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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 FCC can not tell a property owner he or she must allow an antenna. The FCC can not dictate anything in regards to property. In fact, a property owner not allowing external antennae would not fall foul of any federal law, since the only federal laws in regards to renting property are that you do not discriminate based on any of the legally protected classes.
That said, he should check into local zoning laws. But that has nothing to do with the FCC. A state or city may allow such a thing, but in most cases I would say that a tenant can not install his or her OWN antenna. The owner, manager, or maintenance staff would need to do it.