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I am now getting HD over the air!

A while back, I blogged wondering about getting HD over the air. A bit after that, I saw a deal on an antenna: the Philips MANT940 from buy.com for a somewhat reasonable $30 or so after shipping was added. I got it. It took a while to get to me, and once I got it, I was ready to set it up. I live in a basement suite and as you can probably guess, getting signals of any sort can sometimes be a problem. DC is relatively flat, so you don't have the problems I experienced in the past with antennas in Vancouver where my location on a hill (on the wrong side of the hill) didn't really help get decent signals.

Anyway, I opened the box, took out the 4 pieces, plugged in the antenna (which looks very different from the rabbit ear types) with the provided cable, the signal amplifier and the little piece that connects into the coax outlet on the TV. I put the antenna by my TV and let it search for channels. Soon enough, it picked up about 30 or so channels! I was impressed. A couple of things that really bothered me though were the signal breaking off for some channels when I moved around the house (strange but maybe I am a distrubance). So, I tried something else. I put the antenna on my window sill and got it to search again. This time, I got over 20 HD channels and over 20 SD channels!

Getting TV in HD on an HDTV is amazing. You can see so much detail, some of which is not exactly flattering. I saw an older woman on TV, she had so many wrinkles so clearly visible that I was a bit grossed out. At any rate, getting 20 HD channels is awesome for me. It solves my TV problem vis-a-vis paying a lot for cable or satellite. I won't get CNN or MSNBC or whatever, but I get plenty of TV none-the-less and enough TV shows to keep me occupied. I think this is probably one of the better deals I got for about $30. Imagine if I were on an upper floor or have this antenna mounted at the top of the house! Now I need to find a neat way to tie down the cable wire from the window so it doesn't look terrible. If you're tired of paying the cable company and don't really need all the cable channels, try one of the new HDTV antennas, they're way cooler than the rabbits ears from the past.

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