Monday, August 17, 2009

Good Bye Cable!

When Emily and I were first married and I was finishing up college we didn’t have cable, just some rabbit ears which picked up some fuzzy channels. For the last 3 years we had cable with over 300 channels, on demand, HD… the works. We always said when we had a child we would not have cable, so I canceled it. But we still have TV, just the kind you get over the airwaves, which in Atlanta is a lot! I really do feel like when you have less channels you naturally just watch less tv.

The more I thought about it the more it made sense. For all those years we would only watch about 10 of the 300 channels, many of the same ones available for free in HD over the airwaves. We were paying anywhere from $50 - $80 per month just for the cable, it just seemed like a lot of money to me for what we were actually watching. Now I get over 20 full (uncompressed) 1080p HD channels with a home made antenna made from coat hangers (see image above):

ABC
RetroTV
GPTV
GPTV Kids
GPTV Knowledge
NBC
NBC Weather
Universal Sports
Peachtree TV
FOX
CBS
The CW
2 Korean Channels (which are highly amusing)
A ton of Christian channels (which I block, they annoy me)
A ton of Spanish channels (which i also block, since I can't speak Spanish)
PBS (different than GPTV)
The Atlanta Channel

My ATL

For additional entertainment (weekend movies, documentaries,…) we joined Netflix, and got a Roku so that we could watch all of the streaming movies, TV Shows, and Documentaries from Netflix on our TV. So good bye to cables running to our house, the cable company, and the phone company. (we get our internet over Clear WiMax, which is great by the way). We’ve decided to spend the money we save from cancelling cable on travel. Why waste time and money watching people travel, when you can be traveling yourself?

Posted by at

3 comments:

  1. UnknownAugust 18, 2009 at 3:54 PM

    I feel the same way! Did Jason actually make your antenna?

    ReplyDelete
  2. AmandaAugust 18, 2009 at 8:43 PM

    Ok, how do we get that setup at our new house? :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. JasonAugust 19, 2009 at 12:44 PM

    Here are some sites you can use:
    www.antennaweb.org - use this site to enter your address, it will tell you where to point the antenna and which channels you can expect to pickup.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWQhlmJTMzw - This video shows you how to make a UHF antenna.

    Now you just need to evaluate the cable wiring in your house. Most homes have the wires centralized in your attic or basement (the attic would be best since this is the best place to put the antenna). You should build an antenna for each TV you want (when you split the signal it doesn't do too well), but at less than $10 to build the antenna, it's not that big of a deal. You then just connect up the cable wire going to the room you want to the antenna (oh and your TV has to have a ATSC digital tuner, which all new HD tv's do) otherwise you'll have to get a converter box.

    Anyways, y'all can have us over some time and I'll help Dale with the details (that and we'd like to see your new house sometime)

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)