Hmm. Did they manage to prove that that was just cosmetic - out was the company really run by masochists? 
I built a similar antenna, using plans from MAKE Magazine. (The short-run MAKE TV had a segment on it too!)
It worked pretty well, but can you imagine using something with sixteen pointy spikes inside the house? I lived in constant dread that it would fall off of its shelf (the sweet spot in my dining room) and kill my dog.
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btw, I watch Comet and This pretty often. Comet is relatively new in my market, but it’s great. I think Movies has a better selection of, uh, movies, though. MeTV, Cozi, and Antenna have all the good classic tv shows. Buzzr introduced me to a show called Tattletales that I’ve developed a certain fascination with (particularly certain guest couples) and Match Game re-runs.
I don’t think we have either Buzzr or Movies in the Portland area, but new sub-channels keep popping up so who knows.
I was recording a lot of esoteric movies off of ThisTV for a while. A real grab-bag, ranging from genuinely great films (The French Connection) to really awful, justifiably forgotten 70s movies.
I’m surprised that someone hasn’t put together a channels which shows nothing but old kiddie TV shows. Cartoons, hosted shows, Bozo the Clown, etc.
The one kid-only sub-channel I know of is Qubo, which shows wholesome stuff, 90% of which I’ve never, ever heard of. Some of the shows are Canadian, others appear to have leaked from another dimension.
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you’ll just need some new digital hardware.
Oh, bullshit. There’s no such thing as a “digital antenna.” Traditional TV antennas, rooftop or rabbit ears, work just fine. (Though rabbit ears should include a UHF loop as well for best results.)
The signals are still broadcast over the same frequencies — the only thing that’s digital is the encoding of the signal, and if you’ve got a digital-capable TV, you’ve got all the decoding hardware you need.
(Most “digital antennas” are only digital in the sense that their signal resolution is so crappy — worse than most rabbit ears — that they probably wouldn’t work worth a damn on lifting analog signals above urban background RF noise and multipath echo. It’s much easier for digital tuners to discriminate signal from noise, so a really crappy antenna is sufficient.)
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To be fair, the HD-BLADE isn’t the only antenna I’ve seen that portrays always-has-been-there broadcast TV as some new miraculous service you just need this special dongle to access.
Interestingly, I have spoken to more than one person in my office* who didn’t know broadcast TV was still a thing.
*Where we work on digital TV stuff! For the cable industry, but still!
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UHF, not VHF, unless things are different in the States than in Canada. I think the VHF frequencies have all been re-purposed by now. And people should stop calling the antennas “HD”, they are just antennas for the UHF band.Most digital TV is HD.
There are apparently a few digital stations that use VHF space. One of the Portland area stations . . . it has been a whle since I scanned so I’ll have to look that up.
Also, there are (as noted uptopic) still a few VHF analog TV stations, used as repeaters.
The cable business has done a bang-up job of hiding the existence of broadcast sub-channels as well. Rather than putting them on the same multiplex as their associated broadcast channels and using the X.Y broadcast numbering, they get shuffled off to, let’s say, channel 497. You’d hardly realize that MeTV, Decades, etc. aren’t just cable networks along the lines of USA or FX.
Yes indeed. Chicago’s WBBM (channel 2, the CBS affiliate) actually has both VHF (2.1, 2.2) that covers the region, and a low-power UHF signal (2.11, 2.21) for city dwellers. Even in the analog days, it was the hardest channel to pick up.
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Our Comcast franchise puts the HD “main” channels in the 700s (e.g., 712 for Fox 12 Oregon) and the first subchannel in the 300s (e.g., 310 for OBP’s 10_2 subchannel).
Things are getting complicated as the number of subchannels increases. NBC affiliate KGW has 8_2 and 8_3. Where do you put them? Comet (2_3) ended up at 301.
Well, since those are franchised packages, with no real attachment to the parent channel, I don’t find that too objectionable. I’d rather have all of those nostalgia channels in a block anyway.
In the US, both VHF and UHF bands are used for DTV broadcast. The upper portion of the UHF spectrum (ch. 52-69, the 700MHz band) was auctioned off a while back to mobile providers, and there was some discussion of auctioning VHF ch. 5 and 6 to expand FM broadcast, but that hasn’t happened (and probably won’t).
My own DTV sports one of these:
…which I bought for $3 in a thrift shop. Works fine.
I’ve never gotten around to rigging a small platform to hold the antenna above the top of the screen, as planned, but it seems to work better concealed behind the screen, using the flat-panel’s metal case as a reflector. (-:
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I do enjoy the randomness of these type of channels. “Can we get it cheap? Great! Run it!” Good, bad, and unintentionally bizarre, you see just a ton of stuff you’d never see otherwise.
I was hopeful for Qubo (“Heck yeah! All cartoons all the time!”) but there’s never. anything. cool. on. there.
Ever.
What is really astonishing about Qubo is the incredibly wide variety of utterly lame cartoons. It’s like they combed the archives of a dozen nations for the most bland, inoffensive, “let’s have fun learning Values!” cartoons.
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One of my activities on dog walks is to notice how may houses with these still attached need new roofs. Nearly all of them now.
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ADDENDUM:
There is one show on Qubo worth looking at. If only when you’re out-of-it tired on a Saturday morning and just want to watch something bland while you’re half-awake and lying on the couch:
The Choo-Choo Bob Show.
Just look it up. Episodes on YouTube.
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It’s kind of weird, it’s like people have forgotten rooftop antenna technology even exists anymore even though it works just as well today as it did back in the heyday of broadcast TV.
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Maybe roofers get an incremental sale to take antennas down when they do the roof. I know I paid extra to have the holes filled left by the dish installed by the previous owner of my place.
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