I pay a lot of bills. Mortgage, car loan, car insurance, electric, gas, water, cell phone and health insurance. None of these bills upset me even the least bit to pay. I need every one of these goods and services. Only one bill actually upset me every month when it came in, and that was my cable bill. I was paying $65/mo. for 200+ channels and I watched 10 of them, and most of them were ESPNs. Miserable waste of money, but I paid it every month.

It was actually Sarah that planted the idea in my head of getting rid of the cable, although she didn’t know it at the time. While walking through Best Buy in early December, I made the offhanded comment that I’d like an Apple TV, and I didn’t think anything else of it. Sarah, however, remembered that when it came time to go Christmas shopping and bought me one. Somehow, I guessed what she had bought me and told her that it was a nice thought, but we don’t have NetFlix or Hulu, and we can just DVR any shows we want, so we returned it. However, a few days later at work, we got to talking about AppleTV, NetFlix and Hulu, and I got to thinking. Plenty of people had talked about dropping cable, installing an antenna for locals and using NetFlix/Hulu for all their shows, and it sure would be a lot cheaper. We wouldn’t even need the AppleTV, I already have a PS3.

I started pricing out antennas and thinking about how reasonable this would be. I did the math about how much we would save in a year, and I weighed that against what I would lose. In the end, I decided that having to watch ESPN on my iPad or computer was worth saving $500/yr in cable bills.  So, I did the math, ordered the antenna, and called Time Warner. (Trying to figure out how much I would pay for internet without cable was an adventure in itself, and ended up on Consumerist.) Coincidentally, NetFlix and Hulu run amazingly well on the PlayStation. NetFlix has better picture quality than cable most of the time, and never worse than cable.
Hulu tends to look more like streaming internet video, but for $8/mo, who’s complaining?

The antenna was probably the biggest challenge. I did a little research (not enough, I soon found out), asked some friends, and ended up with an AntennasDirect 43XG Unidirectional UHF Antenna. I previously had a satellite dish, so I figured I could use that post to mount it, but I ordered another post just to be sure. I also already had the coax ran from the dish, naturally, so that wasn’t a problem.

The next thing I had to do was figure out where to point the antenna. The most powerful antennas are unidirectional, which is important since most of our TV originates from Cleveland, about 40 miles away. A quick trip to TV Fool and their antenna wizard provided me with this useful chart:

A unidirectional antenna has a cone-shaped target area, and the transmitters themselves are omnidirectional, so to get all the channels I wanted, I aimed the antenna right around 12:10 on the dial. Turned on the TV, ran a channel scan and it started finding everything I wanted. (There was a little more to the actual work, involving finding the best position for the antenna, but that’s the gist of it.) However, I was missing one channel, WJW-8 Fox.

If you look at that transmitter map again, you’ll see two columns, Real and Virt. The “Real” channel number is what channel it actually broadcasts on. The “Virt” channel is how it actually shows up on your TV. For instance, WKYC broadcasts on channel 17 but shows up as channel 3.1. If you look, WJW Fox is channel 8, both real and virtual, and channel 8 is a VHF channel. I didn’t know the difference between UHF and VHF channels when I started (remember when I said I didn’t do enough research?) so a quick trip to AIM to ask a friend why I wasn’t getting Fox, and I got schooled. VHF channels are broadcast as channels 2-13 (30-300MHz), whereas UHF channels are 14-69 (300MHz-3000MHz). Fox is VHF, my antenna is UHF, hence, no Fox.  They were supposed to be moving to UHF within a few months, so any solution to this would be temporary and not worth spending a ton of money on. So what’s a guy who wants to watch playoff football to do?

I needed a VHF antenna, and I needed it to come on the same wire as the UHF signal. So I picked up a few things from Radio Shack to jury-rig this: a UHF/VHF combiner (looks like a splitter, but backwards), a VHF Dipole antenna (normal rabbit ears), a matching transformer (to convert the antenna wire to coax), some zip ties and electrical tape. I felt like a regular MacGyver. So, off to the roof. After about twenty minutes and some antenna aiming, we had Fox!

So, it’s been over three weeks without cable, and I can honestly say I don’t miss it. I get ESPN through my iPad (my dad still has cable, so I sign in to the app as him). All the shows we watch are on NetFlix/Hulu or locals. I prefer to listen to the Cavs & Indians on the radio, so that’s not a problem. I still need to purchase a set-top box so I can run the sound through my home theater, but that’s it.

If you have any questions about getting rid of cable, I’m your guy now, it seems. No cable? No problem.

Tags: antenna, cable, hulu, netflix