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I also went ota, built my own antenna and put it inside the garage up in the rafters.see http://www.digitalhome.ca/ota/superantenna/index.htm for lots of information and plans. I needed a pre-amp for the 90 feet of cable to my tvs. The nearest broadcaster is about 45 miles away. I get the standard stations: ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, FOX, and ION along with their sub-channels. That's 13 channels that come in very well nearly all the time. I also get several other channels, but not consistently.

Not quite true. I have used an unlocked GSM-only phone on Bell's network without any problems. Put my SIM in and it works. Bell and Telus both run quad-band GSM in addition to their HSPA and CDMA networks in most areas.

Well, either that's new or your are roaming on another network They definitely don't have GSM here.

http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=116420

1 - People rip DVDs to files around 700MB / 1GB that's 2 hours. And that's good enough for TV

http://www.digitalhome.ca/2011/04/netflix-now-has-800000-canadian-customers/
a High Definition video stream which consumes about 2.3 GB per hour.

The TV industry is telling me that I need to have BluRay player (~ 16GB/hour) to take advantage of my expensive new HD TV, now you're saying "Bah, even DVD is too much, you don't need that kind of quality, highly compressed 480i (0.5 GB/hour) is good enough for your 1080p TV"

Oh, I get it. All I'm saying is that ripped DVDs don't look "bad" on my 32 inch TV, and certainly watchable on bigger screens.
Of course BluRay looks stunning. But I can see that only from being right in front of the TV.
2GB/hour of HD content may look great, but I guess I wouldn't mind not having that for TV shows, for example.

2 - Do people really watch almost 7h of TV per day?

http://www.csun.edu/science/health/docs/tv&health.html
Number of hours per day that TV is on in an average U.S. home: 6 hours, 47 minutes

How much would they watch if it wasn't for commercials? It's almost 50% show 50% commercials nowadays.
Streaming/Tivo/etc leads to a different pattern of watching.

1 - People rip DVDs to files around 700MB / 1GB that's 2 hours. And that's good enough for TV

http://www.digitalhome.ca/2011/04/netflix-now-has-800000-canadian-customers/
a High Definition video stream which consumes about 2.3 GB per hour.

The TV industry is telling me that I need to have BluRay player (~ 16GB/hour) to take advantage of my expensive new HD TV, now you're saying "Bah, even DVD is too much, you don't need that kind of quality, highly compressed 480i (0.5 GB/hour) is good enough for your 1080p TV"

2 - Do people really watch almost 7h of TV per day?

http://www.csun.edu/science/health/docs/tv&health.html
Number of hours per day that TV is on in an average U.S. home: 6 hours, 47 minutes

http://gizmodo.com/#!5737002/the-problem-with-android-updates-part-seventeen-or-why-samsung-galaxy-phones-are-stuck-in-the-past
http://androidcommunity.com/samsung-fascinate-users-report-froyo-update-problems-and-solutions-20110422/
http://www.bgr.com/2011/02/24/sprint-pulls-epic-4g-android-2-2-froyo-update-data-connectivity-sd-card-issues-reported/
http://www.digitalhome.ca/2010/12/samsung-users-complain-android-2-2-update-is-bricking-phones/

By the way, since Slashdot seems to deem update problems with specific phone models newsworthy, where are the Slashdot posts on these Android update problems, and how come that isn't a 'saga'?

No kidding. Is this just going to be more hype & fail like Nexus One?

Go to the Nexus One page, and click "Looking for detailed information about the Nexus One? Visit the Nexus One Support Page." and you get a bloody 404, no explanation.

Want one? Click "Buy From" for Canada and you get a Quebec-only outfit. (I'm Canadian and physically closer to New Orleans than Quebec.) It /was/ available for use on our major cell services for just less than four months before Google pulled the phone. At which time they said online support will still be available -- see 404 note above.

VHF Rabbit ears plus UHF loop. These used to be good for analog television, but now for digital television they are all-but-worthless. You really need to get one of the larger antennas:

Settop VHF/UHF - http://i589.photobucket.com/albums/ss337/KonichiJ/dtv-antenna-rabbit-ears-hdtv.jpg
CM4228HD - http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/picture.php?albumid=107&pictureid=538

By the way free tv won't last too much longer. The FCC and Obama administration are rushing full speed ahead to sell-off the remaining channels by 2012 to their Corporate Overloads (ATT and Verizon), and only leave ~5 channels per city. So enjoy your Free TV while you can - you'll soon be forced to either upgrade to Pay TV, or else take up book reading

They're "Business" deals in most ISPs I know of.

Haw, most ISPs I know of around here charge businesses out the nose and if you're buying DSL or Cable for your company, it's still oversubscribed and offered without a SLA. The sole reason to pay more is because you're a business and it's unfair that someone might make money off of someone's technology and not give it to them.

If you want real dedicated bandwidth with a real promise to keep the internet turned on, you get a T-1 connection or better, and it starts around $400 for 1.5Mbit with installation fees depending on location. And then, you're usually just getting a line to your local phone company so you're still at the mercy of whatever your phone company decides to do to your contract "subject to change without notice" (just ask TekSavvy).

I believe what the GP was talking about is a price for the bandwidth - say $10-30 for 1-10mbps, AND a price for the throughput...

Packages here are for bandwidth and data cap, combined. Rogers has a 10Mbps/60GB package, a 3Mbps/25GB package, and others. What we can't do is pick the speed and data independent of each other - speed and cap are a combo pack. There's a chart which I think is current at http://www.digitalhome.ca/content/view/3861/280/ (lower down).

CoreAVC is the fastest software H.264 decoder, you might want to try that out with MPC. I haven't had any video playback issues since switching to it. Of course it's Windows only, and not free.

My problem is that my stupid Yamaha receiver has a "DTS bitstream bomb" problem... certain BluRay movies exhibit extremely loud "digital popping" noises during DTS passthrough playback, forcing me to switch to Dolby Digital. :( Hopefully Yamaha support can provide me with a firmware fix I've read about on some forums.

Build one of these. Made a huge difference for me when I switched in Spring of 2008. I used steel picture wire. Other's have used copper wire, aluminum wire, or copper piping. It's directional so make sure you build it to be movable.

http://www.digitalhome.ca/ota/superantenna/design.htm

Last month, Make Television on PBS showed how to make one of those Hoverman antennas using coat hangers, a pipe and some pieces of wood. Here's the video.

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/01/maker_workshop_dtv_antenna_steadyca.html

Here are some GPL'd antenna designs I also found on a different site.

http://www.digitalhome.ca/ota/superantenna/design.htm

There are even better designs than the UHF loop. I built one of these, and it works great, even without a reflector. Extremely easy to build too. Something even better and a little more complex would be the Grey Hoverman.

"and of the 1% who "need" more bandwidth, 99% of them probably aren't using it for legitimate downloads. "

That stat may have been true a few years ago, but I strongly suspect, if it hasn't changed already, it'll be different over the next few years. Video streaming services are becoming very popular, and it's gotten to the point where many Netflix users prefer the Watch Instantly option over receiving DVDs in the mail. The bitrate for HD Netflix content on the Roku box is 3.5 Mbit/sec. Let's suppose that some people keep increasing their usage of streaming services to the point where it replaces their usage of broadcast TV. Hell, why not? Netflix and Apple TV are cheaper than standard or premium cable. Let's then consider the statistic from http://www.digitalhome.ca/content/view/3134/283/ that the average person spends about 142 hours in front of a TV per month. That means downloading over 218 GB in one month just from watching TV through a streaming service.

The Gray-Hoverman antenna designs, schematics, and diagrams on this site are Copyright ©2008 and are free: you can redistribute them and/or modify them under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at our option) any later version.

I live in a valley...

next to an HD-only transmitter.

Needless to say, analog *anything* has been an issue. Last spring, sensing there may a be rush later, I got our two coupons from Uncle Sam, and cashed 'em in. A few points on my experience:

o Direction and gain are definitely more of an issue. Since we barely got anything analog clearly on bunny ear/loop, we got next to nothing with digital.

o With digital, it's all or nothing. Either you have clear signal, maybe with some artifacts, or you have black screen.

o *The* most annoying thing is that sounds cuts first.

o So, I did what any self-respecting tinkerer would do. I build a grey-hoverman antenna out of foam board, packing tape, tin foil, and picture hanging wire - all from from Walgreens (U.S. pharmacy) :-D. http://www.digitalhome.ca/ota/superantenna/

o Obviously, with such rarefied materials I have a less-than-precise design - that works... really well.

o The GH antenna is highly directional. Since digital is crystal-clear, we put up with adjusting the thing in the bay window.

o We get 9-12 clear channels now, instead of 4-5 distorted ones.

o It's best to put it in an attic, or outside. Be sure to ground it, etc. The higher, the better - generally.

o Note that there are two ranges for VHF DTV, high channels and low channels. The Grey-Hoverman seems to do well with UHF DTV and high VHF. Most DTV seems to be UHF.

o Only some DTV is HD. Stations were given sub-channels. Some use only the main channel and switch back and forth between HD. Others put SD on one and HD on the other. Others use all for HD, with different content. The public television stations, strangely enough, seem to be making the best use of the sub-channels.

o The other prominent build-able design is called a Yagi. It consists of connected bow-ties, rather than zig-zag elements. The Yagi design is nice, because its gain is roughly even across UHF. The Grey-Hoverman seems to have better gain than the Yagi on some ranges, but cuts out in others. Check the frequencies of your local stations and compare them to the two antennas' gain charts before deciding.

o Why the range of channels for me? Well, in a valley the signal has echoes. Some echoes are stronger than others. Sometimes the amp makes the two echoes the same strength. In that case the converter box cannot lock in. Thus, if your location is subject to echoes (hills, valley, etc.), design your wiring to allow the easy removal of your amplifier.

o Also, atmospheric conditions seem to have an effect. On clear dry days we don't do so well; on wet or humid days, I think we could get New York City, if we wanted (we're in southern N.E.).

o Finally, going digital with a converter has one interesting benefit for you OSS fans. Since the Neuros OSD is still SD, converted DTV works nicely with it. I don't have one yet, but they are now on Amazon, and I am strongly considering getting one.

I covered this subject in my /. Journal almost a year ago.

HDTV Reception: Everything You Need to Know

http://slashdot.org/~evilviper/journal/184757

About the only thing noteworthy that has happened since then is the "open source" Gray-Hoverman antenna, if you want to opt to build your own antenna with very high gain. http://www.digitalhome.ca/ota/superantenna/index.htm
Although, at about 1.5m / 5' tall, you'll probably want to scale it down to get it to fit in a window.

if you are in Canada go to www.digitalhome.ca/forums to the OTA Forum Knowledge Base & FAQ to get started:

http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=41102

Better yet, hardhack your own. Build an open source Gray-Hooverman antenna.

http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=81982&page=25

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/14/2021223&from=rss

I built one just for fun and it works great.

A lot of folks are enthusiastic about the Gray-Hoverman antenna design.

There is discussion here.

Keo provides a detailed description of a design he built for use in his apartment.

Unfortunately, the pictures of his build are no longer available, but from the other forum posts and his detailed description, his version of this antenna could be replicated.

A lot of folks are enthusiastic about the Gray-Hoverman antenna design.

There is discussion here.

Keo provides a detailed description of a design he built for use in his apartment.

Unfortunately, the pictures of his build are no longer available, but from the other forum posts and his detailed description, his version of this antenna could be replicated.

A lot of folks are enthusiastic about the Gray-Hoverman antenna design.

There is discussion here.

Keo provides a detailed description of a design he built for use in his apartment.

Unfortunately, the pictures of his build are no longer available, but from the other forum posts and his detailed description, his version of this antenna could be replicated.

So, April 2009 and the digital conversion?

February 2009? Whatever. I'm there already. Rabbit ears and a converter box work just fine.

I have a cabin way out in the woods. A homemade Gray-Hoverman works great there.

It's already been done. Using nothing more than some plexiglas for wire spreaders and some multi-strand jacketed wire taken out of an old vacuum-cleaner power-cord.

http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showpost.php?p=713227&postcount=81

More replies to that design can be read on this page of that thread http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=81982&page=6

No sense reinventing the wheel. To tell the truth, this free-hanging collapsible model is performing better than the one I made to specs using stiff 1/8" dia. aluminum wire with a metal-mesh backing.

p.s. this "anonymous coward" is Keo, the guy who posted that design and info on it. I just didn't care to have to sign up to yet another forum.

It's already been done. Using nothing more than some plexiglas for wire spreaders and some multi-strand jacketed wire taken out of an old vacuum-cleaner power-cord.

http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showpost.php?p=713227&postcount=81

More replies to that design can be read on this page of that thread http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=81982&page=6

No sense reinventing the wheel. To tell the truth, this free-hanging collapsible model is performing better than the one I made to specs using stiff 1/8" dia. aluminum wire with a metal-mesh backing.

p.s. this "anonymous coward" is Keo, the guy who posted that design and info on it. I just didn't care to have to sign up to yet another forum.

Gray-Hoverman Antenna | Performance | Designs, Schematics, And Diagrams | Join the Digital Forum Discussion

The Gray-Hoverman Antenna For UHF Television Reception
March 13, 2008

This project is dedicated to Doyt R. Hoverman (b.1913), the man who created and did the early work on the Hoverman antenna at a time when antenna modeling programs did not exist. His work would have been entirely created and improved by field testing, trial and error, and with a great amount of calculation without the benefit of electronic devices. Without his efforts, our work would not have been. Doyt Hoverman passed away in December, 1989 at Van Wert, Ohio, USA.
First, A Bit About The Original Hoverman Antenna
Doyt R. Hoverman's original design for a television antenna was granted US patents #2918672 on 22 Dec 1959 and #3148371 on 8 Sept 1964, which expired in 1979 and 1984 respectively. To view them, click on this link and then simply enter the patent number mentioned above to retrieve each.

In his patent applications, Hoverman describes two designs with 4 rod reflectors, full wavelength and co-linear half-wavelength reflectors, with the second design using the following specifications:

* Driven array = 56" dual segments with 8 subsections of 7" (same as the first design)
* Reflector spacing = 3.5"
* Full Wavelength Reflectors:
o Top and bottom = 29"
o The two middle = 24"
* Half Wavelength Co-Linear Reflectors
o Top and bottom = 14"
o The two middle = 10"

The above dimensions are for reception of UHF channels ranging from 14 to 35, as claimed in the patent. He gives design equations for shifting the range, and suggests 35-58 and 58-83, although the range 58-83 is not applicable now as UHF TV channels in North America only go to 69, and after 2009 will only go to 51.

The original Hoverman antenna design did not have a reflector and used a driven array of 56" segments with eight zig-zag 7" sub-elements. The original patent # 2918672 claimed UHF and VHF reception. The modeling results did not find any positive net gain for VHF Low channels 2-6 nor for VHF High channels 7-13.

There is very little information available anywhere on the Hoverman antenna. The only reference to any commercially manufactured Hoverman antennas seems to be in the article (PDF) The Hoverman, VUD Sept 1982, which mentioned a 4 bay Hoverman made by AntennaCraft named the model G-1483 and which was also made for Radio Shack as the model 15-1627, seen in this photo courtesy of tvlurker:

Radio Shack Hoverman

Some of these commercially manufactured Hoverman variants used 7 pairs of collinear rod reflectors. Judging from the AntennaCraft and Radio Shack websites and many Internet searches those Hoverman models do not seem to be currently in manufacture, although it seems that old stock of the AntennaCraft Super-G 1483 is or was available from SummitSource.com.

Recent Research On The Hoverman
Canadian antenna buff Autofils, speculating in an online discussion of Build It Yourself Antennas on the Digital Home web site in early 2008 on the possibility of experimenting with the old Hoverman Antenna design, sought out old sparks, another Canadian antenna enthusiast, who used 4NEC2 computer antenna modelling software to model the original Hoverman design. His research showed that the Hoverman had p

Friday, 13 April 2007

Bell Canada today - April 13th - pulled all of its advertising from Digital Home citing our refusal to take down an article which informed readers about a new generation of satellite receivers expected to arrive in July.

In the article , Digital Home stated that the information was from Bell ExpressVu dealers and that the company had yet to publicly announce the receiver specifications.

Yesterday, I was contacted by a press relations representative from Bell Canada and was informed that Bell Canada "might" pull its advertising from Digital Home Canada if the article was not removed from the Digital Home site.

The PR representative explained the request came from Pat Button, the Vice President of Marketing at ExpressVu. The representative said Mr. Button had seen the article and demanded it be taken down from the site because it was having a negative impact on dealer sales. The representative also said that it was impossible for Bell to be releasing new HD receivers this year because a Request for Proposal (RFP) for the receivers had not even been issued by ExpressVu.

Oops, HDCP stands for High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection. My mistake! Also I forgot to cite ICT, AACS and HDCP, which would have saved me from looking retarded when I checked the links. That's what I get for going by memory.

Oops, HDCP stands for High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection. My mistake! Also I forgot to cite ICT, AACS and HDCP, which would have saved me from looking retarded when I checked the links. That's what I get for going by memory.