Off the Air (Free) HD TV in Grayson County Virginia

The place to start is to Geocode your location. The easiest way it to enter your street address and zip code at GetLatLon. You can shift the map under the pointer to get a precise location (I can see my tower). Mine is 36.58303581986451, -81.09414339065552. You won't need that precision, 5 decimal places are enough.

Next, go to TVFool and key in your coordinates obtained above. The stations at the top of the list are the most likely, for me WXII and WUNL both on Sauratown Mountain south of Mt. Airy.The azimuth is 117 magnetic, roughly ESE.

I have an aging 45' tower and a roof that needs replacing, so the choice of location seemed like a no-brainer. Actually, reception at 45' was no better than I had at 4' so I suspect that roof top installations are high enough. You are not going to get line of sight anyway but a clear view of the horizon is a good thing.

Antenna selection is the place to begin. I had an old VHF/UHF 12' long Yagi monstrosity but it picked up absolutely nothing so I knew I had to do better than that. I searched the 'Net and came up with dozens of conflicting recommendations. This site seemed responsible (most are merely marketing).. They have a locator too and come up with specific recommendations which I took as a guide but not the Gospel. Eventually the simplicity of an 8 bay seemed credible. That should be the moral equivalent of 8 rabbit-ear antennas  properly arranged and phased and I had hope of 10+ db gain. I chose the Winegard HD-8800 because I could buy it locally (Mt. Airy) ($81). There are outlandish claims of performance on the web and this model does not get the highest ratings but they are close. One site did have test results for the lower half of the UHF spectrum and this one did well - at or near the top.

Odds of success improve if you use a mast mount preamp. I found this one at Walmart in Galax ($27). The specs are similar to other models available over the net. The amp (on the left) mounts just below the antenna on the mast and is connected to the antenna with a short (3') piece of 300 ohm twin lead. I got mine from Willing Partners in Independence for $0.75. The preamp is connected to the power injector (right) with RG6 coaxial cable salvaged from the DirecTV installation. You can buy preassembled cables of varying length from Lowes in Galax. I bought a terminator kit but did not need it (yet) ($20). The injector is not water-resistant. I installed mine in a metal box at the base of the tower. It is mandatory that the injector connect directly to preamp with no other devices (such as splitters and distribution amps) in between.

There are going to be three connections to the antenna so a distribution amp is called for. I bought this Scientific Atlanta (now Cisco) on Ebay for $21). The distribution amp is powered by a brick connected with a short coaxial cable. The input is connected to the output of the power injector above. Each of the three receivers is connected to the ports on the bottom. I found a terminator for the fourth port.. The wife's receiver is a Polaroid HDTV from Walmart. The guest house has an ATSC to NTSC converter box bought from Magic Mart for $25 after the $20 credit from the FCC. The remote had come to an unfortunate end but a $5 universal remote from Dollar General in Independence worked (my old RCA System 3 remote did not).

I don't have a TV but I do have a desktop and a laptop computer. In the past, I used a TV tuner card in my desktop connected to the DirecTV receiver. It was marked ATSC but in fact could only decode NTSC.I had a low profile ATSC tuner card salvaged from a dead HP computer but it was not compatible with Linux. Fortunately there is an ingenius solution, the HDHomerun, from Silicon Dust. It has two tuners, one gets connected to the distribution amp, the other could be connected to a cable box or another antenna. These are the two F connectors on the right. The connector on the left is for the "brick" and the remaining connector is an Ethernet connection which goes to my home network switch. I bought mine on Ebay from a fellow who warned that only one of the two tuners worked. Since, I hadn't planned on connecting a second RF source, that was good enough for me. Both tuners actually work so I got a relative bargain at $50 ($125 new on the 'Net).

I downloaded the "client" software for Windows for my laptop and installed the software included with the Ubuntu distribution. I wound up downloading, compiling and installing updated versions from the manufacturer on my desktop. Not as simple as an HDTV tuner but I get a signal strength meter and signal quality indicator along with a network traffic indicator. I also get to watch TV on every computer in the house (only one gets to change the channel).

The old rotator didn't work. Raymond climbed the tower, soaked it in WD40 and yanked on it with slip joint pliers. It worked for a day. We are both getting tired of climbing the tower, so I bought a replacement, an RCA VH126N from Lowes for $80. It is a three wire system, the old wire is 4 conductor, so I chose a color code 1-black, 2-white and 3 red and green. I wrote the color code on the inside of the rotor itself and on the control. The color doesn't matter as long as 1 is connected to 1, 2 is connected to 2 and 3 is connected to 3. Climbing the tower is good exercise and the fear of falling generates adrenalin but I don't need either right now.

All that remains, is a few hours of channel searching. I'll move the antenna in 10 degree increments and do a scan.Looks like 3 or 4 hours more work. Time to go read a book. I'm doing Andrew Harvey's, "The Direct Path" at the moment. Wonder what he thinks of HDTV?