good morning YouTube welcome to another installment in my cutting the cable video series
this is how I cut the cable and went off the grid for my TV reception for a year I researched how I
could get the TV content I wanted without paying hundreds of dollars for junk I didn't watch I
set up this HDTV antenna found I could pick up about ninety five stations in excellent digital
TV quality there's about 75 feet of coax from the antenna to the distribution point inside my house
I added this medium gain pre amplifier to boost the signal into the house well not really required
I do have a couple of distant stations that fade in and out and the preamp seems to help with those
I can pick up stations from 20 to over 100 miles distant I'll include links to the equipment used
in the video description below let's climb up into the attic and see where the TV signal goes next
the cable from the antenna and preamp runs across the Attic to the other side of the house where
I am now it connects to this 8 port distribution amplifier that feeds signals to various locations
in the house I wanted to minimize the use of splitters after many service calls while we're
Comcast often to swap out his bad splitter so now each cable runs directly from here to the point
where it connects to a TV or tuner but between the preamp and the distribution amp I ended up
with these two wall thwarts plugged into the wall my kilowatt meter shows they each use 6 watts of
power or 12 Watts creating a vampire load on closer inspection both amplifiers required
15 volts DC I have 12 volt DC at my solar battery bank so I replaced these 2 vampire loads with one
of these this is an inexpensive lm2577 DC boost converter set to 15 volts output I put the board
into this little tiny project box with two type F connectors and a power connector you can see
on top I ran battery power to it and now that runs my TV signal distribution system on free
solar power it has worked well all year I can't tell the difference between AC and DC power on
the signal quality as I found elsewhere the DC power consumption is a lot less than the
AC power consumption in this case 12 watts on AC 3 to 4 watts on DC it's no problem to
run this power supply off my battery bank it only takes 6 amp hours to run a whole day so
I've eliminated a 12 watt vampire load that's 105 kilowatt hours per year in a previous video
you'll see how I eliminated the 50 watt vampire load of the Direct TV equipment by sending that
back to them granted I'm using some power to replace that functionality but I've improved
in that area as well I'll go into that in a little more detail later in this video all my TV's have
built-in ATSC tuners so they can receive the over-the-air channels just fine unlike cable
or satellite I can watch TV without having a set-top box I also find the picture quality
with over-the-air broadcasts is much better than cable or satellite digital TVs usually
have built-in program information displays but they are dependent on the broadcaster to send
out the correct information and the display of that information can vary from TV to TV and is
fairly limited this TV only shows what's on one channel for the next half a day or so I
was used to the nice TV Guide that you get on a cable or satellite TV set-top box and I want the
way I chose to do that was via PC based media center software I set up some TV tuners both
internal and external then installed Windows Media Center after scanning for available channels and
setting up the main server for the house I get this nice TV Guide screen I can propagate this
channel information to other pcs in the house automatically I use a network attached storage
or NAS device for recorded TV shows and media playback I had an older Buffalo Tara station Mass
there was one terabyte in size and used about 55 watts of power but I upgraded to a larger device
currently twelve upgradeable to 20 terabytes that only uses 48 watts of power well that is 18 watts
more than the one terabyte direct tv DVR used I can now use this Nass for other purposes as well
so before I have 30 watts of DVR and 55 watts of now and now I have 48 watts of combined mass
Plus DVR functionality my network TV tuner also uses power 24/7 it's listed as 5 volts at 1 amp
since it runs off a small wall wart I should it should be easy to power off the battery bank with
a DC step-down converter with the subscription savings I'm paying for this nice Synology Nass
as well as a new all-in-one PC I have set up as a smart TV so if you're thinking of cutting
the cable by all means set up an antenna and see what sort of signals you get I'm glad I
took the time to research over-the-air TV and gradually transition myself into it the last
month of my satellite subscription I hardly ever turned on the set-top box watching mostly live
or recorded TV instead you will not be getting the exact same channels and shows as you did on
cable or satellite much of the premium channel content is available by via streaming services
if that is a must-have so far I'm only using one streaming sports service that cost me less
than seven dollars a month feel free to join the conversation in the comment section below be sure
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