Bush Mackel

So not too long ago, me and the wife decided to take out the cable portion of our Verizon package leaving us with just phone and Internet service. To be honest, she wanted to take out the phone too but with all the conferences calls I find myself on these days, I told her I HAD to leave that land line IN PLACE.

Fast forward a bit and it has now been about a month or so since we made that fateful decision to do away with the cable. And I gotta say – From a content point of view, we’re doing just fine! Turns out there wasn’t anything on our basic cable package that we couldn’t just torrent and because we’re just downloading all of our shows, we’re picking what time WE WANT to see everything… Which is good! (As an aside, the whole torrenting thing I’ve never really liked but I figure if I keep away from movies and stuff I shouldn’t be in too much of harms way…)

The Snake in my Boots
Of course there had to be some issue and it has an oooglay head… And it’s name is the OTA Digital TV Signal. “But wait!”, you’re thinking, “I thought you just torrent everything!” That’s true, we do torrent pretty much everything but sometimes stuff comes on early enough that we’d like to see it as it’s broadcast or sometimes (and call us crazy) we just want to turn on the TV and get content. As I write this, I think we’re getting ohhhhh two of the big networks decently. And note, I did not say “well” – I said “decently”. Which means that often we get them with a multitude of dropouts (which imo is still pretty bad) AND we’re still missing everything else on those other channels we’re not getting which indeed sucks.

What sucks more is that with the rabbit ears I have, I have to do the utmost of positioning to get the two channels I CAN get, and I am constantly having to adjust them. I’ve played with position, splitters, inside, out… It’s really just a pain in the a$$. And if this is all foreign to you, the thing you have to remember is that because OTA signals are now digital, there aren’t really any more fuzzy pictures. You either get the signal – Or you don’t.

Plan of Attack
So I’ve done some research on the topic and while I think the BEST thing I could do to remedy the situation is buy a $60 to $100 antennae and put it on the roof (where it conceivably would have a better line of sight to the towers), I think instead I’m going to try a small directional indoor antennae that I bought while doing debugging off my registry for $25. Based on how far I am from the towers, it looks like I wouldn’t necessarily need an amplified antennae anyway so we’ll give this one a shot. And let me tell you, I hope that it works because when it’s Sunday and I can’t watch football ’cause I’m stuck in the house with the kids… It’s no bueno.