Somehow, it doesn’t at all surprise me that you could build your own tv antenna out of stuff around the house. When I worked in the dining hall during college, we had a radio out back, but someone eventually broke the antenna. But not to worry, we were able to build one with discarded forks. It worked pretty well, too.
The problem is with your rabbit ears. The great thing about digital is you either get it or you don’t their is not much in between
For the 8 v shaped pieces, in the middle. For the 2 longer bent pieces, both ends, at each bend and in the middle for 5 clear spots each.
I have one of these things hooked up to the HDTV in our spare bedroom where we don’t have cable, and it works great even though Antennaweb claims we need an outdoor antenna.
That doesn’t seem to be the case since the signal is there at times and not at other times.
I have the same problem but I read that getting a digtal TV would not make any difference. The signal I am getting would be the same.
When I first got the converter box I was surprised how much clearer the picture was but the dropped signal and the pixel crap turned me off. I have only one channel that is fine 99% of the time using the box. All the others cut out and sometimes are lost all together.
I don’t watch TV very often but I am going to dread the cut over. Once in a while when I am home from work I leave the TV on while I am cleaning or whatever and the channels I watch cut out and it pisses me off. I just want to watch Price is Right.
His point isn’t that you’ll either get it 100% of the time or 0% of the time - it’s that when you get it, you get 100% of the signal, and when you don’t, you get 0%. You just don’t get a 50% signal to watch the moon landing from your living room while eating a TV dinner and breathing in dad’s secondhand pipe smoke while mom cries into her sherry in the kitchen.
I just got my converter box and hooked it up on Tuesday. I have the digital anntena that was reccomended. I get nothing when the box is hooked up. I spent an hour on the phone with the customer service rep and tried everything. Got nothing. Evidently all the channels will be broadcast thru channel 3 on my TV, like my VCR/DVD player? I can’t even get the set up screen to come up, cbhannel 3 is nothing but solid black. The rep I was talking to said ‘maybe you’ll have to unhook the VCR to get it to work…’.
Um…no. You mean I have to make the choice between having TV reception or having a DVD/VCR? That can’t possibly be right.
Why couldn’t they just leave things alone? All this is is a way to force people to spend money.
Do you have a good internet connection? If so, just stick to hulu.com.
Did you try running it *through *your VCR? Post your TV and VCR/DVD models and we could walk you through your options.
My converter boxes have both a line output and an RF output. If your TV has both types of inputs you can plug the converter box into one and the VCR into the other.
Otherwise, as Munch said, the proper hookup is to run the antenna into the coverter box, the converter box into the VCR and the VCR into the TV. After all, your VCR is going to need a digital converter, too.
That may be true, but unless I play with the antenna just like I did when I was watching the moon landing the signal drops from 100% to 0% and back several dozen times a minute and the net effect is really almost the same.
Ultimately I was able to scan 20 channels but to do that I had to have the antenna in a really awkward position that obscured my view of the TV set and every time I tried to move it to a more discreet place I couldn’t get good signal. I almost went to the kitchen for the aluminum foil.
But I decided the programming selection sucked beyond belief so I took the whole rig down and put back my cable box instead of turning it in and cancelling the service, that was the end of my 6 hour experiment with Government TV.
Hmmm…OK… I tried running it thru the VCR, hooked ot the anntena in plug and still got nothing. It looks to me like to do that I will need another cable, to go from the anntena out on the VCR to the TV. Jesus…why can’t this be easy???
I am just not feeling well enough today to fight with it.
Not sure that’s it. This should all be connected in sequence:
Antenna → Converter Box → VCR/DVD → TV
Also - post your TV and VCR model so that we can actually help.