Posted on 04/26/2009 5:24:48 AM PDT by Las Vegas Dave
The lowly TV antenna is making a comeback, and bringing free TV along with it.
Sales of over-the-air TV antennas jumped last year thanks to the digital TV transition, as users upgrade their gear for better reception.
At the same time, some consumers looking to save money in today's economy are dumping cable and satellite pay TV services in favor of free broadcast television.
Makers of antennas, as well as local broadcasters, hope to drive more viewers to free television by touting its merits.
Besides being free, broadcast television offers the best high-definition picture quality, because it's uncompressed. Cable and satellite operators compress their HD channels in order to squeeze in more channels on their bandwidth, which degrades their quality.
Plus, most local broadcasters are now multicasting, with each providing up to six extra subchannels for viewers to enjoy.
Even if they can't persuade pay TV customers to switch to broadcast-only, antenna makers and broadcasters hope to get them to at least use antennas on secondary televisions in the home. Once households experience free TV, they might be willing to make the switch at some point, people in the industry say.
"We're seeing a huge uptick" in TV antenna sales, said Lou Lenzi, senior vice president of product management for Audiovox 's (VOXX) antenna manufacturing unit. "Some of our customers are reporting anywhere from a 50% to 100% increase in sales over the past 12 months."
< snip >
"A lot of people are rethinking spending $50 to $100 a month on pay TV," said Grant Whipple, national sales manager for antenna manufacturer Winegard, of Burlington, Iowa. "People are talking about not going out to eat or cutting out this or that, but I can save a lot of people well over $1,000 a year by putting up an antenna."
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
LVD
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wait until we have the total switch over to digital. The old analog signals travel better through things like trees and clouds......when peoples digital signal is not as clear as a sattelite with no obstructions (other than large storms) we may see more people going to dishes.
I’m not so sure about that... The digital signal I receive is far superior to the analog I get. Even with the clouds and trees (Not much else to get in the way down here in Houston).
I just put the antenna in the attic.
But can you get Fox News?
I wonder about the digital signals. I made a Fractal antenna from directions on the internet and hooked it to a tuner device on my laptop. It works very well but seems to require close signals.
What are the signal characteristics? Do trees and other such impede reception. Is a clear line of sight necessary. Does the signal disappear when out of sight, ie no line of sight, due to distance?
Then there is the question of direction. Is the digital signal highly directional?
I really enjoyed fooling with the amazing little device that plugged into a usb port and made the laptop an HD TV.
I made the fractal antennna because it was less cumbersome than the many variations of coat hanger antennas. The laptop goes with us camping and now does extra duty as a TV.
It's less compressed, but it ain't uncompressed. An uncompressed 1920 X 1080 signal is 2.97 Gbps. The signal TV stations are broadcasting over the air is WAY less than that.
From http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enwiki/2544354:
ATSC digital television supports multiple digital subchannels if the 19.4 Megabits-per-second (Mbit/s) bitstream is divided. Full quality 1080i HDTV (High Definition Television) requires 18 Mbit/s fact|date=March 2008; however, many stations compress this down to 11 Mbit/sfact|date=March 2008. A 720p HDTV signal can be compressed to 8 Mbit/sfact|date=March 2008, and an SD (Standard Definition) signal compressed to 6 Mbit/s without perceivable loss of quality.fact|date=March 2008 4 Mbit/s or less yields acceptable results if the subject in the video moves very little, such as a slideshow-type automated weather channel. (Note that the actual bitrate moves up and down, due to usage of variable bit rate encoding.)
Old movie re-runs & old TV sit-com reruns.
Do you know how far you are from the transmission towers
( http://www.antennaweb.org/aw/Welcome.aspx will show you the distances. )
......(amplified).....
How?
Yea, I used that website to shop for an antenna. The one pictured, was fairly omni directional, as I’m more in the city and have towers all around as opposed to someone in an outlying area, who just points one towards the city. Distances range from 5 ~ 35 miles. I get pretty much everything. In fact, I get one station (quite well too), that I thought I would never be able to get with an attic mount, it’s 35 miles away.
I put one of these in my attic:
It works quite well.
No, no Fox News, content is pretty slim.. I picked up a Dell XPS from their refurb site and connected the antenna to that, and hooked up the computer to my Mitsu 65in DLP.. I spend more time watching TV through web sites..
Provides 15dB of gain for UHF,VHF and FM bands.
I built a coathanger antenna (several actually) via You Tube.
Signal strength vs. rabbit ear/loop on TV.
Loop..weak-39%
Homemade..65-79%
That’s with the homemade at head high. It is directional.
Digital signal is far far superior to the analog.
Who writes this drivel? I'd love to know how a 1.5 Gb/sec uncompressed HDSDI stream gets to the home through a 19.4 Mb/s ATSC transmission.
Right, the standard broadcast “HDTV” signal is still quite compressed, but I find that the Over-The-Air signal I can receive is usually superior to the same programming coming through my cable or satellite system. It seems the cable and satellite providers compress the signals even further, to get more content through their “wires”.
Raleigh area..
Our ABC affiliate broadcasts ch.11 analog, ch.52 digital.
Apparently when they go all digital they are going back to VHF ch.11.
Complicates antenna design.
Which is what I’m sure the author intended to say.
Satellite DTV especially is notorious for not only lowering bitrates of HD programs, they also lower resolution from the standard 1920x1080 to as low as 1280x1080.
They also use MPEG4 for all of their HD compression, so direct bitrate comparisons vs. OTA HD is not possible (OTA uses the older and less efficient MPEG2 compression standard.)
Dish and DirecTV even lower the resolution of many of their SD channels from 720x480 to as low as 480x480 to save bits.
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