I will admit, I can spend an entire Saturday laying on the couch fully consumed in nonsense on cable TV. Having said that, I also do understand that it is a total waste of time and not to mention an ever increasing cost. Soooo, we are going the old fashioned route and putting an antenna on top of the house to get some high def broadcast television.
I have used several websites trying to figure out where to point the antenna and most of them have been a pain, worthless or told me that I was completely out of range. We are in a fringe area but I was convinced that it was possible and the website that actually proved the most useful, surprisingly, was the FCC resource page located at https://www.fcc.gov/media/engineering/dtvmaps
The website gave compass coordinates and these allowed for easily positioning the antenna using a compass app I had downloaded on my phone. Now for the actual installation, we had a ladder that was a wee bit too short so I was unable to get on the roof. So I held the ladder in a precarious position and my wife and 8-year old son got on the roof and installed the antenna. We used Pofung radios to communicate and it went pretty smoothly. After installation I ran a scan on the TV and we had around 18 channels which was a lot more than I expected.
The next step to complete our cord cutting experience was to install a Tablo. The Tablo is a network based DVR which works really well. It records shows, allows for season recording and works with Roku, Fire TV Stick, Xbox, tablets and our phones. I can be out in the workshop and pull a show up on my phone – if I wanted to. So far the whole experience has been painless and I no longer spend countless hours watching Tiny House Nation or Flip or Flop.
So a rundown of our TV entertainment is: Roku which allows for multiple apps, the biggest of which is YouTube and Netflix plus the Tablo app. We also have Hulu but I really do not enjoy using it and we will be ridding ourselves of it. Our biggest form of entertainment these days centers around being outside, which is really the way I think it should be.
