Back to basics – Coat Hangers Rule airwaves

So, my fancy-schmancy single-bay Hoverman antenna looked cool.  It worked well, considering that it was 75 feet from my headend in my house.  The problem – the cable run was 75 feet from the headend in my house.  I couldn’t just re-route it because I needed to keep the ground bonded to my house ground.  What to do, what to do.

I decided to try putting it in my attic, but the single-bay Hoverman is some 38 inches tall, and my attic space was 30 inches.  In desapair, I looked around my garage and saw my old coat hanger hoverman that I had made.  It sat collecting dust, waiting to be donated to a friend.  It was about to become supremely useful again.

Long story short, the coat hanger Hoverman is now in the attic, the cable run is now 25 feet long, and the signal strength is superb.  The amazing thing is that the antenna is up there, sitting behind a metal duct, beside some other metal conduit.  Just sitting there, pointed in the general direction of the general area of the TV transmitters many miles away.  It is a superbly ugly and elegant piece of garage tech.

Find your local TV station Towers with AntennaWeb

The cable companies would like you to believe that the only way to get moving pictures on your wall-mounted glass lamp is to connect to their media faucet.  Thankfully, the folks that sell those old wire contraptions called “antennas” have joined forces to provide tools to break free.  One such tool is AntennaWeb.  I recently used it to line up my new Hoverman antenna.  It is a marvel of “web 2.0” meets “free as in beer.”

While the tool is ridiculously-awesome, I do have an important tip for using it –

Lie about obstructions and height to see ALL stations.

If you tell the truth, the system will faithfully only show you the stations that you might get with rabbit ears.  You really want to see ALL of the stations that you could get if you bought/built an Frankentenna.  So, you should say “no” obstructions, and that your antenna height is absurdly high, like 200 feet.

Doing so will cause the website to show you vectors and distances to all stations in the area.  You can then dial the exaggerations back a bit to see more-realistic estimates of reception.

The AntennaWeb website will give you a detailed listing of stations, channel numbers, distance, compass direction, and the recommended antenna type for each station.  You can even click “View Street Level Map” to see a Google map with directional markers and a legend for each station.  It is truly a smile-making tool.

If you’re on the fringe, you will likely see that most/all of your local TV stations’ transmitters are grouped together in one area so that one directional antenna will cover them all.

Good luck with your OTA TV endeavors, and let me know how you’re doing in the comments!

Upgraded! New Hoverman Antenna

The old “coat hanger Hoverman” served us well this past winter and early spring, but it just couldn’t cut through the leaves on our lush Illinois oak trees this summer.  Some of our TV stations were getting jittery with bad tiling, and they finally became unwatchable.  Upon further inspection of the antenna, I noticed that the heavy-gauge wire had also become ‘kinda’ loose at their junctions, and that probably contributed to the poor reception.  It was time for an upgrade!

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You’re pre-wiring a new addition in your home…

And now it’s time to answer our viewer mail:

Hi Scott,

I was wondering if I could get some A/V system advice from you?  We are putting an addition on our house and will have some walls and ceilings opened up so I was looking at upgrading/adding to our system while it has easier access. 

The big question I have is what wiring to run so we are set up for a number of years in the future.  Do I want to run coax, cat5 and HDMI everywhere or is that overkill?  My ultimate goal would be to set up a distribution system to share signals through most of the house. 

Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated.  If you need more details let me know.

Hi [name withheld],

Ask for advice, and you shall receive it until you cry for mercy.

Yes, you should do a "home run" distribution, whereby each/all of your cables run back to a common point.  Fancier configurations (i.e. trunk & branch, loop-through, etc.) are only required for large facilities and long distances, or for people in small facilities who enjoy making things ridiculously over-complicated.  "Home Run" distributions offer greater flexibility and are easy to troubleshoot. 

(MUCH more advice after the jump…)

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Quitting Cable: Day 130 = $250 in our pockets

All systems green.  TV is in summer re-runs.  Still not missing cable TV.  Looking for our next TV series on DVD or Netflix Streaming to consume; perhaps Dollhouse.  You have been updated.  That is all.

Quitting Cable: Day 91 = $180 in our pockets

So far, saved $180 and the TV signal is always in high-def.  Been watching South Park directly from www.southparkstudios.com, and the kids have recently gotten hooked on MythBusters on Netflix Streaming.  I recently introduced my wife to Firefly (and have been prepping her for the disappointment of only having 14 episodes), and I’m excited to watch Serenity with fresh eyes.

Our entertainment is a la carte, with new TV shows recorded to the central DVR for free, new movies costing $1 from RedBox, and ‘all-you-can-eat’ old movies and TV series costing $9 a month.  Cable TV providers must know what is coming next, because they have been converting themselves into telecomm companies. 

We really, really do not miss cable TV one bit.  Now, if we could just get some more competition in the Internet Provider space, we’d be all set.

Quitting Cable: Day 52 – Staying [Common] Grounded

Flash-Crack-BOOOOOM!!! Lightning and thunder woke us up this weekend during the first major Spring storm, and [boy] was it striking close to our house.  My first thought was of the new over-the-air antenna sitting on top of my garage, not properly grounded.  Doh.  This first storm was a not-so-gentle wakeup call. 

Lightning is a mysterious phenomenon.  It can strike a person directly without killing, and it can strike the ground killing everyone nearby.  More frightening to us technophiles than personal injury, lightning can really ruin your day by causing your expensive electronics to release the magic blue smoke required to make the gadgets function.  Sometimes the devices go out with a whimper or barely audible *pop*, and sometimes the devices go out with a flash and a bang.

When we subscribed to cable television from the utility pole, the cable was grounded at the point which it connected to the house using a ‘ground block.’   When I disconnected the CableCo’s cable and installed our new off-air antenna in February, I was really still in the “let’s see if this will even work” phase of the project.   Also, lightning was not a major concern in February, so I did not think about grounding it.  I changed my tune when I saw/heard that lightning/thunder!

My first instinct was to go buy a new grounding rod and some wire at the local Home Depot, but I remembered that “ground loops” can cause problems with RF signals.  I spent 2 hours researching the topic on various sites and determined that I should NOT mess around with a second grounding rod.  Using two grounding rods connected to the same house at different points can create dangerous ‘ground differentials.’  It can also be very expensive to bond the two grounding rods together due to the raw material cost of heavy gauge (#4) copper conductors and the complexity of burying the conductor at the proper depth.  According to every expert on the subject, your house should have a single point of common ground, and everything should be tied to that single point. 

So, I ran the antenna feed to the original grounding block from the original cable connection, and I ran a new ground wire from the antenna mast to the ground point on the house provided by the power utility company.  Whew.  We’re safe again.  Or at least as safe as we can be when it comes to lightning.

Quitting Cable: Day 33

The Comcast Cable lineman disconnected everything at our house at 10:15 am this morning by putting a blocking terminator on our line at the utility pole, rather than reading the very clear and easy-to-understand note about being sure that our Business Internet service was not interrupted.  (The customer service representative even read the note back to me and confirmed that it would print on the work order!)  Apparently, I am far too wise and experienced a soul to indulge in wishful thinking anymore.   

The Comcast’s credit, I called the Business Support line and they got another lineman out within the hour.  Our downtime was a grand total of 70 minutes.  That’s pretty stellar response time, but it was still a significant and preventable disruption in the middle of the business day, given that 50 minutes of that time was me managing the outage on the phone, checking my side of the cabling to make sure a squirrel didn’t chew through anything, making failover plans for the business gear in the event that they didn’t send someone out soon, and then meeting the 2nd lineman.  So, if they would send me a video of them slapping the carelessness out of the first lineman that couldn’t seem to spare the time to read the notes on the f***ing work order, that would be great.

Quitting Cable: Day 31

Still not missing cable, and it has become the new normal.  So much so, in fact, that I had to force myself to write this update.  It’s so not a big deal.

The cable company sent us a full bill this month dated Feb 15, so I called them to ensure that they had our cutoff order in the system.  The call center rep confirmed our cutoff date as Feb. 2nd, and said that their ‘system’ has not yet ‘finalized’ the cutoff.  She tried to shorten the time and bring the ‘finalization date’ closer, but her computer would only extend the date, not shorten it.  She told us to not pay this new bill (since we had paid more than the prorated amount already), and she confirmed again that we would receive a refund check for the overage.

So, we continue to watch TV as a family in the evening.  The Olympics currently dominate NBC, with hours and hours of snow sports on the local affiliate.  The kids like watching ‘the pretty girls’ skating with those ‘handsome boys.’  The NBC network aired the Olympic Curling competitions on CNBC, so we did not get to see it.  We will survive somehow.

NBC has our attention after the Olympics, too, with “Parenthood” and “The Marriage Ref” coming up, along with my own personal addiction “30 Rock.”  Fox has “House", and ABC has “Better Off Ted” (if they have enough insight to renew it for another season).  My wife is finding her “Hoarders” fix online, and the kids are watching the heck out of PBS Kids and Harry Potter movies.

Our RedBox rentals continue to outpace Netflix (which has not seen fit to send us more than a couple of new releases since November).  The kids are watching quite a bit of Netflix Streaming, and I wonder when Netflix will start capping the bandwidth.

I’ll try to remember to check in every once in a while.  Feel free to share your “quitting cable” stories/links in the comments.

Quitting Cable: Day 12

I feel like a convert, a reborn media consumer.  I feel like some kind of religious freak enthusiast who has just discovered the invisible truth that has been there all along.  I was blind, and now I can see.  I am driven to share my new-found knowledge.  I shall become insufferable!

No.  I won’t.

Marc Maron recently had a rant about this particular topic, wishing that everyone could just unplug for [a month?] and reset.  I don’t recall his exact quote, but it was along the lines of “How much of our angst and frenzy is self-inflicted, driven by the media that we are gladly jamming down our eye sockets and ear holes.  WTF!”

Two years ago, I would have thought that Marc was a knee-jerk praetorian.  Today, I am a believer.