Seventeen to go!
17 days to the switch! I received some good questions today I want to share with everyone. Here’s an excerpt from a reader that posted a comment.
I decided to let cable go to save money and then realized all the shows I watch are on regular TV anyway. Will miss the DVR but I will see if Best Buy can help me find something to replace that. In the mean time will use my VCR once I remember how to work it
We exchanged several emails today, and I got a pretty good picture of her situation. They had cable, and decided to drop it for free TV. Hey, my kind of people, but don’t get me wrong. Cable and satellite are very good options and people have the right to choose. If you do follow Ingrid’s process to convert from cable to free TV, here’s a couple of issues you need to adjust.
Cable frequencies are different than broadcast frequencies. That’s why there is an AIR or CABLE setting on most TV sets in the menus. That has to be changed. The UHF channels are in a higher band of frequencies, and as I have mentioned, the higher channels do not travel through wires as easily as lower channels. A satellite dish down converts the satellite signal to a lower frequency to reduce loss going into the receiver. Cable does the same thing by keeping their frequencies in order and as low in the spectrum as possible. Channel 17 on cable would actually show up around channel 69 in the cable frequency plan.
You have to go into the menus on the TV and change from cable to air, then rescan the channels. That puts things back in sequential order and removes the unused channels in between to make using the channel up/down buttons faster to surf through all channels. (Not that anyone does that)
The second thing to remember is that cable is a closed system. The actual cable wire is shielded to prevent all the outside signals from mixing into the cable channels. For example, if you live close to the towers, a signal over the air will not interfere with the same channel on cable. It really does not make a good antenna, although some signals will get into it. I advised her to go to the side of her house where the cable comes in from the street, remove the cable and install the antenna feed there. If you go back to my video where I worked on my own antenna, that’s exactly what I am doing. That feeds all my TV’s in the house from a single point.
She is lucky that she only lives 4 miles from the transmitters, but a lot of folks could get by with hiding an antenna on the ground by the foundation behind a bush. Certainly worth trying, and in her case, a small set of rabbit ears should work. It just needs to be weatherproof. I went to the Best Buy website, and you can buy a lot of ten dollar antennas and replace it every 6 months for the price of one outdoor model. They range from 80 to 150 bucks.
As for missing the DVR, there’s several options to choose from. I have a TiVo with a lifetime subscription data package, but there are options that use the PSIP data to get program info free, and I’m sure TVGOS I mentioned in an earlier post will have a free option. Just don’t rely on an older analog unit working you pick up on Ebay. In short, pick your new DVR by studying the data plans, and how much they cost in the long run.
That’s pretty much it for converting from cable to free over the air TV.
I also talked with a lady in Durham today having trouble setting up her box I want to mention. In her case, she did not see anything from the box. It turns out every time she selected channel 3, the TV would jump back to the last used channel automatically. In her case, she has to go into the TV menu, and add channel 3 in the lineup manually. She did get to see the menu asking for the language setting on the box, so once she gets it to stay on channel 3, she’ll be fine.
I have mentioned several pages back, when all else fails, find an 8 year old to program these things for you!
If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader or email.
Subscribe to RSS
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment