Is this any good?

In article , VanguardLH
wrote:

Despite what the ads show about all those wonderful mega-count of
channels that you'll get for free using an antenna tuned to the OTA
stations in the UHF range, the reality is the station count is dismal,
especially after grouping the side channels for one station into a count
of just one station.

again, that's *not* true at all.

On Tue, 15 Jan 2019 09:47:17 -0500, nospam
wrote:

In article , VanguardLH
wrote:

Despite what the ads show about all those wonderful mega-count of
channels that you'll get for free using an antenna tuned to the OTA
stations in the UHF range, the reality is the station count is dismal,
especially after grouping the side channels for one station into a count
of just one station.

again, that's *not* true at all.

I live on the outskirts of a large metro area and it's definitely not
true here. The various OTA antenna sites all show 46 channels as being
available here, and when I scan I see nearly all of them, I think 43 the
last time I counted. Secondly, my local cable company carries 16 or 18
(I forget) of them.

In article , Char Jackson
wrote:

Despite what the ads show about all those wonderful mega-count of
channels that you'll get for free using an antenna tuned to the OTA
stations in the UHF range, the reality is the station count is dismal,
especially after grouping the side channels for one station into a count
of just one station.

again, that's *not* true at all.

I live on the outskirts of a large metro area and it's definitely not
true here. The various OTA antenna sites all show 46 channels as being
available here, and when I scan I see nearly all of them, I think 43 the
last time I counted. Secondly, my local cable company carries 16 or 18
(I forget) of them.

i can receive about 35 digital channels over the air, which is *well*
above the 6-7 old school analog channels, and that's using a cheap
antenna in a non-ideal location.

some of those can be streamed online, which is another option.

Char Jackson wrote:
On Tue, 15 Jan 2019 09:47:17 -0500, nospam
wrote:

In article , VanguardLH
wrote:

Despite what the ads show about all those wonderful mega-count of
channels that you'll get for free using an antenna tuned to the OTA
stations in the UHF range, the reality is the station count is dismal,
especially after grouping the side channels for one station into a count
of just one station.
again, that's *not* true at all.

I live on the outskirts of a large metro area and it's definitely not
true here. The various OTA antenna sites all show 46 channels as being
available here, and when I scan I see nearly all of them, I think 43 the
last time I counted. Secondly, my local cable company carries 16 or 18
(I forget) of them.


The cheapest you can get in on this, is if you have some sort
of device with digital reception capability. If you want to play
around, you need at least one station near enough for rabbit ears,
to test out your setup and prove it's all working. It would be
pretty hard to get the damn software to work, if all the stations
were fringe, and they were popping in and out at random.

These are some of the ways of accessing OTA content.

1) New digital TV set (some sets more sensitive for OTA than others...)
2) Set Top Box intended for driving old TV set on Channel 3
3) USB dongle for computer, ATSC or DVB-T etc
4) PCI Express tuner card as in (3)
5) SiliconDust Ethernet-connected tuner/recorder

The USB dongles, some of them run hot, due to using
older generations of silicon tuners. PCI Express cards are
big enough, they can use traditional tin-can front ends.

In this example, you can see tin cans on the left. As well
as "missing" ICs where silicon tuners might be fitted for
a tincan free version. A silicon tuner can run hot enough,
to take advantage of a "thermal slug" on the bottom,
to pump some of the chip heat into the PCB.

http://www.hauppauge.co.uk/pics/hvr2...cket_large.jpg

The ATI Theater cards were some of the first to use a silicon
tuner, but the silicon tuner ran burning-hot on those.

The tuner industry seemed to go through a "collapse" a few years
ago, due to lack of sales. As far as I know, Hauppauge is
still in business. Hauppauge (WinTV era) was around at first,
when nobody else was interested. Then when digital TV came along,
there were like, a hundred different STBs offered for sale, and
the DTV launch was the hey-day of the stuff. But within only
two years, a number of chipsets went out of production.

KWorld went out of business, and they sold a lot of the
"$39.95" materials. I think the KWorld name still exists today,
and somebody bought the name and perhaps still makes a few
things. If you wanted to dabble in OTA TV, a KWorld product
was one of the cheaper ways of doing it. Hauppauge usually
charge more for their stuff.

It's been pretty well uniform over time, that the software
quality that comes in the box can be poor. Quite a
few novelty computer-type stuff deserves that title,
of being a slave to bad software.

And when all is said and done, you really want to construct
a "server device" for yourself, something autonomous, so your
TV recordings will not be disrupted by you "re-booting" your desktop
or whatever. For "live" operation on the other hand, that's not
important. I could, for example, open a window right now and
input a signal from my STB and watch live (that setup doesn't
do recordings at all). But I no longer have the software
set up for that, and only the "recording" tuner is set up,
and only on the Windows 7 boot drive. I would have to put
the "better quality" tuner card into a separate PC, to have
decent uninterrupted TV recording.

Paul

On 1/14/19 8:00 PM, nospam wrote:
In article , VanguardLH
wrote:

Remember back when you had an analog TV antenna (probably just a couple
of rabbit ears on the TV) and the few local channels you had back then?
Well, that's what you'll get today with a digital antenna capturing the
OTA broadcast stations.

actually, there's a lot more than that in most places, certainly in
major cities.

I'm not in a big city, but still get 3 separate channels plus their
subchannels, for a total of 10.

--
Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us/

"I don't believe in God, because I don't believe in Mother Goose." --
Clarence Darrow

HW wrote:
Do you know if this gadget works indoors? I don't have an external
aerial so I need an indoor one to receive FreeView without any extensive
cables.

https://www.freeseetv.com/tvfix/en/

As Paul mentioned, this is a Dutch (The Netherlands) company. When I -
in The Netherlands - go to their website, it says:

"THESE NETWORKS ARE BROADCASTING
FREE TV NOW IN Dutch_flag

abc CBD CBC CTC Global"

I.e. a load of ********, because these networks do of course *not*
broadcast in The Netherlands.

More ********:

"supports 1080p HDTV"
Yup, it supports dust as well.

"Boost your range up to 50 miles with an amplifier"
But it doesn't include one.

'Manual'
https://www.freeseetv.com/pub-assets/images/manual/hdtv-antenna-instruction.d9e5156123ea03a7.pdf?language_id=1
Judge for yourself.

Bottom line: Don't walk, but run to get one of these and while you're
at it add a 300-metre steel tower in Paris at the bargain price of
$99.99 (shipping not included).

Mark Lloyd wrote:
On 1/14/19 8:00 PM, nospam wrote:
In article , VanguardLH
wrote:

Remember back when you had an analog TV antenna (probably just a couple
of rabbit ears on the TV) and the few local channels you had back then?
Well, that's what you'll get today with a digital antenna capturing the
OTA broadcast stations.

actually, there's a lot more than that in most places, certainly in
major cities.

I'm not in a big city, but still get 3 separate channels plus their
subchannels, for a total of 10.


Country people don't get quite as many choices.

The circle on the left, is for the location of my sister.
The circle on the right, for a hypothetical person in Toronto.

https://i.postimg.cc/FKgRDjFY/fun-with-tvfool-com.gif

Paul

Frank Slootweg wrote:
HW wrote:
Do you know if this gadget works indoors? I don't have an external
aerial so I need an indoor one to receive FreeView without any extensive
cables.

https://www.freeseetv.com/tvfix/en/

As Paul mentioned, this is a Dutch (The Netherlands) company. When I -
in The Netherlands - go to their website, it says:

"THESE NETWORKS ARE BROADCASTING
FREE TV NOW IN Dutch_flag

abc CBD CBC CTC Global"

I.e. a load of ********, because these networks do of course *not*
broadcast in The Netherlands.

More ********:

"supports 1080p HDTV"
Yup, it supports dust as well.

"Boost your range up to 50 miles with an amplifier"
But it doesn't include one.

'Manual'
https://www.freeseetv.com/pub-assets/images/manual/hdtv-antenna-instruction.d9e5156123ea03a7.pdf?language_id=1
Judge for yourself.

Bottom line: Don't walk, but run to get one of these and while you're
at it add a 300-metre steel tower in Paris at the bargain price of
$99.99 (shipping not included).

If they're selling "Internet TV" and not "OTA TV", I hope
that's clear before you actually buy something.

The device has no power source that I can see. And they
seem to want to connect it coaxially to a TV RF input.

It would cost about $5 in materials to build one of those.
In case anyone was wondering why they would be "excited" to
sell it.

*******

Paul in Houston says it's a fractal antenna, and that's
a high probability given the dimensions and planar form factor.

As a kind of joke, this is an example. This is like a Gray-Hoverman
that's been "chopped up a bit". The balun does impedance matching.
And this example would be a UHF antenna, and not likely to attempt
to receive VHF frequencies.

https://cdn.instructables.com/FD0/HB...M7XM.LARGE.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_antenna

The best fun you can have, is to study an antenna you plan
on buying, in 4NEC2 beforehand. For example, a $100 antenna
at RadioShack has a defect you can see in 4NEC2, where the
lobe for Channel 9 points backwards, and thus the
antenna cannot pick up Channel 9 in the VHF band. By knowing
this, you check your channel table for channels 8,9,10
and see if there's a remote possibility the antenna won't
work with those.

The antenna I built here, someone wrote an "optimizer" that
adjusted antenna elements and evaluated performance each time.
The computation ran for about a week, before the developer
decided that was enough computations.

And it doesn't have a problem with channel 9.

The only problem with that antenna, is it has gain at
channel 65 where you no longer need gain, as digital TV no
longer goes all the way up to UHF 83. The top end of the band
has been trimmed, and when you design an antenna, the gain wasted
on higher channels is better spent on lower channels.

So when I see my antenna has excellent gain on 65, that means the
gain is wasted because no TV is up there now. I finished the antenna
two days before analog TV was cut off, and that's how I was able
to test channel 65. And it came in excellent, implying the theory
didn't predict the gain properly. My antenna now sits in a crate,
in pieces (ready to be reassembled). It's a fringe antenna for the
country. When tested in the city, it's pretty directional and needs
to be rotated while you use it. The country installation location
has all the stations on one vector, and the antenna is perfect
for such an application (as the antenna no longer needs to be
rotated).

Paul

On 1/15/19 3:21 PM, Paul wrote:
TheÂ*antennaÂ*IÂ*builtÂ*here,Â*someoneÂ*wroteÂ*an *"optimizer"Â*that
adjustedÂ*antennaÂ*elementsÂ*andÂ*evaluatedÂ*perfo rmanceÂ*eachÂ*time

OT. But what the hell do you do for a living? Not complaining as your
replies are very chocked full of info. PCs, now antennas and more
I've seen.

Al

On 1/15/19 3:51 PM, Big Al wrote:
On 1/15/19 3:21 PM, Paul wrote:
TheÂ*antennaÂ*IÂ*builtÂ*here,Â*someoneÂ*wroteÂ*an *"optimizer"Â*that
adjustedÂ*antennaÂ*elementsÂ*andÂ*evaluatedÂ*perfo rmanceÂ*eachÂ*time

OT.Â* But what the hell do you do for a living?Â*Â* Not complaining as your
replies are very chocked full of info.Â*Â*Â* PCs, now antennas and more
I've seen.

Al

That is if you don't mind telling.

Big Al wrote:
On 1/15/19 3:21 PM, Paul wrote:
The antenna I built here, someone wrote an "optimizer" that
adjusted antenna elements and evaluated performance each time

OT. But what the hell do you do for a living? Not complaining as your
replies are very chocked full of info. PCs, now antennas and more
I've seen.

Al


I'm a retired EE.

But with a bit of a science background.

Paul

On 15/01/2019 22:56, Paul wrote:
Big Al wrote:
On 1/15/19 3:21 PM, Paul wrote:
The antenna I built here, someone wrote an "optimizer" that
adjusted antenna elements and evaluated performance each time

OT.Â* But what the hell do you do for a living?Â*Â* Not complaining as
your replies are very chocked full of info.Â*Â*Â* PCs, now antennas and
more I've seen.

Al


I'm a retired EE.

But with a bit of a science background.

Â*Â* Paul

??? https://ee.co.uk ???

--
David B.

HW wrote:

https://www.freeseetv.com/tvfix/en/

It should work but it's a bit pricy. Over the air TV depends on where
you are some areas any old rabbit ears work well, other areas require a
VERY good antenna.

I'm in Phoenix, Arizona and I use this:

https://www.amazon.com/RCA-Multi-Dir...igital-Indoor-
Antenna/dp/B0027FZQ1E/ref=sr_1_18?ie=UTF8&qid=1547596238&sr=8-
18&keywords=rca+tv+antenna+indoor

OR https://tinyurl.com/ybret529

This allows me to get all the local OTA channels but I got only about 4
or 5 before I moved so who knows?

I'd find an old rabbit ears and see what channels you can get, good
luck!


--
XS11E, Killing all posts from Google Groups
The Usenet Improvement Project:
http://twovoyagers.com/improve-usenet.org/

David B. wrote:
On 15/01/2019 22:56, Paul wrote:
Big Al wrote:
On 1/15/19 3:21 PM, Paul wrote:
The antenna I built here, someone wrote an "optimizer" that
adjusted antenna elements and evaluated performance each time

OT. But what the hell do you do for a living? Not complaining as
your replies are very chocked full of info. PCs, now antennas and
more I've seen.

Al


I'm a retired EE.

But with a bit of a science background.

Paul

??? https://ee.co.uk ???


Just keep scrolling until you find it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EE

Electrical Engineering.

I was designing electronics before I got the parchment.
I made a profession out of a hobby, but not right away.

Paul

In article , David B.
wrote:

I'm a retired EE.
But with a bit of a science background.


??? https://ee.co.uk ???

of all the stupid things you've said (and there have been many), that
one ranks close to the top, if not the top.