That I could understand, but here’s the full quote:
“I was just kind of surprised that this is technology that exists,” says Mr. Sisco, 28 years old. “It’s been awesome. It doesn’t log out and it doesn’t skip.”
I can’t claim to know Sisco’s history with antennas, but the WSJ is certainly making it seem like he was genuinely ignorant of the technology until recently. I have my doubts that he actually was unaware of its existence; I choose to believe that the Journal is doing the usual News Corp. move of constructing a story in such a way so as to make some group of people appear stupid for the entertainment of their old white audience. In this particular case, they chose to demean millennials. I’ve noticed much of Murdoch’s news media concocts sensationalist bullshit about people who are younger than the typical consumer of that news. It’s really no surprise that part of their agenda is disparaging younger generations, given that the old tend to be more conservative while the young tend to be less so. This might look like an article about rising antenna sales, but I view it as political propaganda.
It’s worth a shot. Although I think US public TV took a hit when the BBC realized they could make money by having their own BBC America channel – PBS was my introduction to BBC classics like Dr. Who and Blake’s 7 in my youth because they used to license them for peanuts.
There’s a wooded hill less than a kilometer away with popular walking trails on it. I was thinking that it would be fun to paint it with wifi from a Pi with an open BBS website and see what happens. (No Internet and DNS jiggered so that everything leads to the BBS.) The trails are daylight access only, so naturally the kids go there at night to have a bonfire. (Or did. The police helicopters have military-grade IR equipment now.)
No idea I’m afraid. Here in Ireland people have been using free satellite for years. It’s not the dish that is the problem but the receiver. I don’t know if a receiver from that long ago would still work and, more particularly, one from a provider of satellite may be deliberately crippled/tied to their service.
The boxes cost about €50 up here (more with a dvr in them) and they do work with already installed dishes though you may have to calibrate the direction.
Not good. Millenials tend to wait way longer before having children, and it’s the children you need atop the roof to adjust the antenna while you yell instructions from down below. Get crackin’, Millenials!
You can use it for free-to-air, but once you get into it you may want to get further into it. Unencrypted satellite TV is a deep rabbit hole, but you can get a lot of international programming. (And also a lot of crazy televangelist programming)
The dish would work OK for some satellites, but ideally you want a 1m dish (which you can get super cheap as Dish network surplus) because most of the free satellites are further out than the Dish Network ones (and you need a bigger dish to see them).
A full kit like this you could piece together yourself for cheaper:
Once you get the hang of it, you can get a dish motor (if your receiver supports it) which lets you start mapping out channels on different satellites and have the receiver automatically move the dish. Upgrade the receiver to one with a DVR, and you can fully automate moving the dish and recording broadcasts. Cool stuff!
Long story short: If your extra dish is a 1m dish, you could pick up some cheap pieces and do something useful with it. Otherwise, mostly not.
ETA: People have used them for Wifi antennas, which they work OK for. But they are designed (IIRC) for lower frequencies than 2.4 and aren’t ideal.
Way back when, PBS was the only place to watch “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”. I was a regular watcher and I even donated some money during those PBS telethons they used to do.
Attach an antenna to your TV for free streaming video!
The small square holes found in the walls many homes can be used to plug in an audio communication device that works even in places with poor cell phone reception!
Make your food last longer by leaving your refrigerator plugged into a nearby wall outlet!
Cable and satellite providers have done an outstanding job of hiding the existence of local subchannels (think MeTV, Decades, etc). They get shoved off to bizarre channel numbers that have no correspondence to the ones used over the air. To a cable or satellite subscriber, they look just like typical cable channels, and unless they’re already familiar with the OTA landscape, they are unlikely to realize they are available for free.
In the Portland market, Comcast carries some but not all of the subchannels. There’s a sort-of correspondence. For example, OPB, the HD PBS station, is at 710. Subchannels OPB-2 and OPB-3 are at 310 and 311.
OTOH, QUBO (broadcast 22-2) the “really lame cartoons and kiddie shows from an alternate universe” channel is no where to be found on the channel map.
(The two things QUBO is good for is the Choo-Choo Bob Show (a live-action show that is half comedy sketches, half railway-geeking) and Lazytown, a surreal show from Iceland that has mixes actors and creepy human-ish puppets; it pushes exercise and good nutrition.)
Millenials wait to have children for the same reason that we’ve discovered bunny ears, don’t buy cars, don’t buy houses, get married late.
We don’t have money. In fact we don’t need money. We can subsist entirely on generalizations about living in the moment, feeling your bliss and rejecting things out of hand.
You know those crappy little RF modulator units which came with video games, for use with televisions whose only input was antenna terminals? There are proper AV versions of those for low power use where you can set what channel to broadcast on. For example, you could have cameras or VCRs on channels 2-10 or whatever. But they are strong enough only to broadcast maybe a few hundred feet at most. One could almost certainly use a radio amplifier of around that frequency range and cover a neighborhood or town, with the proper antenna, and if the geography cooperates.
Maybe not hocus pocus… well, maybe you’re right.
It’s all about where you are in relation to the terrestrial station that you’re trying to receive.
For example, almost all of our stations are to the south of us, so one “leaf” antenna on a south-facing window works for that. But if we want to get the one station that’s to the east, or the two that are west-ish, we have to go to another room to watch, because we need an east or west facing window.
We could solve the whole thing by putting up an antenna on the roof, but we live in an apartment & have no access to that. So we live with watching certain shows in certain places. And doing most of the watching using Netflix or something else on the Roku.
Do so. I’ve considered doing similar with my Calibre ebook library, but given that a fair percentage of it is commercial ebooks I’ve stripped the DRM from, maybe not.
Through Time/Life, and then Lionheart Television - which IIRC was sometimes subtitled “The BBC in America”. Most of the series I grew up with in the US were either from the UK or Japan. No wonder I never socialized to US culture!
Sounds like honeypot time! Start a bonfire somewhere and then from elsewhere nearby, you can ambush them.
When my kids were little, I remember getting home from like my fourth 20-hour workday in a row. I sat down on the couch to hang out with them for a while before I went to bed. But I started dozing off and found myself in this sort of hypnogogic half-awake half-dream state. And as I realized I had dozed off I was focusing my eyes on what turned out to be Lazytown and felt really disoriented, like a psychedelic flashback or something. “WTF is this? What is happening!”
