The Art of Zen Living

I’m considering dropping cable TV after the spring season.  There are only 2 shows I watch on cable channels that I consider “must see” - and both of them are ending this season.  There are plenty of good shows on the major networks to keep me entertained.  There is a post coming about limiting TV period, or cutting it out all together, but this is not that post.

So I started looking around for an antenna for my TV.  I was a little shocked by the wide selection (and the prices!  $25 to over $100???  For an antenna?).  I suspected that since the “HDTV” antenna was sitting right next to regular old coax cable marketed as “HDTV READY!” with a fair markup, there may be some hype going on.

Back to the internet to do some research before I spend “dumb money”.

As it turns out (as I suspected), an HDTV signal is broadcast over the air in the same manner that TV has always been broadcast.  The difference is in the tuner, not the antenna.  Something else I learned is that there are a lot of people making their OWN antennas.  Hmmm.

So I grabbed a basic design, and decided to go “all out”.  I bought the screws (98 cents) the washers (88 cents) and the UHF/VHF Transformer (sounds impressive, doesn’t it? $3.79 at Lowes).  The board, wire coat hangers and cable TV cable were all “reclaimed” or “found”.  Total cost to me was under $6.  That’s a savings of $14 over the cheapest “store bought” rabbit ears I could find, and given the nature of rabbit ears I have no doubt that this works far better (just take my word on the engineering techno mumbo jumbo, K?  THX!)

I used this design (video). It took me about an hour while watching Reaper yesterday afternoon.  Hooked it up today, and get a BETTER picture than Comcast for the local HD stations.  I pick up about 24 stations total, although 6 of those are “regular” and “HD” versions of the same station.

I’ll get some pictures up later, but I’m quite pleased with myself.