Back during the FIFA World Cup, I got tired of hunting places playing the games. I didn’t have cable and had no interest in paying to watch. So, I went out and bought an antenna and connected it directly to the TV.
Fast forward a few months later, my wife was tired of looking at the precariously balanced antenna and asked me to move it. As temps had finally dropped, I went into the attic and installed the thing. Ran the cable around the beams and down a tube into the house. Got the idea to buy a splitter so I could share the antenna between the main TVs.
First thing I watched were the final 15 minutes of ST:TNG season 2, episode 9, The Measure of a Man. RIP Sir Patrick Stewart.
Once I lived far from the big city nearly on top of a mountain. I could only get the local country/gospel/christian radio stations on my normal FM antenna. I found that Radio Shack had 100 mile FM antenna. I installed that above the house and got all the big city stations loud and clear. It was a glorious day.
That’s good work.
I wasn’t sure if there were even over-air broadcasts anymore.
Reminds me of visiting the country grandparents during summer as a kid and having to run outside to rotate the 2 story antenna pole whenever the reception got bad.
Definitely wish I’d done this (and a couple other things) before blowing 50cm of insulation into our attic.
The in-wall box is great!
Edit: words.
As someone who is planning to blow insulation into their attic, do you have a list of what you wish you’d done?
I’ll probably forget a couple, but here’s off the top of my head.
- Adding backflow dampers where two bathroom fan exhaust pipes meet before going outside.
- TV antenna
- Amateur radio antenna (don’t currently have anything to attach but LoRA/mesh ability may be useful)
- Adding a couple more lights in the attic. I’m not doing much up there but checking for leaks following a big storm would be easier if everything was lit up.
- Really proper sealing anything penetrating the main floor ceiling.
- And, the biggest one for me, moving/adding ceiling light fixtures in the main floor. The bedrooms all have their electrical entering in the corner as the original fixtures were “fancy” with the wiring running through a chain to the the light hanging from the middle of the room. Updating from the 1970s means having the light fixtures in the corner which makes weird lighting in the rooms.
Having recently done this myself, I might add:
- If your bathrooms don’t have exhaust ventilation or if the duct size is too small, redo it
- Any pipes or ducting in the attic should be properly insulated
- Interconnected smoke alarms
- Passing network/speaker wire in strategic areas of the house for access points, cameras or speakers
Thanks!
Make damn sure your soffit vents don’t get covered. The jackass who did this right before I bought the house jam packed all of them. I had zero airflow in my attic and had to crawl around clearing the soffits vents and reattaching the styrofoam baffels.
Trying to find beams and army crawl through thick blown in insulation to every edge of my roof was the worst experience. Would be a great torture for a SAW movie.
Anyhow now I have fantastic airflow! But all that could have been avoided if he didn’t overdo the edges and fuck up the baffles.
Thank you!
Get ceiling fixtures (fans and lights) wired and set up. If youve got ceiling electrical boxes that are only rated for the weight of a light and you think you might want a fan, swapping the box will probably be easier now. Ive got closer to 20cm of insulation and ive made a bit of a mess of it playing around with the ceiling fixtures
Appreciate it!!
More effort than what I did, I had a $3 antenna I bought on clearance that’s mounted on a bookshelf in my living room. After just having it plugged into my TV’s coax port for over a year I broke down and bought one of the supported adapters to use the OTA antenna on my Plex server and set up the live TV that way.
I was able to watch all of Brazil’s World Cup games either at home or streamed to my phone while I was at work no problem. Only other time I really use it is to watch the Oscars or some NFL games. Even having the antenna in my living room not near a window I get several stations from Boston, Worcester and Providence with decent signal strength.
I might move the antenna to a window with a coax extension cord at some point but I get all the channels I care about just fine right now so it isn’t a priority at the moment.
I installed an over-the-air antenna…
What other kind is there?
I don’t know if you’re joking or genuinely curious, but here goes: Over-the-air (OTA) typically refers to ATSC television broadcast in the US. There are many non-OTA antenna types that could be mounted to a house including the following: geostationary satellite, LEO satellite, PTP microwave, AM, FM, shortwave, LoRa mesh, and others.
I feel like “OTA” in this context is short for “OTA TV”, vs getting channels over cable/fiber.
Sure, but the concept on an antenna is to send and recieve signals over the air, fiber doesn’t use an antenna, cable is debatable, it broadcasts signals at different frequencies in a single cable, which could be seen as using radio and some kind of antenna, though that is not what the vast majority means
Nice!
Hell, I made one out of an old hunk of wood, some crappy wire, drywall screws, cardboard and aluminum foil. Plus a 3’ piece of coax.
Sits behind the TV. Works well enough to pickup any station I care to watch.
Oh wow I meant to do this years ago just for backup to get to news or PBS.
If you’re in the middle of a city and likely near some broadcasters do you even need a roof/attic installation these days?
If you’re within 20-25 miles of the station’s broadcast tower you can just fold up a paperclip, stock it in the cable jack, and get most channels. Further than that, an antenna is needed to prevent frame drops and choppy-ness. (At least from my experience in a relatively flat area)
You don’t.
Mine sits behind my TV (and as noted, homemade) and I can pickup pretty much all the local antennas.
There’s phone apps to help you locate your local antennas and orient your antenna.
Nice. Any particular antenna or just whatever Costco might have?
I’ve never seen an antenna for sale at Costco. You’d be better off going to a hardware store – either to buy an antenna, or just to buy some wire to make your own.
But really, there’s no “one size fits all.” It depends on what frequencies you want to pick up and where they are in relation to you. Somebody in the middle of the city with stations a short distance away in different directions needs a completely different kind of antenna than somebody in the exurbs who needs to receive signals from a long distance away in the same direction.
It has admittedly been long enough that last time I was thinking about this, ota antennas were still around in big box stores, somewhere between the switch to digital signals and the overtake by streaming services.
I’m sure you could get an antenna at big box stores like Walmart or Home Depot, just not Costco in particular.
Costco caters to a relatively affluent demographic, and affluent normies aren’t really in the market for OTA antennas. There are more frugal/DIY types who also like Costco (and I count myself among them), but we aren’t really the big spenders Costco is trying to attract.
(Ever notice how Costco sells food in bulk and all sorts of fancy appliances and stuff, but doesn’t sell canning jars? Same deal, I think.)
Nice and neat work!
