Cutting the Cord

[Walter Dnes]

On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 01:37:12AM -0400, Evan Leibovitch wrote

>   - This will be cable rather than DSL. Any comments, good or bad,
>    about Teksavvy's cable service? Most of the comments I've read seem
>    to be able the DSL stuff.

  Their support forum is at http://www.dslreports.com/forum/teksavvy
Overall, cable seems to have more outages and congestion reports than
ADSL.
 
>    - Is anyone having any like with OTA, ie a good old antenna? I have
>    a south facing wall on a three storey house in northwest Toronto,
>    should I even try this?

  It's beautiful.  You'll get *REAL* HDTV, not compressed crud.  I live
in a 6th-floor condo near Dufferin+Steeles with a SSE view, and I get
all the Toronto locals plus the major US networks from Buffalo.  *AND I
GET THE REAL SUPERBOWL COMMERCIALS*, 100% legally.

  There are a few weird features, e.g. the channel that shows up on your
TV set may have no relation to the physical channel that it broadcasts
on.  "Virtual Channel Numbers" were thrown into the ATSC standard to
allow stations to keep multiple years of "branding", despite the fact
that almost every TV station moved to UHF, and the ones that didn't are
regretting it.  Also, digital is not necessarily HD, e.g. if they're
broadcasting a re-run that was originally recorded for NTSC.

  Two questions...
1) Can you see the CN Tower from your house?  If the answer is "YES",
then you're almost guaranteed great reception.

2) Do you have an unobstructed view to the SSE?  Most of the Buffalo TV
stations broadcast from the Grand Island, NY "antenna farm".

  Contact me offlist, and I can bring over a small tabletop UHF antenna
that I use.  We can test it for a few minutes.  It may be all you need.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org>
I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications
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