Free HDTV using your old TV antenna

If you're asking what kind of title OTA HDTV is, then I would have been right there with you two days ago. I've had an "HD Ready" television for about 3 years now and I also purchased an HD satellite box which my provider (for $10/month) allows me to watch some HD channels on. Now, I've known for quite a while that you could get HD signals over the airwaves, but have never tried...until yesterday.

You see, last week I purchased another HDTV, but this one has a built in tuner. My friend and I were in my garage and he asked "when did you get the plasma?" . I told him about the purchase and he proceeded to look at the inputs. I told him the coax input was for an antenna to get DTV (digital television) or analog. He argued that you need a "special" antenna to get digital.

Of course we needed to settle the argument, so we started wiring cable and such and hooked it to the TV. I've never used this antenna, but it was sort of pointed toward the closest city, so what did I have to loose? Kaboom. I got 15 analog and 5 digital channels on my first try.

We checked out the digital channels and the HD ones certainly looked great (most of the analog channels were too snowy to use). So, today I rigged up a more permanent connection and got 11 HD channels and 26 analog. Most of the analog again were unusable, but the digital are great!

Of course I won't leave you hanging for information. Here are two good web sites, especially if you're in southern ontario and want to play around with HDTV over the air.

http://groundstate.ca/digitaltv

and

http://www.remotecentral.com/hdtv/

BTW: My location is Caledon, in case you are wondering whether or not you are too far away to get a signal.