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@suzanrush - I will agree with one thing the older Tv's did last a long time. And the old NTSC quality was good enough for a long time as well.
HDTV if you can ignore the occasional compression artifacts from whatever compression technology they are using and the digital picture errors when the signal wobbles a little bit, HDTV and HD content does have a better resolution than SDTV. That's not to say that SDTV is that bad to view with newer larger Flat Panel screens.
Maybe we will get some more Ham Radio operators out of all this OTA stuff and people playing with Antennas and Coax cables. :-) Trying to "DX" those farther off TV station signals ...
To show you how nasty cable companies can be ... we failed to stay on auto-pay with Comcast because we kept not having the money in the bank, and they can't set a specific date when they will run the bank charge. They finally seemed to have "lost" us altogether ... I noticed we weren't getting the bill any more, and called one day to ask about getting Cable Internet. They couldn't find our 30+ year old account by any normal lookup by name, phone number, address ... they just DELETED US. We had been getting cable since in So. Fla. it was American Cable, Then Continental Cable, then ... Comcast.
DirecTV - the guys installing dishes are often idiots and don't know how to locate the dish around trees ... etc. I have been having flaky HD reception for a long time. Every time the sky gets cloudy or it rains - I have to down shift to SDTV channels. Ran out of money to keep up with their $85.00 a month bill here lately ... and THEY WANT THEIR MONEY. So it's off.
So that put me looking at the cable that's still working even though we've been deleted. But the signal is flakey.
So being a ham radio operator I decided to try and hook up (cross over coax cables) my 40 foot mast with an vertical omni VHF - UHF antenna and a Yagi (with no rotator) for VHF only. And I got a LOT of channels in a scan. So far I have just used alligator clips to patch over the 50 ohm Ham Antennas to the 75 ohm coax going to my Flat Panel monitor / Tv. The tuner / receiver found 30 some channels. The locals are crystal clear and in HD. ION TV has HD and some extra channels.
Pretty cool I may be convinced to put a real antenna for OTA TV up on that mast and run the correct coax all the way down to the TV and see what happens.
I like playing with antennas. I have dipoles for the HF ham bands up in the trees, a vertical 28 foot in the front yard for the HF bands as well, and the 40 foot mast with the fiberglass VHF/UHF vertical and the Yagi for VHF that I mentioned before. The V and V/U antennas pick up pretty good. I have a coax switch between the two. 40 foot up for the vertical, and about 35 for the Yagi. The channels are crazy spread around UHF and VHF. You really need a web site like this to make sense of it all.
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Alan Spicer
KA4UDX
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