Part 2 of the “Cord Cutter Curious” series. Let’s start with an assessment of what I have to work with.
I live in Florida within 30 miles of the TV signal source. You can check for yourself what distance and direction your signal source might come from using TVFool. This will give you an approximate direction signals will come to your location and at what height your antenna will receive the best signal.
I have a two story house that has coax pre-run to several rooms left over from cable network providers and from original construction in the late 90’s. The house will allow me to elevate the TV antenna as high as possible to provide better reception of those signals susceptible to line of sight interference. An outside pole antenna is a bad idea in Florida hurricane season since they easily become flying projectiles and have to be replaced. With that I decided on either an indoor antenna or an attic antenna.
My first goal was experiment with the antenna’s I have on hand (a Mohu Leaf and a home made fractal antenna) to determine a high elevation spot inside the house with the best reception possible.
I started by simply trying a Mohu Leaf tucked behind a TV upstairs. It was used to bypass the annual disputes between service provider and broadcaster. The reception was pretty good with some channels in the lower range reception coming in borderline and inconsistent. The lower channels were the primary channels we wanted because they covered NBC, ABC, Fox and CBS. The ones that seemed to always be in dispute with the cable companies.
I then checked out my attic, which amounts to a narrow crawl space since the roof has a low pitch. There was a spaghetti pile of coax with various splitters sitting on top of the insulation. Fortunately most of it was within reach of the attic access. It didn’t take long using the cable tug method to figure out which coax ran into my master bedroom. Weirdly enough, there were a few.
And why is that? From the cable guys I talked too (I went through “cable guy” training classes during my corporate time. That’s another story for another day) it’s easier and cost effective to run a new leg of good cable rather than fix what exists or pull out the old cable. So I removed what I saw as obvious excess cables from the attic to reduce confusion.
The “cable guy” training also gave me enough confidence to know what’s feasible and what should be avoided entirely.
I moved the Mohu Leaf into the attic and secured it to one of the highest rafters near the roof line oriented in a westerly direction. It only took two push pins through holes in the Mohu Leaf. That was an easy mounting job. After connecting it to one of the coax with a double ended female connector and a coax from the wall to the back of the TV I tested the TV.
The reception was excellent. The additional six feet in elevation into the attic was exactly what we needed. Now when our TV service provider lost our local affiliates due to disagreements, the plan was to simply switch to the TV input on our TV and there we go. But with a change to cancel cable, this would prove far more important. That was just the first TV and the first minor step.
More to come. Stay tuned.
21 Buzzards 