OT: TV Tower.

[Robatoy]

I know this is OT, but I respect the opinion of many here so here it goes.

I just bought a used 40' TV tower. $75 bucks. 45 miles asthecrowflies from Detroit I will get about 36 channels a dozen or so HDTV. FREE I walk the dog by this guy's house and he was wrenching his BMW motorcycle so I stopped in and asked him about that nice shiny tower he had... he showed me ...... incredible picture now it is all digital. A dozen are HDTV... for FREE!!!! There's never f*ck-all on anyway... I pay for 150 channels of pure unadulterated crap. Between Netflix and FREE OTA TV... I'm saving some real Erdinger money now...

[Lew Hodgett]

------------------------------- And your question is?

BTW, run lots of stays to keep that tower in pure compression.

Lew

[FrozenNorth]

Just putting the antenna in a banana tree would have been cheaper :-)

[Stuart]

???

So is this a tower or is it a mast?

A tower is free-standing like the Eifel or Blackpool, a mast is a slim structure supported by guys (stay wires if you prefer) like on a ship.

[Gerald Ross]

Plus during a storm you can get some free electricity, for a short time!

[Leon]

And if you ever get lost you only need to look for the tower! Can you fly a flag from that thing? You'll be the talk of the neighborhood, Cool find!

[k-nuttle]

I have been enjoying broadcast TV since the change to digital and I don't have a tower. I get about 2 dozen channels, all national networks, PBS, and an all movie channels, and a channel the transmit about half movies and old sitcoms.

[Robatoy]

It is a self standing tower. A 4-foot section of mast is on top driven by a rotor. The footprint is triangular.

[Robatoy]

The question is: Anybody having any luck with OTA TV?

[dpb]

On 8/12/2011 8:39 AM, Robatoy wrote: ...

Very little...when they forced the changeover from analog to digital in fringe areas, the signal went from snowy to the typical on/off of digital and we went from the three networks plus PBS and one local to the two networks most of the time and the third hit 'n miss and no PBS or local. That's with an external amplifier on the signal prior to the input to the digital converter; w/o it there's nothing at all.

I've intended to add another 6-10 ft to the tower but haven't got a round tuit handy enough to have done so, yet.

All in all, as is typical, a setback for rural areas...but then again, we don't count; all we do is supply the basic food items, what possible use are we so why bother about them? (Seems attitude of DC and State governments, anyway, afaict. :( )

--

[EXT]

Go to RemoteCentral.com and check out the HDTV forum, you will find discussion there about OTA TV and reception along the US/Ontario, Canada border.

[Rita and Neil Ward]

I have experienced random reception with some of the OTA TV stations in my viewing area. I have a disk type antenna mounted about 5 feet above the roof. Receive three stations all the time, out of 12 to 20 found after channel search: others drop out randomly while viewing.

[Swingman]

Limited, but favorable. I have an antenna and WinTV USB adapter for my laptop which I use to watch TV on the balcony the rare times I'm interested in a sporting event.

The picture here in Houston, from numerous stations, is astounding compared to cable ... not surprising since, IIRC, OTA is not compressed (or not as much), as over cable or sat.

And it is farking free! ....

[-MIKE-]

BWAaaaa haha hahahaha hahaha!!! You didn't expect answers to your actual question, did you?

If you wanted to know if anyone was having any luck with OTA TV, you should've asked about how to build a TV antenna tower out of wood, then you would've have gotten all kinds of answers to your "real" question. :-)

[Lew Hodgett]

Used a folded dipole (5 ft of 300 ohm twin lead) for analog for years.

Got a Samsung digital TV, hooked up the dipole, and kept on truckin.

With the switch to digital, picked up a big bunch of channels.

Lew

[Robatoy]

Excellent. That's the kinda stuff I hoping to find. Thanks.

[Robert Haar]

Reception is good but content is the usual US network junk. With most of the programming being reality TV, or pseudo news talk shows or sports, there is very little other that we find to watch. Public TV and the Canadian stations that we get are the only stations that carry anything worth watching.

I am a bit closer to Detroit than Robatoy (25 miles north) and use a externally mounted antenna on the a one-story part of my house.

[Stuart]

Not that I have heard (Living in the UK). Blackberry's encryption has been mentioned but there are no moves to cut them off, as there were in Iran.

[CW]

[Larry Jaques]

The trees are no longer that tall. (He smokes too many of the leaves.)

-- Fear not those who argue but those who dodge. -- Marie Ebner von Eschenbach