My Switch to Over-The-Air HDTV

I’ve been wanting to make my Xbox 360 the focal point for media for some time now, but haven’t had the time, nor the justification yet.  However, last week I finally finished converting all of my DVD’s (143) into MPEG-2 or WMV’s so I can watch them through the 360. Because of this, I had to pick up a 1.5 TB drive…man is that a lot of space.  Between my movies, music and pictures I don’t think I’m below a 1 TB yet. 

Since my wife just started nursing school this week, now she wasn’t going to be watching a lot of TV during the day now.   Don’t forget she also has to keep track and watch out after our little crazy 16 month old little girl (she is a handful…but a joy).  So I keep thinking…ok ok should I cancel Dish Network or not?  From my wife’s point of view, it is probably a good thing because she needs fewer distractions.  For me, I love all the ESPN channels, TNT, FX and the History Channel (good stuff on there). 

So I called dish up, canceled and that was that…and extra $90 in my pocket each month. 

I have two 42” Plasma’s in our house that I needed to get an antenna hooked up too.  I have cable ran in the entire house so I figured I would just go buy and antenna and put it in the attic or on the roof somewhere and run it into my main  line.  Was I ever wrong! I thought I had done my research via antennaweb, but obviously not well enough.  I decided to pick up an antenna from Radio Shack for about $60 and I was going to mount it outside (worked really well for my brother at his house). 

First Try 

I first start off by hooking it up in the attic.  I get down, run the setup on my Philips TV and it gets a whopping 3 channels. So something was up.  I then decide, ok I’ll put it on the roof and point it at South Mountain (like numerous people told me to do, and my research as well).  I point it at South Mountain and run the setup again. Ok now I’m up to 12 channels (keep in mind still missing CBS, FOX and ABC).   I then decide to point the antenna more northwest as my brother has done.  I picked up about 18 channels, now missing FOX and CBS still.  I was very frustrated at this point as I figured it should not take this long to hook up an antenna and get a few stations.  So by 10:30 PM that night I gave up and called it quits.  Not to mention getting beat up by my roof (I live in Arizona so very hot even at 10:30 at night).  Now I’m at the point where I already cancelled Dish, and no TV anywhere in the house. 

Final Solution

I get back on antennaweb and do some more research since now I have somewhat of an idea of what I’m doing now.  Turns out I need to purchase a small multi-directional antenna. I guess the one I had before was directional only (like a dish satellite).  I go to walmart and pick up an RCA ANT1450 for $29.99.  It's a nice looking flat one that doesn't take up any space inside. 

I first decide to just hook it directly to the TV and see what happens.  I run the setup again…and wow, now I’m getting 32 channels and some analogs in there as well.  And this antenna is just sitting on top of one our bookshelf looking things so you can’t even tell it’s in the room! 

So this entire time, all I had to do was buy this $30 antenna, come home, hook it up to the TV and run my setup.  I was done within 10 minutes of work, where as the night before I spent 4 hours trying to get it to work!

So instead of messing with the attic I went and picked up another one and put it on our other TV. 

Here is the kicker though, the other TV in my bedroom, gets all channels as it’s supposed to.  For some reason in my living room I can’t get FOX.  I don’t know what is causing that in there, but I will deal with that another day as I don’t watch TV much these days.

So that was my adventure switching to Over-The-Air HDTV!  Made it way more difficult on myself than needed. 

I have now eliminated a DVD recorder and Dish DVR out in the family room. I'm down to just my Xbox 360 and home theater receiver....it's so nice.

Next goal: get a dual tuner for my media center box and run TV through the PC so I can watch it via the Xbox 360 and have recording capabilities.  I will probably be buying PlayOn here shortly as well