As previously posted, we finally dumped Speculum.

First, with our old 1080 HD 42 inch Toshiba, we went with Sling (Blue) and hooked up an indoor DTV antenna with an inexpensive amplifier.

Mixed result with the antenna. We did get 65-ish over-the-air channels. But, no WESH, Channel 2, which was not a big deal because we NEVER watch it. The down-side was that WFTV, Channel 9 (ABC), was hit-or-miss with occasional periods of interrupted audio and moderate pixelation; all of which was a complete NO GO as far as Mrs. Dingpatch was concerned (we watch the local news and she is locked in to Good Morning America)!

For Black Friday we upgraded to a 55 inch Samsung smart 4K set for the living room and purchased a moderately priced indoor/outdoor antenna for the attic. Great reception, except for the same problems with WFTV (and no Channel 2 WESH)!

Well, we were receiving WFTV just fine on the kitchen TV which was hooked up to a home-made antenna that I came up with after watching some YouTube "How To's". The kitchen Tv got WFTV just fine but did not get WESH at all (no big deal).

So, anyway, this morning I got up into the attic and swapped the antennas for shits-and-giggles. Now the living room gets 67 over-the-air channels, receives WFTV just fine, and also gets WESH clear-as-a-bell! My dingpatch made antenna is much better that the store bought one!

I guess that the major take away from this is that the crappy looking home made antenna is well worth the cost of materials and a little bit of hands-on labor.

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Dora Hates You

Edited: 01/16/2019 at 08:59 AM by dingpatch

No reason to pay for cable these days. As long as you have decent internet speed and a firestick, alot of options with modbro, iptv, pluto, kodi, new movies, old movies, sitcoms, rising tides for sports and ppv. And also the antenna for local news is all you need! I think I would have to mod that antenna a little if it was goin be in the house for the wifey tho looks like a medieval weapon or someshit!

Do NBCgold sports packages run thru Prime?

I know they work thru fire, but I don't want to spend the $50 for something that doesn't work.

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I was right.

Ding...

Make a really BIG fin, hide the wires on one side and put it on a table by the window...
Functional Art work

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BurrysBreak

Inflation caused The BIG BANG...look it up!

Don't know about prime but if your looking for soccer kodi has just about any league or game you could want and it's free. I also have friends passwords for Netflix and hulu but looks like they are going try and eliminate people from doing that.

Ditched Monopolistic TV cable awhile ago. So many other options internet TV and OTA antenna mounted in attic.Also free movies at library.

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Style is what you make it!

Edited: 01/18/2019 at 12:14 AM by palerider

Yes, the Library's DVD collection is generally "all you need". Although, the availability of some "new releases" is perhaps 50/50 because they do not have the budget to "get everything". That's where Redbox perhaps comes in.

Get a Library card, sign up for an on-line account and peruse the collection of thousands of titles. It usually only takes 2 days for your local Library to get what you want from another location.

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Dora Hates You

A year-and-a-half ago my buddy went with AT&T/DirectTV for internet, land line and TV. I told him not to but, he really didn't understand all of the constraints. He was only looking at the bottom-line monthly cost. Now, his needs have changed and AT&t is giving him a rough cornholing!

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Dora Hates You

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Dora Hates You

I've had an old school type antennae in the rafters of the garage / attic with a booster for years..... get all the major broadcast channels (plus some stupid ones) and I'm 40 miles from any broadcast location (lately FOX has been cheap with their transmission and will have issues at certain times, but I usually just watch them for football)....... Only bummer not having cable to me is MAY and OCTOBER (sports playoffs on cable)

You put that Mad Max wiffle bat looking thing in your attic and got good reception?


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Capitalism is based on the ridiculous notion that you can enjoy limitless growth in a closed, finite system.

In biology, such behavior of cells is called "cancer".

Oh yes. Better reception and more channels that the $70 store bought one.

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Dora Hates You

If you're not already a Spectrum subscriber, they have some reasonably sweet 2-year, internet-only deals to suck you in. But their web page makes you enter your home address, and if you already have service, they direct you to that page, which has no prices, so you have to call their sales people to find out more. I did.

Last year, when their commercials boasted "the industry's fastest starting speed, 100 Mbps" I called to see if I could get bumped up from my 60 Mbps plan. They said that was a "special, legacy plan for grandfathered Brighthouse customers," so I didn't dig any deeper back then. I just assumed it meant I was getting a cheaper, grandfathered price too.

Last week, I called to see what the deals were, and found out my "grandfathered in" plan was a piece of shit. I could get 100 Mbps internet and more TV channels for $20 LESS per month. I was pretty pissed about that, so they backdated my bills by 1 month to apologize for that. Big whoop.

Anyway, it is nice to have the 100Mbps connection, as of today. I'm actually getting 115 Mbps thru the wired router, 115 Mbps on the 5 GHz WiFi, and 50-80 Mbps on the 2.4 GHz WiFi.

We also signed up for the 1-week free trial of Sling. Their interface kind of sucks, much like their website, but once you get past all that, there is some really good content. I killed several hours watching music documentaries and concerts on their AXS channel.

Sling's motto "No useless channels" is a crock of shit. They have two different packages (Orange and Blue), each $25, which you can combine for $40 total. Both hard-coded, no-flexibility packages, but you can buy all the premium extra channels you want separately.

There are limits to how many TV's you can simultaneously stream any given channel to. Like I don't think you can have two separate TVs watching ESPN at the same time. For local channels I think they provide two of the big four (NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX), and you have to get the other two over-the-air, but I don't remember which two are there and not there.

Anyway, we're gonna see if our new Spectrum plan ($129 is supposed to include all taxes and box "rentals" and fees) is worth keeping for TV and internet. (We already do internet phone with Ooma for about $3 in taxes per month.)

Without TV, the existing-customer, internet-only packages were $70.99 for 100 Mbps, and $99.99 for 400 Mbps (supposed to include the modem, taxes, and all fees.)

After I have a chance to build some antennae, and investigate other streaming options (Amazon Prime, YouTube, Crackle, Philo, whatever else there is), I'll probably go internet-only, maybe 400 Mbps, plus a ham radio for lunch. But you should easily be able to stream 3 HDTV channels in a tiny fraction of the 100 Mbps, so 400 is probably wasted money.

Close to completely ditching the VoIP landline, which gets nothing but spam calls, despite being on the state and federal do-not-call lists.

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There are several good websites with lists of the TV station transmitter tower locations and frequencies in our area. For most of Brevard, you just get a wideband antenna and point it toward Bithlo. If you're closer to the Indian River County line, you just point your antenna down the coastline, since every tower is basically just off I-95.

Most of the channels accessible from Brevard look like crap, but after the big 4, you can get several channels and NASA's channel, if you're into all that. Those are not available on the basic Sling packages, as far as I can tell. An antenna + Sling is probably enough for 95% of us. At $70 for 100 Mbps internet + $40 for the combined Sling package, your bottom line is around $110/month.

FWIW, I did the speed check on my old iPhone SE while parked close to a T-Mobile tower, and got about 65 Mbps. My wife's new Xr got about 110 Mbps from the same location.



Edited: 02/09/2019 at 05:15 PM by RegularJoe

Spectrum automatically upgraded me to 100Mbps, so I wonder if I'm in the BS higher price category?

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I was right.

One small nit about antenna TV is when a plane departs or lands at the MLB using the "over the island" air route, reception gets jammed and it cuts in/out for 30 seconds or so..sometimes no signal at all or just pixelation. I wonder if that is what Ms. Dingpatch was seeing. Like clock work the 6:10 AM flight causes this, then the 8:30am flight , also the helicopters from the AFB causes jamming as well. Does your DIY antenna notice this? As air traffic increases the reception loss instances will increase as well (This is with a mid range outdoor antenna with amp.

I'm up in Suntree. Plenty of Pave Hawk traffic from Patrick but, never any correlation with bad reception on the store-bought antenna. The Mad Max antenna has been Clear As A Bell.

I'm going to make another Mad Max out of coat hangers today.

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Dora Hates You

I get spectrum internet at $49.99 a month which they tried to make me pay more twice (the last two years) and I went to the Cape Canaveral office and those people bumped me back to $49.99.

From Cocoa Beach I have a Walmart midrange price flat antenna on the window connected to an HD TV and it's picking up stations (Bithlow?)) pretty good.

Yep'er.

Just finished another Mad Max antenna and hooked it up in the attic for the kitchen TV. 67+ channels, WFTV is clear-as-a-bell, and WESH comes through just like it was on cable.

I'll be taking the store-bought antenna out of the attic and selling it cheap (https://www.lowes.com/pd/RCA-O...ype-Antenna/1000465533.

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Dora Hates You

The OTA Movie channel is surprisingly good I think. I run a window antennae in my office and have it on in the background and they run some classics. Guns of Navarone this AM.



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Capitalism is based on the ridiculous notion that you can enjoy limitless growth in a closed, finite system.

In biology, such behavior of cells is called "cancer".

Update: I live in Satty, about 5 miles farther from the Bithlo towers than Dingpatch. I didn't have time to try building his homemade antenna (actually because I want to do a modified version of it), so...

I dropped $49 on this simple piece at Lowes: https://www.lowes.com/pd/GE-Pr...ype-Antenna/1000309169

Sitting on top of the entertainment center, it picked up 20-25 channels, but of the big 4, only ABC (WFTV Ch. 9). Lying on the roof, it pulled in about 65 channels, including NBC, CBS, and FOX. Perfectly sharp. Most of the channels are garbage, but the big 4, plus Univision, are good enough for me to cut the cord next month. If the antenna gets the important channels sitting in the attic, I'm golden.

The family has a FireStick plugged into every TV in the house, running the Sling App off WiFi, and they all voted for that over Spectrum's content.

Channel 2 (NBC, WESH) is about the only channel in our area broadcasting on VHF, but it's 198 MHz (not the traditional Ch2 @ 56 MHz). The Lowes antenna is mostly tuned for UHF, but the long back element is supposed to catch some VHF. The local channels are almost all between 500 MHz and 600 MHz (UHF), so the smaller antennas are generally adequate.