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Coronation (SCA)
Sep. 17th, 2006 02:28 pm( SCA event )
Sep. 17th, 2006
The ultra-basic cable service that was $12/month when I signed up is now up to $18/month, and we don't watch that much TV anyway, and we've moved the TV since the last time I tried to pull in local channels without cable. So today I went out and bought a pair of rabbit ears. (Dani didn't think I'd be able to find them in a store. Ha! I'm not the only TV Luddite in Pittsburgh. :-) ) They are provisionally hooked up to one VCR, and I'll run that in parallel with the cable (different feed) for a little while to see if the reduced-but-probably-adequate signal is, in fact, adequate. So far I've managed to pull in NBC, CBS, ABC, and PBS, but not WB and Fox. I think I need to reconfigure the VCR for it to see the UHF (VHF? I mean numbers over 13) channels, which is where these two live.
Due to historical quirks we actually have three VCRs hooked up to the TV rather than the canonical one (viewing) or two (dubbing). This has in the past been handy for segregating taping (especially when things conflict -- ever notice how if you only care about three or four shows, two of them will still be on at the same time?). I had thought to hook the rabbit ears up to the cable splitter that's feeding those VCRs, but a few more minutes of thought would have showed me why that wouldn't work before I actually installed the rabbit ears and started playing with them. But that's ok; if it should ever be relevant in the future, there's room on top of the TV for a second pair of $12 rabbit ears.
The theory I'm going to test out is: rabbit ears will be good enough for the network shows I want to see right now, everything else comes out a year later on DVD (and VHS for archival is dead or dying), and NetFlix is cheaper than cable. (I haven't actually joined NetFlix yet, but I will when I have a long-enough list of stuff I want to see that I don't want to buy.)
Due to historical quirks we actually have three VCRs hooked up to the TV rather than the canonical one (viewing) or two (dubbing). This has in the past been handy for segregating taping (especially when things conflict -- ever notice how if you only care about three or four shows, two of them will still be on at the same time?). I had thought to hook the rabbit ears up to the cable splitter that's feeding those VCRs, but a few more minutes of thought would have showed me why that wouldn't work before I actually installed the rabbit ears and started playing with them. But that's ok; if it should ever be relevant in the future, there's room on top of the TV for a second pair of $12 rabbit ears.
The theory I'm going to test out is: rabbit ears will be good enough for the network shows I want to see right now, everything else comes out a year later on DVD (and VHS for archival is dead or dying), and NetFlix is cheaper than cable. (I haven't actually joined NetFlix yet, but I will when I have a long-enough list of stuff I want to see that I don't want to buy.)