TV Antennas or MythTV and HDTV in Toronto

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Oct 04, 2007 at 12:42:46PM -0400, Colin McGregor wrote:
> I am looking for a good, inexpensive and tough outdoor
> TV antenna for use with my MythTV box.
> 
> I am on Rogers cable, which for the most part I am
> basically happy with. The problems with Rogers show up
> when it comes to my first stabs with HDTV using a
> pcHDTV-5500 tuner card in my MythTV box. Up until
> quite recently I gather Roger's offered SOME digital
> channels unencrypted (but not at high definition). So,
> to get any sort of usable digital signal from Rogers
> you now need to rent a cable box (something I can not
> cost justify and I don't want the pain of sorting out
> the issues of having the Myth box control the cable
> box).
> 
> The folks doing KnoppMyth (the distro I use on my
> MythTV box) have (at least for now) dropped analog
> support for pcHDTV-5500 (due problems with the current
> driver). So, to see anything via that pcHDTV-5500 card
> I need a digital signal.

By digital do they mean ATSC or QAM only?  By analog do the mean NTSC or
all things using an antenna?  I guess they mean NTSC isn't stable.

> Using a plain old fashion rabbit ear style antenna I
> was able to get CBC-HD from the ground floor (CBC has
> the most powerful HDTV transmitter in Toronto).
> Shifting the antenna up to the attic, and attaching an
> amplifier added CTV-HD and some of the Buffalo based
> HDTV channels. Next I tried building one of the
> antennas described here:
> 
>   www.lumenlab.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=9613

Nifty.

> If anything performance was slightly worse than the
> rabbit ear/amp combo.. So, what I am looking for now
> is an inexpensive commercial antenna that I could
> mount outdoors and increase the number of HDTV
> channels I can reliably get over the air. I say
> reliably because, I can get the three Buffalo PBS
> stations in HDTV, I periodically (like every few
> seconds) get pixelization and audio drop-outs. Further
> the pcHDTV card driver starts acting squirrelly when
> faced with a bad signal...

I keep meaning to try playing with an HDTV tuner card and an antenna.  I
might have more incentive if I actually had an HDTV to watch it on.

--
Len Sorensen
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