Quitting Cable: Day 7 Recap

Posted under A Geek Dad's Life, Blog Posts, Quitting Cable

I disconnected the Media Center from the local cable provider, connected it to the over-the-air (OTA) antenna, and ran the setup process on the Media Center to find the digital channels.  I had a brief panic before I realized that I needed to connect the OTA cables to different connectors on the Hauppauge tuner cards.  That was followed by excitement when I saw the cards auto-find all of the local OTA channels.  The Media Center (the truly amazing bit of programming that it is), found our scheduled network shows in the new channel lineup and automatically updated the recording schedules to use the new channels.

The Coat Hanger Hoverman works better than I had ever expected, though I shouldn’t be surprised; many people are having good luck with it.  We’ll have to see how it will hold up in the wind, weather, etc.  I have a plastic bag over it at the moment to help shield it from the elements, and the bag does not seem to be diminishing the signal significantly;  the seven RF ‘drops’ in the house are all being serviced from that single antenna (and an RF amplifier) with brilliant digital signal.

As of noon on Saturday Jan 30th, 2010, this house is no longer using cable television.