OTA digital TV?

[chenoameg.livejournal.com]

Anyone in the Davis Square area successfully pulling in TV signals with a TV antenna?

For a variety of reasons I'm looking to retire our cable, but I want some feedback before I buy a large antenna.

Comments

[pekmez.livejournal.com]

We have a converter box and an TV that is maybe 7-10 years old (from when the previous TV that dated from the early 1980s died!), with a pair of plain old passive rabbit ears (whose mechanical attachment to the TV cracked, and is now kind of wobbly, so we can't even guarantee that they're always pointing the same way) that we bought to improve analog reception when we cancelled cable 4 years ago. The converter box we got is the Dish Network TR-40 (priced at the cost of the DTV coupon plus $8 shipping).

We get better digital reception than we did analog. I am not a big TV watcher so I did not really notice whether we lost any channels we used to have in analog or gained any new ones - the number is roughly the same, besides the fact that now we get a half dozen PBS choices from GBH and GBX instead of only 2, yay. All the major channels are fine.

One thing I have noticed about the TR-40 box, fwiw, is that if you turn off the TV and not the box (say, because your small child presses the TV button herself and then you do not notice), and then leave the box on for a few days, it tends to "hang" in some state where the power LED is on but it's not sending signal to the TV anymore, and you have to power cycle it to get it to turn off and then respond properly to being turned back on.

We live up near Powderhouse and the Tufts athletic fields (chenoameg knows that, but other readers who might care where this reception cmoes from.