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I refuse to pay for cable, satellite, and so called streaming services. Which they are nothing more but a cable package without a cable box. I live in an area where I only get around 7 fta channels on my outdoor antenna. Does anyone know anything about fta satellite dishes or if they are any good? I have Netflix, Hulu, and amazon prime. But with Netflix and amazon raising their rates. I don’t feel like it’s worth paying their prices. When I already have a ton of dvds and the library has more. Plus my son would rather read, color, or play with his hot wheels then watch tv. So any help would be greatly appreciated.
I don't think home satellite dishes have been worth the yard space since the early 1990s. (I was there, and designed equipment for them and wrote for the trade/hobby magazines.)
There is tons of free streaming if you already have the setup for NF, Hulu, etc. Even Vudu has something like 1000 movies for free. With that and the basic 4 or 5 broadcast channels, you probably can't do much better without a lot of expense (which would equate to a lot of paid months of streaming service).
I looked into FTA satellite . If you look up the list of channels you will get, there are a ton of foreign stations, in case you want to watch TV in a foreign language. English language American channels are scrambled before they are sent to the satellite, so the only ones available are the free to air main networks, that it appears you are already receiving.
Cable TV I've got and all they are showing are reality TV shows and decades old network TV shows. I get Rawhide and lots of Big Bang Theory, plus movies that were released last century. Unless you want to watch The Fast and the Furious over and over and over, it's not worth paying money for (except a family member wants the football channels and even then the main games are on free network TV.)
A good roof top TV antenna will bring in your local stations better. Remember TV antennas? If you can even find one.
We have a rooftop antenna that gets about 20 channels. We also stream Hulu and Netflix through a Roku and there are several free channels you can also get. Roku has it's own channel and Pluto, Vudu and a few others are completely free if you don't mind commercials.
Location: Was Midvalley Oregon; Now Eastside Seattle area
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Used to have Ku dish at the coast-Oregon. C-SPAN, NASA were interesting to watch. My issue was that sometimes the satellite goes dead and you need to know the channels.
Just barely within range of digital OTA from Mt Hebo. We can see Mt Hebo.
Yep. Too many people have had cable tv for so long, they've forgotten that we had outside antennas and 3 channels. There's far more OTA channels now, with all the sub-channels.
Stellar brand of antennas work well, and they're reasonably cheap compared to some of the advertised tire patch UHF only antennas.:
Depending on area, you can raise your TV ant to about 20 feet and put an amp behind it and get a good 100 mile range to pick more channels. If your on the darkside, google IPTV if you have decent internet. Not going to much into that, as its a gray area and works. Cheap! like 5$ a month cheap.
But get your ant higher off the ground, put a amp on it and see how many more channels you can get. C-band sats are rare and not many companies keep them operational anymore. My aunt and uncle had one for 30 years and over past few years their channel list has completely been terminated. Sats get replaced and C-band boxes doest get updated, so lose channels. The El-Carte they had was great. Pay like 2 bucks a channel, and still get east and west coast channels with it.
Depending on area, you can raise your TV ant to about 20 feet and put an amp behind it and get a good 100 mile range to pick more channels.
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But get your ant higher off the ground, put a amp on it and see how many more channels you can get.
No amp and no amount of legal height will get you over geographical obstructions. Most TV reception is across flat or low terrain and height+boost will get you more. But having lived in a hilly rural location where half the town had sight of TV towers and half didn't, I can say that anecdotal info doesn't go far for this purpose, and spending money putting up taller and taller towers and adding amps and such is an expensive crapshoot.
The place to start is with the FCC signal strength page. (Yes, there are secondary sources, all of which take this data and spin it the way local weather reporters spin NOAA data. I prefer to go right to the source.) The FCC site has a composite of transmitter location and rough geographical data, so if you enter your address down in a hollow, it knows you will be blocked from channels your neighbor on the adjacent hill can get.
If you run your address, it will tell you signal strengths for every tower you have any likelihood of getting, including ones down in the "brown" and "red" levels. If you have a lot of "yellow" stations, a taller antenna and an amp will help. If your list goes right from the "greens" - if any - to brown, it's very unlikely that anything but a pretty extreme tower is going to get you more stations.
By the way, the FCC site assumes your antenna is 35 feet over ground level for these calculations. So if you have an attic antenna or one at 15 feet on your chimney, any yellow stations will need only a few more feet and a little boosting to catch. But if your antenna is on a third-story chimney or very tall attic, you aren't likely to have much more capture ability.
Anyone who can put in a 75-foot tower is excepted from the limits. Some rural folks can.
An amp can only boost what it sees. Don't buy one until you have your optimized antenna, and then look closely at your actual reception strengths. (Most TVs will have at least a crude strength indicator.) An amp can ONLY bring in those ones just below your current reception level, and improve the channels you already have. They can't magically pull signal strength from very weak stations.
And, remember that TV is line-of-sight. For all the old-days fun of getting atmospheric skip channels from a few hundred miles away, if your antenna can't DIRECTLY see the tower, you aren't going to get the channel. TV frequencies don't scatter and bend like some others. Too far away, earth curvature blocks it. Add in for any hills, mountains or resting kaiju in the way.
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