OTA Antenna?

[Arizonarob]

Anyone using a HD OTA antenna for their local channels? If so, how do you like it? Good reception? Plenty of channels? How was the install? Easy? Painful? Where did you mount it? Inside? Outside?

Reason I’m asking. I’ve always had Dish, and I received an email from them saying they are giving out free OTA antennas for local channels, so you can save $10 bucks a month off your bill.
(I know, sounds too good to be true. But I haven’t called them yet to see what the “catch” is.) So was curious to hear people’s thoughts.
What say ye?

 

[HeyEng]

We do have an OTA antenna (this one) connected to an Amazon TV Recast and it works very well. We get all our local channels with no issue (we are about 20 miles from the large antenna farm that most of the area uses) and this with the antenna located inside and hidden near a window. No install was necessary since it just "sits." This website should give you a good idea how well you may be able to get local channels.

Edit: I attached what channels you might expect to see in Chandler, AZ. One of the bonuses of the OTA antenna is you most likely get "extra" channels that are "side channels" to the main channels which are rarely carried by cable/satellite providers. Some of those channels are Crud, but some are pretty good.

 

[koht]

I had an OTA and Playstation Vue. 70 bucks for the antennea and 40 bucks a month for psvue. I liked it a lot. On our OTA, we received roughly 65 channels. Many were duplicates as we live halfway between Cincinnati, Oh and Dayton. We got both Cities. The actual picture quality is much better than cable. The way I understand it, cable needs to compress the video and then bring it back to your tv. It doesn't do a great job at that. With OTA the video is never compressed and you get a much better picture. I could tell watching football and basketball games that the picture was indeed much better than cable. Something like antennaweb.org will give you a gander at the local channels you may pick up.

My guess is to save 10 bucks off your bill they are going to remove the local channels from your box. So you will have to use OTA for local channels. If you like to DVR local channels, it can be done but will be a pain and expense.

edited: I cannot type

 

[proavia]

I have one very similar to THIS ONE . I have cable on the main TV and the OTA on the others in the house. It is mounted on a short pole in my attic space. It came with a box that's installed near one of the TV's that allows the antenna to be rotated. It's usually pointed directly at South Mountain (for those not from the PHX metro area, that's where all the local stations have their antennas mounted). Great signal strength. And I can always rotate my antenna to point towards Tucson or Prescott if I want to view their local stations.

An OTA antenna makes for a good backup if the cable - or in your case, satellite goes down. Here's a list of what we can get in the Valley of the Sun - PHX OTA Channels .

 

[jblizzle]

Up there I would think you would get great reception.
We got rid of DirecTV years ago and went to just a big antenna on the roof and streaming.
Only issue we have is that we are not line of site to the main antennas on the Mountain and have to use the repeaters off the other side of town ... which FOX does not have

Whatever. We rarely watch live Network TV anyway.

 

[Griswald]

It all depends on location. If you are within 40 miles of the local TV antenna farm, a $10 set of rabbit ears will give you all the local channels. Over that, its a Crud shoot. I am 54 miles away from Raleighs TV antenna farm and I use a large attic mounted antenna with an amplifier and get fairly good results. Not all channels and not all times.

I also switched to Hulu Live TV and am really enjoying the $45 a month for 68 channel thing. Beats Dish, Direct, AT&T and cable by a huge amount.

 

[zea3]

I use an antenna and Playstation Vue also. I'm thinking of switching over to Sling since I am the only one using the Vue. I don't miss regular cable at all!

 

[Arizonarob]

Wow, thanks for the responses guys!
Gene I like the idea of the one you have mounted in the attic. I’m assuming it needs power all the time to be able to rotate it?

Are all the channels in HD quality? Or does it fade out to SD if a week signal? I would think sitting in the bottom of this bowl, er, I mean valley, getting channels would be easy. But how are you pulling in Tucson? They are at a higher elevation then us, and over the mountain ridges.

 

[proavia]

Actually, the box that is by the TV plugs into AC and the RJ6 coax wire connects to it and runs to the antenna. Power is supplier to the rotator via that cable wire. So, just the RJ6 coax connects to the antenna.
Antenna - coax - box (AC, antenna and TV jacks) - coax - TV

If you house was built in the past 20-ish years, there is probably a coax antenna lead already in the attic space - and originally ran to where the Cox cable connection point is.

PHX channels are HD where available. I don't know about the TUC stations. I'm in way NE Chandler, so I'm a little higher than you are.

 

[Arizonarob]

Oh, you’re in the nosebleed section of Chandler.

 

[markayash]

For a i got a free DVR i got a AIRTV box from sling ( was free if I signed up for 3 months ) and added a external 2 TB drive ( $45 )..Now I have a channel guide and a DVR and NO monthly fee's..I was paying Tivo $15 a month

 

[Arizonarob]

So I wanted to update this thread for anyone interested in free tv.

So it turns out that Dish (see first post) was planning on dumping channel 3 & 5 here in the Phoenix market. I watch channel 3 every morning for news, as they have a great balance of news and local goings on. So when it disappeared, I was a little peeved. I grabbed This $25 dollar antenna from Amazon, and I got well over 50 channels for free, all in crystal clear HD quality. (some are in SD)
I didn’t even mount the friggen thing, it just sits on a glass shelf above the TV.
So if you’re looking for a good indoor HD antenna that won’t cost you a lot, I highly recommend the one I posted.

 

[Rattus Suffocatus]

So I wanted to update this thread for anyone interested in free tv.

So it turns out that Dish (see first post) was planning on dumping channel 3 & 5 here in the Phoenix market. I watch channel 3 every morning for news, as they have a great balance of news and local goings on. So when it disappeared, I was a little peeved. I grabbed This $25 dollar antenna from Amazon, and I got well over 50 channels for free, all in crystal clear HD quality. (some are in SD)
I didn’t even mount the friggen thing, it just sits on a glass shelf above the TV.
So if you’re looking for a good indoor HD antenna that won’t cost you a lot, I highly recommend the one I posted.

With a $30 "attic" antenna and a decent pre-amp placed outside on my porch roof, I can get the UHF channels from Phoenix here south of Tucson... So yeah, it's definitely worth looking in on. the picture is better than on Dish and Cox cable when we had it and you get far more channels OTA that way than in a "broadcast package". I also have an Amazon recast. It's maybe 3/5 star product but it does work for stuff I cant stream without paying for that needs to be timeshifted (AHEM, PUBLIC Broadcasting).....

So yeah... just do it...