I recently purchased a DTV converter box for my secondary TV (using the $40 coupon from the guv’ment). Unlike my larger, living-room TV which uses cable, I have a smaller TV that still uses an antenna.
I plugged everything in — antenna to the converter box to the TV. To my dismay, I only reliably got two DTV stations (and two subchannels for total of four channels). The results were worse than my earlier test (which you can watch the video of here).
Odds are, I’ll probably need to get an outdoor antenna to pull in a decent number of digital TV channels. There is one thing that I would like to try — make my own antenna (PDF link). The instructions are from “Make,” a new public TV program. The directions look cool and pretty straightforward — well, I guess if some old metal clothes hangers, some wood and a freakin’ transformer are straightforward.
Still, it sounds like it’s worth a try. The antenna is designed to pull in the UHF channels that most local stations are going to.
Here’s more about “Make” from the public-broadcasting publication, Current.
On the jump is my earlier video story about the DTV switch and what local viewers might encounter:
