Thursday, June 4, 2009

Free TV 101 - Part 4

Part 1 here
Part 3 here

Radio Shack had a number of styles available depending on where the antenna is to be located. My first choice was a table-top or inside antenna. It looked like the Starship Enterprise from the movie Star Trek. It's omnidirectional, which means it doesn’t matter which direction it points and it can sit on top of the TV cabinet. The folks at The Shack told me this is one of their best sellers for inside antennas. The cost for this adventure was about $60.

Armed with my new antenna I went home watch some free TV. There, I unpacked my new toy. The whole thing looked pretty simple to install; it had a remote control and a 1/2 page instruction manual. Note -- there was no cable included in the box to connect this antenna to my TV, but lucky for me I had a 6 ft. long spare cable left from a previous move. You know, that stuff always accumulates!

I decided to try it on my digital TV rather than use one of the old analog sets. I think it would have worked fine on the analog set if I used the Digital Converter box. Naturally, I connected it up right away and figured I’d read the instructions later.


Having used cable for so long meant it took a while to figure out how to switch inputs on the TV to connect this new toy but I was able to find the coax connection on the back of my TV. It was back there with the rest of the HDMI connections.

Once I got everything hooked up, I still couldn’t get any reception. It was time to break out the book that came with the TV. Right there on page 18 I found the answer. I had to let the TV scan and look for all available channels when using an antenna. After finding the setting on the TV menu, I let the scan begin. It took 10 or 15 minutes to complete. I then sat down in front of the TV with my handy list of available channels (printed from the web) ready to catch my first glimpse of free TV. Of course, you know, I had to do a quick surf to see how many channels I could get regardless of how clear they were. Wow! I got about 20 channels right off the bat. But it turned out only 6 or 7 were clear enough to watch. These were the local ones that had already gone digital. Turned out I needed to read the instruction manual for the antenna after all.

See you tomorrow ;-)

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