’Rabbit ears’ find new life in HDTV age

[admin]

Buying an antenna for a high-definition television seems as out of place as using a rotary phone to make a call. But some consumers are spending thousands of dollars on LCD or plasma TVs and hooking them up to $50 antennas that don’t look much different from what grandpa had on top of his black-and-white picture tube ...

http://business.bostonherald.com/technologyNews/view.bg?articleid=197661

[admin]

In Australia, local HDTV is only available as free-to-air. Portable antennas work great, in fact just a piece of wire would do when I'm up stairs (the coat hanger works too).

[jmet]

I am wanting to get HD programming but, I only want my local channels (ABC, NBC, etc) in HD but, Dish Network (who I have satellite with) does not offer my local channels in HD. They said I needed to purchase an "off-the-air HD antenna". Does anyone have one or can you recommend a good one?

[admin]

Do you already have a rooftop/external antenna? If the US is anything like Australia, even 20 year old antennas will still work fine with digital TV signals.

[PurpleDemon]

That's exactly what I was told at Radio Shack a few years back when I bought my rooftop antenna.

Only difference now they put it on the box HDTV ready.

[doctorhardware]

There is also antennas by Terk that connect to the back side of your dish and at the receiver you use a splitter to separate the hd off air signal from the dish signal.

[admin]

The "HDTV compatible" antenna is another one of those cons that went around here in Australia in the early days of HDTV. All sorts of people telling you that if you don't change your antenna, you won't get HDTV or even might disrupt your neighbour's HDTV signal. The only real issue was whether people had UHF compatible antennae, as some were still using ones made decades ago that did not support UHF signals (we only have 2 channels using the UHF band, and those two aren't really mainstream, so many people just didn't bother upgrading to a UHF antenna).

[doctorhardware]

I had a Terk antenna that I used for off air signals. The Terk antenna was very good for what is was. I paid around $30. It came with every thing you needed to connect and attach it to the dish. I was at a major electronics retailer, they were trying to sell the extended warranty and a very special HD antenna. Both which were very over priced. They were also doing the hard sell on the installation, trying to insinuate that the people would not to be able to handle the install themselves.

The sale people at the electronic retailers around me, all leave me alone now. They have finally learned that I know what I am doing and do not need their help.

[ed klein]

Yep, my HDTV source (right now) is an antenna, until I get satellite in the spring, is pulling 1080i on most digital signals and pulling antalog signals until Feb 17, 2009. Approximately 22 stations over the air.

Wal Mart has a good selection of antenna.

[drfsupercenter]

We have cable, but I use a $12 antenna to get the local channels, because I can then use TSReader to dump .ts streams in 720p/1080i.

With my cable, they do give us the local HD but it's recompressed and in QAM, which makes it harder to record.