That is about when we got out first TiVO also, the first DirecTV DVR's were
2 tuner TiVo'sAnd then we switched to HD and the new DirecTV DVR's were no longer TiVo units and the reliability went out the door. Almost 4 years later they have made enough software upgrades to the DVR that it is tolerable.
There is plenty worth saving to watch at a later time, you just have to look at every hour of broadcast 24/7 for the next 2 weeks. Or let the DVR do that for you. I mean you invest in a new LCD to watch TV you might as well make the most of your investment and find stuff worth watching.
If you are confined to what is currently being broadcast, you do get a lot of crap. If you use a DVR to seek and record the type shows you would watch you will probably find much more to watch. You just don't realize how much you would probably enjoy until you have a DVR locate and record. You send a little time setting it up telling it what you want to watch, who you want to watch, what kind of programming you want to watch and a few days later you have a line up of recordings. And it continues to do this until you tell it to change or stop. And you watch the programming when you "want" to sit down and watch TV.
Yeah I pretty much don't watch that crap either.
Add to your filter, NO Commercials,
Because you can fast forward through a commercial a 1 hour show is now a 40 minute show and and the show you like to watch does not take as much of your time to watch.. Add to the filter, NO SPORTS except for the occasional Golf tournament that may interest me. I can filter on that too. I choose the tournament with a specific player or players.
Now consider that of all the filters you personally filter daily, the DVR now does it for you automatically. You don't have to waste time when you turn the TV to apply your filter.
Your openion of TV programming is not unique to you. I felt the same way, as did most every one that I know that now have DVR's. We assuredly watch more TV that we want to watch in less time than it took to watch fewer programs.
I had to have one replaced after one year of use - bad disc drive. Got the new one hooked up to my broadband router using powerline ethernet connectors. Gives you access to "Demand" over the internet which gives another recording path other than the 2 tuners. Some of the demand programming from DirecTV is now in 1080p format. You can also play slide shows, movies and audio from your PC. I put the TVersity Windoze media server app on the OverLords PC which has all our audio/picture/video data on it. To go with my 46" 1080p Mitsubishi LCD, a 5.1 sound system is a must. The speakers that come in these new HDTV sets are unbearably bad.
Cut a piece of 300 ohm twin lead 60" long
was told that this dimension was related to the bandwidth one expected to receive. If so, wouldn't there be a difference in required length for UHF vs VHS, vs FM, say?
We went through 5 replacement DirecTV HD DVR's before they decided that it was the software. The Tivo unit to this day still works like a charm, It is bullet proof. Some time this year DirecTV is suppose to offer an new Tivo HF DVR. Uverse is probably going to get my business before that happens.
Gives you access to "Demand" over the internet which gives
I tried it once in the beginning but have not gone back to look at what's out there.
You can also play
Yeah, I have been using 5.1 since about ummmmmm 1994 IIRC. That said however I have a Sony Bavia and it has remarkably good speakers. I have no idea where the bass comes from as the speakers openings behind the grill appear to be 2" x 6". But still it is cool to hear some one enter on the right side of the room and then see him appear on the right side of the screen. Or hear a helicopter approaching from the rear speakers and finally appear at the top of the screen and going away from you.
That's more or less my filter as well. The cool thing about TiVo is you can mine what's left. I got interested in Clint Eastwood as a director, so set TiVo to record any movie he directed. At this point, I've seen them all, so I cancelled that.
I have it set up to record the local news, but just keep one show. So I can watch it when I want, but don't get a backlog. Our local PBS does a lot of good shows late at night. I can see them with no loss of sleep.
Don't forget the value of skipping commercials. You can watch a one hour show in 40 minutes.
-- Doug
I'll let any Hams on list answer your question; however, 60" covers everthing including FM in my area.
SFWIW, Radio Shack sells a factory made unit which is 60".
Lew
"Leon" wrote
GOLF???? Did you say GOLF????? Watching paint dry is more exciting than golf. I am falling asleep just thinking about it. :-)
The "accepted" (on FCC tests) simplified equation for a half-wave dipole wire length is: feet = 468/MHz.
A folded dipole simply folds each leg of the dipole back to the center. Effectively, the 5' long folded dipole has 10' of wire. Its resonant frequency is thus 46.8 MHz according to the formula. Interestingly, this works out to about a full wave for the 100 MHz FM band. It might be worth experimenting with slightly shorter lengths, moving the resonant frequency to, say, 75 MHz. The gains will be minimal, if measurable at all (let alone noticeable).
The simplified formula differs from the theoretical value in a vacuum by the velocity factor of the wire, in this case apparently about 95% (from 492/MHz in a vacuum). I wouldn't worry much about it. The antenna's resonant frequency is not nearly so important for receive-only operations as it is for transmitters. A mismatch on a transmitter presents a very high impedance, causing the feedline to also radiate, and plays all kinds of havoc to equipment in the vicinity.
A dipole is also somewhat directional, with about 2 dB of gain in its broadside direction compared to a point radiator. This implies the same 2 dB attenuation in its side lobes, off the ends. Given a choice, I would face the antenna toward the signal and the ends toward the local RF noise. However, if reception is so marginal that this is enough to make or break the chain, consider it broken and get a tuned, multi-element, directional antenna. The same goes fiddling with the wire length.
Golf is one of the most spectacular sporting events ever. The only event more exciting is watching grass grow...
If you have never played the game, your comments are understandable; however, watching todays touring pros "do their thing" is a display of totally remarkable talent enhanced by endless hours of practice.
Lew
That is the "accepted" formula because it yields the proper length for any half-wave long wire antenna, including a folded dipole.
Not correct. The resonant frequency of a half-wave dipole, folded or otherwise, at 60 inches long is 93.6MHz. That is a little below the center of the FM broadcast band (98MHz).
The effect of making the half-wave antenna in this manner is twofold; (1) it raises the feedpoint impedance to 300 ohms, as compared to a single-wire half-wave dipole at about 75 ohms; and (2) it increases the useful bandwidth of the antenna somewhat over that of a single-wire half-wave dipole.
As with any antenna, the actual resonant frequency, feed point impedance and bandwidth will all be somewhat dependent upon the environment around the antenna.
Yes. In free space (vacuum), the wavelength of a radio wave is found by the equation 300/(Frequency in MHz). For example, 50MHz has a wavelength of 6 meters in free space. Converting this to feet, where 1 meter is
3.28 feet, gives 984/(Frequency in MHz). Divide by two for a half wavelength and you get 492/(Frequency in MHz). So you see, the equation used to compute the length of a half-wave antenna takes into account fact that we are computing the length of a physical antenna, rather than free space wavelength. It is resonably accurate so long as the diameter of the conductor is very small compared to the operating wavelength.Very oversimplified, but probably appropriately so for this discussion. However, I would not go so far as to say that the frequency an antenna is "cut" to isn't important for receiving operations. The antenna will not perform as well if it is mistuned, and that effect can be dramatic, depending upon how far off resonance the antenna is.
I think you're referring to an isotropic radiator? The gain of a dipole (folded or not) is around 3dbi IIRC. This is the ideal gain broadside to (perpendicular to) the antenna. The actual gain will be very much a function of height above ground, the conductivity of the ground, and the proximity and type of of surrounding opjects.
The gain "off the ends" can be very low, much worse than 2 or 3db below the maximum.
Often the proper orientation of any antenna with a small to moderate amount of directivity, such as a dipole, is a compromise. We can't always arrange for an interfering source to be 90 degrees away from the direction of the transmitter we are trying to receive signals from.
Since we care about nits today, 2.15 dBi, actually, and not entirely applicable due to the parasitic coupling you mentioned. The end nulls will certainly be considerably different from a simple wire dipole because the end current nodes do not fall to zero as they must on the simple wire.
Apparently, you were not then "given a choice."
You watch Red Green too? :-)
Absolutely! And unlike most all other sports with big money pay, a golfer only gets paid if he plays well enough to place. Can a baseball, football, soccer, basketball, or hockey player say that? A golfer normally gets no help from team mates. He is 100% responsible for his score.
It's 23 minutes program, 7 minutes commercial per 30 minutes on the clock; however, what I find a much larger PITA is what the networks do with their 23 minutes.
It goes something like this:
1) Summarize what we just told you. 2) Tell you what we are going to tell you. 3) Tell you what we told you we were going to tell you. 4) Summarize what we just told you. 5) Tell you a commercial is coming and they will return after it.Basic outline of a speech, it hasn't changed in years.
If you are lucky, #5, which is the new material, might reach 10-12 minutes per 30 minute segment.
A communication rate of about 30%-35% is a total waste of my time.
Don't get me wrong, in times of emergency, broadcasting does a fantastic job.
OTOH, the product they try to sell to pay the bills is not a very good product IMHO.
I'm not about to invest resources in equipment nor my time to use it in order to create something that my make it to mediocre status.
As the old saying goes, a sows ear does not a silk purse make.
Lew
... snip
Well, that's close. However, that is not really the product. *You* are the product that they deliver to the advertisers to pay the bills. The product you cite above is really the bait to deliver you to the advertisers.
I hate those celebrity magazine shows.
AND the local news does that.
World Coming To A END! Listen to details on Friday's late night news.
A dipole is not "somewhat directional"--it's absolutely directional. It has its major lobes perpendicular to its axis. It has extreme nulls off the ends. It is, by definition, directional.
A dipole has no gain. In fact, it is the real world reference to which other antennas are compared to determine their gain. The isotropic radiator, while interesting to consider in a theoretical sense, doesn't (and can't) exist. While useful for theoretical modeling, it's sole purpose in the real world is to make an antenna with gain (Yagi, LPDA, rhombic, etc.) seem like it has more gain by making the comparison not legitimately to a dipole, but hyperbolically, to an isotropic radiator.
Nothing more amusing to me than to see the theoretical dBi (decibels of gain in reference to an isotropic radiator, which doesn't exixt) applied to a dipole. Geez, it's a dipole. It has no gain. dBi, particularly when discussing a dipole, is essentially a worthless "value." And to further make the point, when one tosses out the calculated dBi, the antenna used as a reference is almost universally the dipole (dBd). That's why it's so amusing. One might as well say a dipole has zero gain when compared to a...dipole. Duh! can anyone spell tautology?
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