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Best Terrestrial/OTA HDTV Setup For an Apartment?
thesandbender writes "I don't watch TV but keep an HTPC for watching movies. One of my relatives is very ill and I'll have a lot of family rotating through my apartment and I'd like to have a few more options for entertainment. I'm running Vista MCE and bought a Hauppauge HVR-1800 with a DB8 HDTV antenna and I've used AntennaWeb to point the DB8 in the best direction. The results have been terrible and I'm looking for recommendations / suggestions for hardware and setup. I am on the first floor of a three-story apartment building and I can't mount any external antennas (I know this is a major issue). Thankfully almost all the transmitters are located in the same place so a good, compact directional antenna might be effective. And please... no platform bashing. They all have their issues (I have a lot of h.264 encoded files... hardware/GPU acceleration on Linux is very, very limited at the moment)."
The low noise benefits of mast mounted pre-amplifiers are good. Remember that most ota hd channels are in the UHF range so get an amp with gain in that band. Also: Try www.tvfool.com for aiming. Lots more information available to use.
If you're in the US, you can tell the land lord to piss off, they can not stop you from getting a satellite dish. I had a similar problem with my HOA, and Fed law trumps HOAs and landlords.
...to mount an external antenna, but you may be able to mount one inside a window. The glass should be more radio-transparent than the walls.
I strongly recommend the HDTv Antenna Labs website: especially the HDTv Antenna Reviews.
If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
If you can find one, try to get an antenna with part number 15-1880 from Radio Shack. They've been discontinued, but your local store might still have one in stock or you might be able to find one on ebay. It's a simple indoor amplified UHF antenna and passive VHF antenna. I used it in an apartment surrounded by trees about 45 miles away from the towers and was able to get all the HD channels except CBS. CBS used VHF, that's why I couldn't get it. People on AVS forum rave about the antenna, and they were right.
The FCC can not tell a property owner he or she must allow an antenna
I don't think that's true. This seems pretty clear.
Nearly all of the B&M electronics retailers sell absolutely horribly shitty antennas. (There are occasionally decent ones but it's RARE.)
If you want to get a good antenna you need to go to a specialty store (likely online) or in many cases you'll have luck at home improvement stores like Home Depot or Lowes.
Look for products from Channel Master or Winegard. Both make good antennas and preamps. There are a few other good brands but those are the two that come to mind first.
If you fail with CM or Winegard - get cable. Unfortunately reliable terrestrial HD can be difficult. I don't even bother in my apartment. Everything else about your setup is fine, your OS makes no difference if reception is bad. Garbage in, garbage out.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Important note!...I don't know where the original poster is (or if they're even in the U.S.), but in many areas, as of the 2/2009 switch to all digital many DTV stations are moving from their current UHF frequencies to the VHF frequency where they now have their analog broadcast. In the New York area this is true for ABC, TheWB, and PBS, whose DTV broadcasts will be moved to 7, 11, and 13 respectively. I don't believe this is true for any VHF frequencies lower below channel 7.
...not that that stopped a slew of companies from screwing the public by marketing over-prices UHF-only antennas as "HDTV" antennas.
This is an amazing omnidirectional antenna that is small enough to fit in many closets if needed. The 2000 is the same antenna but with 50' of coax, which you would not need if you installed it inside.
http://www.dennysantennaservice.com/1073325.html
I've been watching terrestrial ATSC with an indoor antenna and a MythTV box for several years now. I agree -- amplification is key. In my case, I don't have the luxury of power near my antenna, so I just installed an inexpensive (~$25) powered amp near my PC, and it had a very positive effect. You can pick one up almost anywhere...you can even try the A/V section at your local Target/WalMart.
Cabling to your antenna is also important if it's any distance from the PC. I recommend you keep it at least across the room from the PC, which can generate quite a bit of RF noise. Plus, the extra cable length will give you room to maneuver/aim your antenna. I suggest RG-59 (coax) as opposed to twisted pair. Again, you can get it cheaply at WalMart.
For an indoor antenna, I use a small outdoor UHF-only antenna I got at Radio Shack for ~$25. (It's basically just the small front piece from a full-size rooftop antenna -- a ~3' "spike" in the middle of a V-shaped reflector.) It takes up some space, but works a lot better than indoor antennas I've tried.
Lastly, it will take some amount of experimentation... AntennaWeb will give you a good idea where your local transmitters are, but indoor antennas are subject to lots of reflections and noise, so you might get better results by aiming the antenna a few degrees off of the "correct" orientation...left, right, or even vertically.
Are you sure you don't need MONSTER CABLES?
Joking aside, Lumpy is right. The connection between the antenna and the tuner is not a "wire", it is a "transmission line" -- an impedance controlled duct for RF energy. That's not BS, that's physics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_line
The quality of transmission line used has a huge impact on received signal strength and signal:noise ratio if the cable run is long. RG6 quad-shield is sort of the standard for high-quality TV coax. RG59 is the other commonly available option, and is not really suitable for long antenna feedlines because of the high loss and poor shielding.
Now Monster does produce some coax products, and apparently the real physics and engineering of RF transmission lines isn't "cool" enough for their marketing department, so they decided to spout a bunch of random buzzwords instead to ensure that they avoid any hint of legitimacy in their advertising.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.