We recently moved to Placitas, NM. Everything is great, except due to the location of our house we have some trouble getting local Over The Air (OTA) TV channels. We don’t have cable TV and our service (Sling) doesn’t offer local channels for our area. With a $5 antenna we could could get a few channels, and depending on where I moved the antenna we could get just about everything. But never all at the same time.
I bought a slightly larger antenna for $15 and it was better. Still could only get 3 or 4 of the 5 networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, Fox). A friend sent me an old two tuner HDHomeRun box he had sitting around (thanks Ross!) thinking maybe it would have a better tuner and pull in more channels. It is a very cool piece of hardware but it wasn’t an improvement over the Samsung TV tuner.
As a last ditch effort I decided to see if a bigger antenna would help. Found one for $20 at Walmart. I should add I was trying to avoid going outside, mounting something on the roof, run it a wire and drilling holes in the walls. We were so close with a simple indoor antenna.
The bigger antenna was the answer. Had to put it on the far wall away from the TV, because that’s where it worked, facing the broadcast antennas. Didn’t want to run a wire over to the TV so I plugged it into the HDHomeRun box, got a cheap wireless TPLink Ethernet adapter and plugged it into the network.
The app for the HDHomeRun on Apple TV is great. Added it to my Plex server and can watch live TV from there too. Now we can watch and record local TV from any TV, phone, pad or computer in the house. Think we’re done here.
Steven A. Guccione 