When I stated to research getting rid of my cable subscription I was a bit overwhelmed by all the choices of digital antennas. My wife did not want me to stick a big ugly antenna outside and I did not want to miss out on all the channels. I think this was one of my biggest stumbling blocks and that prevented me from going ahead with the project. In the end I was in Canadian Tire and I was just browsing and I came across an antenna that they had. So on a whim I bought the Futura HDTV Outdoor Antenna – why? – to be honest it was $85 bucks and I could at least test out cutting the cord. I also had to buy some coaxial cable so I bought two lengths of 50 foot cable and a splicing connector so I could splice them together if I needed to. Why did I not buy the 100 foot cable? because I was not sure if I needed that much and I did not want a ton of extra cable – I had not measured first because I had not really planned on installing the antenna until that moment. This is what the antenna it looks like:
Once I got the antenna home I wanted to figure out where I could get the best reception. I tried it inside the house and found that I only got a few channels so I had to bite the bullet and stick it outside. In the end I mounted it on my chimney up on the roof.
With the antenna on the chimney I decided to run the cable outside all the way to where my Rogers cable came in.
So now I have coaxial cable coming in right where my Rogers cable was coming in. It was at this point, on the inside of the house, that I installed the signal booster that comes with the antenna. The signal booster can be put on anywhere in the coaxial cable chain – but I decided to do it down in the basement because I could just leave the 9V DC adapter plugged in and out of the way.
The final stage of all this was to disconnect my Rogers HD PVR and run some coaxial cable directly into my 50 inch Panasonic Plasma TV. I then went through the steps on my TV to use an external Antenna and once that was done the TV scanned for channels and I was set up and ready to go.
I have had no issues with the antenna and it works fine when the weather is bad, rain, snow, extreme cold – no issues.
