By Elliott Brack, editor and publisher | Do you think your cable or pay television cost too much, especially compared to the channels you actually watch? What good are 500 channels if you only watch a half dozen?
We thought that way, and sought to do something about it. So we embarked on learning more about over-the-air TV, buying two different types of inside-the-house antennas and started experimenting. Be careful: this venture took most of a Saturday.
We were told that the antennas would probably get better reception high on the wall. With us having our prime TV sets on the main floor, and in our basement, we began our experiments in the basement.
But first, about the antennas: one cost $79, and was primarily about a foot square of thin aluminum. The other cost $5 and essentially was a thin plastic box about six inches high and you set it near your TV set.
So we began. Depending on where we mounted the antenna on the wall, the thin but expensive aluminum antenna pulled in from 41 to 81 over-the-air channels. It was many more than we expected. But there was a problem: PBS channel 8 wasn’t one of those channels no matter where we mounted the antenna. Often Channel 30 wasn’t available either. And that Saturday a college football game was on Channel 69, and many times that station, and sometimes Channel 11, did not always appear on those that this antenna pulled in.
Then we tried the $5 antenna, with essentially good results, but again, no PBS. We later found that the $5 antenna did a decent job upstairs, on a kitchen TV where often we listen to the PBS Evening news. At least it had PBS regularly in the slightly higher placement.
Now all this fiddling with the indoor antennas was to (1) eliminate being hooked to our pay-TV provider, while (2) cutting our monthly TV bill. But so far the antennas had not done the trick, in that they did not bring in the PBS channels we listen to often.
What to do? That bugged me as I was going to sleep that night, bugged me when I woke up in the middle of the night, and was still bugging me when I woke up before getting up on Sunday morning.
Yet some say we are more clear-headed when first waking up. Thinking through the problem once more, a solution came into being: we could not be able to use the in-house antennas, since we did not like the idea of not having PBS around. Happily, we were able to return the higher prices antenna.
And not wanting to mount a roof antenna, we decided to tackle the second of our two objectives: cutting our monthly bill. Our next step was to try and negotiate with our pay-TV provider.
So we called. And hearing the threat of possibly stopping the pay-tv programming, at least we got a $10 off our monthly bill in a new contract. So while we still have those 500 or so channels which we mostly don’t watch, at least the bare-bones pay-tv service is a little cheaper.
We still can’t figure out why we couldn’t get PBS on the antenna. Perhaps some of you who are technical whizzes can tell us.
Error Correction: Sometimes you just find your mind wondering. In the last edition, writing about the Supreme Court, we mis-attributed. It was William Howard Taft who was the only U.S. president and chief justice, not Grover Cleveland. Funny thing, I had the information right in front of me, and misappropriated the Cleveland name for Taft. And I had just read a book about Teddy Roosevelt and Taft. (“The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism.”) Here’s my red-faced apology to our readers. Thanks to several of you for pointing this out.
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