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television antennas in 2020
Friday, April 17 2020
It was another unpleasantly cold day, though the sun came out for at least part of it. This morning I had to go out on the laboratory deck to remove the last valuable bits of our Dish Network equipment to return as part of our complete transition to Spectrum as our connectivity provider. Dish didn't just want the DVR; they also wanted the antenna horn that mounts in the focus of the dish and a hub that does something to the signals arriving on three coax cables from the dish. I don't know what the conventional homeowner does when their dish is mounted way up high on their roof. In my case, the horn had been fairly easy to remove because our dish had been mounted to the laboratory deck.
After canceling the cable teevee part of our cable subscription, we'd gotten an introductory membership in Hulu just so we could watch Jeopardy!. I'd thought I could maybe download Jeopardy! episodes using Bittorrent, but whoever captures those and makes them available doesn't do so on a regular basis, and the most recent one I could find was from Friday of last week. Gretchen couldn't countenance paying $50 a month to Hulu just so we could watch Jeopardy!, so she'd canceled our introductory membership before paying anything. This meant that we didn't have any Jeopardy! to watch tonight as we ate our meal of chickpea gravy with polenta, potatoes, and broccoli. We made due with an old episode of Shark Tank, but the watching of Jeopardy! during dinnertime is too engrained of a behavior to give up. I have an old television antenna above the solar deck that we could use for capturing over-the-air broadcast teevee. Combined with a over-the-air-capable DVR, we'd have all the broadcast television-watching capability we would need. High on a hilltop with a good view to the east, we should have good reception. Unfortunately, my old yagi television antenna is falling apart, having been beaten by branches from a nearby tree. Some of its long aluminum elements have broken off and fallen, so it's doubtful it works very well if at all. Since installing that antenna many years ago, antenna technology has been advancing. From what I can tell, modern long-range television antennas don't always employ a yagi design. Instead, some of them look more like cloverleaves. I ordered one such antenna with the idea of seeing if I can actually receive a station that broadcasts Jeopardy!. If so, all I would need is some sort of DVR.
To ensure a night of very sound sleep, I took an unusual 150 milligram dose of diphenhydramine before climbing into bed tonight.
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