Nope, you're not crazy! When we bought our first house in '96 I cut the coax off at the ground where the cable company had it roughed in and ready to wire into the house (new construction spec home). At the time, the local cable company had lousy service, poor channel offerings, and was expensive. I bought a good antenna from the local Radio Schlock and tossed it in the attic. We could get all the local channels and a PBS or two without needing a rotator or tower. I did miss having some of the channels (Discovery, History, etc) but I just thought of how much money we were saving and instead we would take a nice vacation every 3 or 4 years (i.e. Hawaii). 10 years of no cable bill was nice.DOUG wrote:You guys may laugh and think that I'm crazy, but I haven't subscribed to any TV provider since 1998. I can't see wasting my hard earned money for all of the garbage on TV. Even when I did subscribe there where only a few channels worth watching.
I use rabbit ears and a Channel Master HD off-air receiver to get all my local TV stations. A lot of people don't know or realize since the new FCC conversion to all UHF didgital frequencies, that the new off-air digital HD TV actually has just as good or better picture than the cable and other dish providers because there isn't as much compression of the data.
Once we moved in '05 to our current home, the off-air reception was pretty poor without a tower or roof mount, and being in a homeowner's association makes it a bit touchy to put up stuff like that. I don't recall any verbage against TV antennas, but ham antennas were verboten. Nevertheless, I didn't want to put up a ground mount tower, and since we are the tallest house in the neighborhood, a roof tower doubling as a lightning rod wasn't a pleasant thought. So, we got Dish Network and have been very happy. Part of the justification was some of the educational channels for our son (and the cartoon channels, too). Now my wife can watch Lifetime (gag) or Hallmark (gak) whenever she wants and of course the perenial Law and Order reruns on various channels seemingly 24 hours a day.
We did just upgrade to HD, even though I bought a 42" Samsung DLP TV almost 5 years ago. Initially the picture quality sucked compared to the ProScan 20" set, but I got used to it. But now with the proper HD setup, WOW! We got a free HD DVR and lifetime free HD from Dish with bill auto-pay signup. All I pay is the montly DVR "fee". I must admit, having a DVR is nice. With the satellite, I could only record on the VCR a program if the receiver was tuned to that channel. That made it impossible to watch one and record another and you had to remember to set the channel before going to bed if taping something late.
Oh, by the way--IT'S FREE
