Thinking about giving this a shot. I’m not much for tv and ditched cable etc but I’d still like to be able to see sports in HD.
Any input would be appreciated. Living in the gta I should be able to get lots of channels. Could be interesting.
I only need the F1 and MotoGP races, but that pretty much kills OTA for me.
There are often a lot of web feeds of whatever you want to watch, though, and having an Apple TV is handy. F1 and MotoGP over the web is sporadic, but I haven’t really tried the proxy thing to get BBC live.
Hahaha eff you
Whoa. I found a wayyyyy better use for this…
Seems you can get US Netflix working in Canada. Gotta try this tonight…Thanks Bango!! Props
So just to do an experiment I bought a $50 indoor antenna from Wal Mart last night. To get a good group of channels I’ve been advised that I’d need a small antenna mounted up on the rooftop. With it being well below freezing…and my roof being covered in ice…and me not liking going on the roof of my house, I decided to just get an indoor antenna.
It’s an RCA product…basically a flat piece of plastic that sits flat on the mantle by my telly. Actually looks very incognito. It just connects via a provided Coaxial cable to the input in the back of the TV. There’s a little amplifier that plugs into the wall but not sure you even need that. I plugged it in just the same.
First nothing came in…then Axel told me I needed to switch a setting in the TV from CABLE to ANTENNA.
I should mention that this is not recommended…just plugging an antenna in…because I live in a house, on the ground and the TV and room in question were on ground level. So not the best situation but this was just a test. So I did the ‘channel auto program’ and in about 2minutes, it had found 10 channels!
I was looking forward to seeing how bad they would be…I figured all pixellated and shite. Was I ever wrong…
I received CFTO a local CDN channel, as well as TVO the provincial version of PBS, 3 channels from the US PBS, CBS from Buffalo, French CBC, and a couple of others I forget.
First - the picture is insanely good. Perfect. Better than my former HD feed from Cogeco. I was shocked. One of the channels was pixellated and not really coming in (the local religious channel lol so I won’t miss it) and the others were all flawless.
I can’t wait to get a proper, discreet antenna on the roof, and run the line into my basement where my old cable used to feed in. I reckon I’ll get about 20 channels including all the major CDN and US networks. Should get me my hockey fix as well as let me watch golf in HD. Need that done before the second weekend in April for sure!
Pic of the picture quality. Excellent. If they’re a little grainy it’s because it was taken with a phone in a darkish room.
http://i375.photobucket.com/albums/oo193/sakimano/20130205_222004_zpsb1c30bb3.jpg
Pic of the picture with the info that comes through at the top of the screen. Pretty cool.
http://i375.photobucket.com/albums/oo193/sakimano/20130205_212752_zps6fd15d7a.jpg
Nice, I get people coming in all the time looking to cut the cord with their cable companies. It’s getting too expensive.
This is the antenna you will want. Probably one of the best antennas you can get, and it’s not expensive at all. Just aim it in the direction where the broadcasts come from.
http://www.amazon.com/RCA-ANT751R-Outdoor-Optimized-Reception/dp/B0024R4B5C/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1360299392&sr=8-1&keywords=ANT751
Unless you live in the middle of a city with signals coming from every direction, avoid a unidirectional antenna. They generate their own static and are extremely sensitive to anything that can cause static. Antennas Direct also makes some outstanding antennas BUT the majority of them do not receive VHF. I don’t know how it is up there, but in the states, 99% of the channels are broadcast in UHF.
This antenna will pull signals from extremely far away. Again though it will not get VHF.
http://www.amazon.com/Antennas-Direct-ClearStream4-HDTV-Antenna/dp/B001BRXW74/ref=sr_1_3?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1360299604&sr=1-3&keywords=outdoor+antenna
My problem is that where I live I am split between Toronto and buffalo. Half the channels are in eah place, and I am at the center of a 90 degree angle to them both.
Toronto is to the northeast and buffalo is to the southeast
I wonder if you could run two of the RCA directional antennas in series. One aiming each direction. I bet you could. The TV tuner doesn’t know the difference. An antenna is just an extension of the coaxial cable really
The guy at the local OTA antenna store said that is what I would need to do. Run one pointing at the CN Tower, and the other pointing at Buffalo. I don’t know how to combine them to feed into one line, but I’m sure it’s easy.
This looks like it can pick up from two different directions
http://overtheair.saveandreplay.com/images/DB8e_mast4-250x250.jpg
Did the guy at the store have any tips on making that sort of setup as storm-proof as possible? I’d love to do something like that but some of the high winds put me off.
I doubt winds would affect it. Not a lot of surface area on those antennas.
A regular coax splitter that normally does 1 in 2 out will not work because you will have signal overlap which will cause static and maybe a complete loss of that signal that both antennas are picking up. For example, your antenna pointing at Buffalo picks up channel 41 clearly, but your other antenna aimed at Toronto is also picking up on channel 41, but not as strongly. The signal strength is different so the “phase” of the signal will be different. Overlapping these will cause the signal to combine. See below…
So here is the setup I would personally do. I prefer the overkill method so keep that in mind lol…
This is what you will use to amplify and combine the signals from two antennas http://www.amazon.com/RCA-TVPRAMP1R-Outdoor-Antenna-Preamplifier/dp/B003P92D9Y/ref=cm_cmu_pg__header
OR - Use this one if you do not want to amplify the signal. http://www.amazon.com/CHANNEL-Passing-2-Way-Splitter-Combiner/dp/B00006JPEA/ref=sr_1_3?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1295017501&sr=1-3
And then for your antennas, go with the clearstream if you want just UHF, or the RCA if you also need VHF. You can probably google a list of OTA channels in your area and the bandwidth they use
Thanks for the posts, Joe, they are very useful. Much easier than trawling the digitalhome threads lol 
With what you’ve suggested above, I might give it a try in the summer.
We’re all geeking it up on tvfool.com to see what channels we could get.
I just put the antenna in a certain spot and cbc came in perfectly…so HNIC is on at my house tomorrow for the first time this season.
HNIC is also streamed through Cbc.ca. that way you can watch Ottawa/Montreal if you are so inclined 
also available in Punjabi.
I can watch habs games too… I get french cbc.
Great show about guns in the us and gun crime on fifth estate right now. Neat stat…
Out of 85,000 gun dealers in the us, 30 of them sold 65% of the guns used in all murders/attempted murders/armed robbery/armed drug deals
That’s staggering. So 0.03% of the dealers sell 65% of the major armed crime guns.
The nra found out about this and lobbied hard (and succesfully) to restrict what the atf can do with that information. They’re only able to investigate a dealer on that list once per year and there are a bunch more restrictions.
Kinda nuts.
Winegard Freevision Indoor antenna. This thing is amazing, the picture is far better than cable. 4.5 stars with 387 reviews on Amazon.
Winegard Freevision Indoor antenna. This thing is amazing, the picture is far better than cable. 4.5 stars with 387 reviews on Amazon.
I got a proper antenna on my roof. It was $500 all in, installed. It’s about 3 feet by 18 inches, x2 because I need a dual antenna to catch Toronto based a stations and NY based stations. I now have about 25 channels excluding the ones I deleted. 29 if you include those. Perfect quality.
It’s great. We don’t watch loads of TV so it’s business as usual although I do enjoy getting the US networks and seeing other hockey games on nbc and golf on the weekends on cbs/nbc