newest. So I'm thinking maybe the tuner in the TV is better than the rest. But if that one TV gets better reception, it seems like I must be reasonably close to getting good picture on the others as well.
But anyway, I'm wondering what I can do to improve the signal. To refresh the details, I have this roof antenna:
antenna link
And I have this amplified splitter/booster:
link
Is there anything else that I can do? Like could I get a pre amplifier? That would go between the antenna and the amplified splitter/booster? I don't know too much about them, or if that's something I could try or what. So I'm just looking to see what you guys think. Is that worth a shot? Or is there anything else I can try?
Thanks for the help! Let me know if you need any more details!
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