Mediacom’s Last Chance

Our local cable and Internet provider sent a repair guy over yesterday (for the third time this week) to fix the Internet line coming into the house.  For the last TWO YEARS every month or two we would lose the signal, sometimes for as many as five days while we waited for them to send someone out to fix it.  I called their wonderful India based tech support branch eight days ago complaining about service being down.  Three days later they sent someone out who “adjusted the levels.”  I complained that that was what they always did (three times in the last six months at least).  Sure enough, the guy’s adjustment worked fine, until five hours after he left when suddenly it stopped working again. Read more »

My Experience of Getting Rid Of Cable- Installing The Antenna

So today we truly cut the cord. No more cable TV, only cable Internet. It should save our household nearly $1000 a year (as long as they don’t raise the Internet rates any time soon). So what now? In the absence of cable our kids won’t be constantly trying to turn the TV to iCarly and Spongebob (BIG plus there!). On the down side we will now be relying on over the air stations, Hulu, Netflix, and possibly some other kind of media player like XBMC. We’ll see how it goes. My wife is happy with the idea, but she grew up the first 19 years of her life without having cable TV. I on the other hand, was apparently spoiled and am told that having HBO rotted my brain to some extent.

The Hard Part-  Finding The Right Antenna

So here we are. The first thing we had to do after deciding to make the switch was to actually buy an antenna since our house didn’t have one already. We literally tried out four different styles of antenna before finally finding one that would actually pull in all of the local stations (even though we live in a suburb of a major city.  Take it from me, unless you live right next door to the transmitter the cheapo little $15 bow tie antennas that you can find at Walmart and Target will not do the trick.  But, it does sell for only about ten bucks at Amazon.

Even the next model up, an amplified indoor disc antenna was insufficient to pull in everything, especially our local ABC affilliate whose tower was a little farther away than the others. Finally the fourth time was a charm, and we invested in an outdoor flat antenna made by RCA, the ANT 800. I got it for around $60 over at Menards.The Easy Part-  Hooking Up The Antenna

I hooked it up and let it sit out on our deck to test it and once we hooked in the amplifier insert it pulled in everything nicely. I finally got around to mounting it high up on the side of our house, not under the gutters because I didn’t want it getting broken off by ice or snow, but on the north side of the house so that I could point it in the general direction of the towers. If you are wondering how I got all this information you can go to AntennaWeb.org, and type in your address to get a detailed description of all of your local channels, what direction they are from your house, and what kind of antenna they recommend that you use to pull them in. If only I had seen this site to begin with it would have saved me a ton of trouble and three return visits to the department stores to take back the ineffective ones.

Hooking the Antenna Into The House Cable System

I wasn’t about to run new cable to every TV in the house so I took the easy route.  I had a long spool of coax sitting in the garage and ran it up a rain gutter to the peak of the roof.  Mounting the antenna in the right place was fairly easy, even though I hate heights.  I had told my wife that I would be outside for about thirty minutes, and true to form it took me twice that.  Once it was up and wired though I  ran the wire down to where the cable company had a splitter set up and connected it to the house system, went inside and tried to program the televisions.  Even without hooking in the amplifier that comes with the antenna I was able to get thirteen channels.  Once I added the amplifier that number went up to fifteen, finally pulling in the elusive ABC stations and doing so with plenty of signal.

Once I knew it was working I finally cut the cable.  Not literally of course, but I called the local cable company and told them I wanted to drop the channels and just keep internet.  I was expecting a hard sell to keep me going but surprisingly it went quick and painless.  Bye bye cable and hello an extra $70 a month!