Digital Antenna

[venture]

So we are finally cutting the cord for the TV portion...more or less. I recently got this for one of the TV's to try it out...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

It's fairly decent but notice channels like KOKH go out pretty often. I'm probably about 28-30 miles from the main antenna farm in NE OKC, but not sure KOKH is up there too.

What have other people done setup wise to avoid any signal issues? Has anyone found a way to run the signal through existing coax in the house to avoid getting multiple antennas?

[seajohn]

Where do you live? I'm in southwest Norman close to the river and tried to get an antenna working a couple of years ago, and finally gave up. I tried several antennas, indoor and outdoor, with and without amplifiers, and none were reliable enough to bring in all the local stations, especialy during bad weather. I ended up subscribing to basic cable (channels 25 and below).

Good luck.

[venture]

Where do you live? I'm in southwest Norman close to the river and tried to get an antenna working a couple of years ago, and finally gave up. I tried several antennas, indoor and outdoor, with and without amplifiers, and none were reliable enough to bring in all the local stations, especialy during bad weather. I ended up subscribing to basic cable (channels 25 and below).

Good luck.

Yeah I'm in SE Norman. Cox quoted me some stupid high rate, so looking at this option.

[kelroy55]

I got this one this past year and works pretty decent for me. It works best if you can put it by a window.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

[Just the facts]

I have 4 of these in the house and have never had a problem.

RCA Basic Indoor Antenna - Walmart.com

[shawnw]

Yeah my $8 basic works better than my $40 amplified. But I am downtown so not a valid comparison location wise.

[jn1780]

Its hard to get good coverage in Norman unless you have an outdoor antenna pointing directly towards the antenna farm in far NW OKC. At the very least you need it near a northern window.

[windowphobe]

The KOKH antenna is just east of their offices on East Wilshire, or anyway that's what you get when you feed the FCC's TV Query results to Google Maps. (@35.549500,-97.488640)

[vaflyer]

I have this antenna in my attic in NW Norman and get great reception for all OKC channels

http://www.amazon.com/GE-24769-Outdo...rds=ge+antenna

[OKCRT]

You guys on the southern parts of the metro will need an outside ant and you can run all your TVs through that with a splitter. If you don't live too far away from the Britton/Kelly area just a cheap indoor ant from walmart will work. Prob about 20 miles max depending on your elevation. I have some people south of Cushing with an outside ant and they get OKC & Tulsa OTA HD stations and I would guess they are 60-70 miles away from the stations. Elevation is KEY.

[Jim Kyle]

When I was on DirecTV and the satellite signal always went out during T-storms, I dragged an abandoned set of rabbit ears left over from the 1960s out of the attic and plugged them into my 26-inch Westinghouse digital unit in the breakfast area, then put them on top of the baker's rack that held the TV to get as much altitude for them as possible.

They worked wonderfully, for all channels, after an hour or so of tweaking the length of each ear and the rotation.

After switching to Uverse, I've left them connected. No need any more to switch during a storm, but the rabbit ears let me watch the extra subchannels that Uverse doesn't carry.

FWIW, I'm about a quarter-mile WSW of NE 122 and Council Road. That's much closer to the antenna farm area than is Norman, so my experience may not be helpful. I can say with some authority, having first gotten my ham license back in 1957 and specializing in VHF/UHF systems, that there's really no difference between the fancy "digital" antennas on sale today, and the standard indoor antennas of years past. And when the signal is weak, you need a good outdoor all-channel unit, mounted at as high an altitude as you can manage. A hundred-foot tower is not too much. Snow won't be a problem, but pixellation may take its place when the signal strength drops below a critical point.

[venture]

So I tried the one I already purchased (which eventually got better) and another one that was a more traditional rabbit ears type - both giving the same number of channels. No big deal, except no Channel 5 at all here.

[windowphobe]

No big deal, except no Channel 5 at all here.

This is due to the fact that most digital-ready antennas are set up for best results on UHF channels, where most stations now reside. NewsChannel 4 is, in fact, on channel 27; the signal carries a PSIP code to tell you it's 4. News9 is on 39. KOCO, for reasons known only to God and Hearst, is on channel 7, and because it's VHF, it pumps less power: 65.7 kilowatts, versus 790 kW on KFOR and 1000 kW on KWTV.

[tfvc.org]

I live just N of Lex and I have an RCA flat amplified antenna flat against a window pointing N, a decent sized newer attic /outdoor antenna pointing N (That I can adjust to try to get a good signal) that is mounted to a lamp inside, plus a large attic antenna in the attic pointing North all connected to a combiner that is then connected to my TV and most channels come in good. Sometimes I will lose the 62s and the 54s and some of the .x channels I can not get in but my dad can who lives next door and only has an attic antenna (which is higher in elevation than my antennas and has a pretty decent unobstructed clearance). Before adding the first two antennas I tried it with just the one in the attic and got half the channels that I am able to now.

[mkjeeves]

After trying a couple of inside types for the TV in my storm shelter that didn't work, I put an antenna in the attic. It works well. Here's a few posts on that in another thread, model, mounting and channel list in the posts that follow. I live a few blocks east of Lake Overholser.

http://www.okctalk.com/current-event...tml#post767931

[Bunty]

In order to get all the OKC TV stations from Stillwater, I use this Winegard indoor/outdoor antenna propped up at the top of an arched window. It is hooked up to an amp from a thin and flat antenna that didn't work to bring in all the stations. The signal strengths are 50 to 56%. http://www.amazon.com/Winegard-FreeV...tenna+winegard

On an ordinary unpowered hoop plus rabbit ears antenna some of the channels will come in. But not 5, 13, 52 and 62.

[Prunepicker]

I have 4 of these in the house and have never had a problem.

RCA Basic Indoor Antenna - Walmart.com

I built my own digital antenna from scraps of junk I had in my garage. There
have been no problems (duh) and I have a ton of channels to watch. I don't
have cable and only pay for MLB Baseball and Netflix streaming.

[Just the facts]

I think the root of the problem is people not living in the service area expecting to receive the service. I see that with a lot of my friends here in Jacksonville that move out to remote subdivisions and then find out the only internet service is dial-up or super-slow DSL and they don't get cell reception. But hey, they saved 20 grand on their house.

[Bunty]

I built my own digital antenna from scraps of junk I had in my garage. There
have been no problems (duh) and I have a ton of channels to watch. I don't
have cable and only pay for MLB Baseball and Netflix streaming.

But a lot of people would greatly miss at least a few of the cable networks, like Fox News and ESPN. That's why I wish the most popular networks on cable would get on the sub channels of local digital stations. But probably nothing but agreements with cable companies, or digital stations not offering an attractive deal to do so is stopping them from doing so.

[ctchandler]

I think the root of the problem is people not living in the service area expecting to receive the service. I see that with a lot of my friends here in Jacksonville that move out to remote subdivisions and then find out the only internet service is dial-up or super-slow DSL and they don't get cell reception. But hey, they saved 20 grand on their house.

JTF,
What is "Super-slow DSL"? I'm on DSL and I do have other options but they aren't any faster than DSL. Just curious. As for this thread, I have a cheap pre-HDTV indoor antenna and I don't have any problems with reception. Of course, I live near Frontier City and less than seven and a half miles from the antenna farm in the Britton road/Wilshire blvd area.
C. T.

[shawnw]

KOCO, for reasons known only to God and Hearst, is on channel 7, and because it's VHF, it pumps less power: 65.7 kilowatts, versus 790 kW on KFOR and 1000 kW on KWTV.

I'm told this may be because Lawton ABC is also, however ridiculously, on channel 7, so OKC ABC has to crank down the power as to not interfere with Lawton ABC. This is third hand, so not something I've personally verified.

[BBatesokc]

An Attic antenna is a great way to go for many people and i know several that have gone that route. You can put it in the attic or on the roof. They are not the old fashioned kind that stick straight up with more wires coming off of them. Instead it a pretty streamlined 'fin' that isn't really even noticeable.

The best part is it can tie into your existing coax cabling so no visible antenna inside and no additional wiring (for the most part - other thank hooking it up to your antenna).

[Just the facts]

JTF,
What is "Super-slow DSL"? I'm on DSL and I do have other options but they aren't any faster than DSL. Just curious.

The DSL we have available to us is 3mbps. I switched to ClearWire for 2 years and we got about 8mbps. Finally switched to cable internet and we get about 52mbps. A lot of our friends live in areas where cable and clearwire isn't available

[seajohn]

I think the root of the problem is people not living in the service area expecting to receive the service. I see that with a lot of my friends here in Jacksonville that move out to remote subdivisions and then find out the only internet service is dial-up or super-slow DSL and they don't get cell reception. But hey, they saved 20 grand on their house.

Actually, the root of the problem is that the government did a poor job on specs requirements for digital TV broadcast. Before the changeover I was able to get all of the stations with an outdoor antenna; some of them were not totally clear, but they were watchable even with a little static or ghosting. Now, it's all or nothing, and areas which previously had service now have little or no service.

FWIW, I have 50Mbps internet and no problem with cell reception. And I didn't save 20 grand on my house.

[Jim Kyle]

Actually, the root of the problem is that the government did a poor job on specs requirements for digital TV broadcast. Before the changeover I was able to get all of the stations with an outdoor antenna; some of them were not totally clear, but they were watchable even with a little static or ghosting. Now, it's all or nothing, and areas which previously had service now have little or no service.

It's not a matter of bad government specs -- the "all or nothing" vs. "snow" attribute is one of the hallmarks of digital vs. analog operation.

The older analog system carried picture information in the form of varying signal strength; the newer digital system encodes that information as a series of binary levels that switch between "full on" and "full off" millions of times per second, which in turn ride atop a "constant" carrier signal.

When the received signal gets weaker than the ever-present background noise level, the analog system simply showed that background noise as "snow." However the digital system's information is either detectable, or it is not. There's no in-between. The result is no noise, ever, but instead the signal can vanish unexpectedly.

The encoding process can introduce "pixellation" which is the sudden dissolving of the image into colored rectangles, and if the signal strength is right at the limit between "present" and "absent" this can show up as a sort of "digital noise." It's caused by loss of the signal for brief instants; some of the video signal's coding gets lost and the result is temporary scrambling of the image or sometimes only parts of it. But even then, you don't get any snow...