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Just getting into cord-cutting? Try this starter antenna

You might not think you care about antenna TV. You might think that cord-cutting is a sham. After all, your friends who cut the cord went from paying $100 a month to the cable company to paying $120 a month with all the streaming services. You may not feel like there’s any way to save money. There is a great way to save money on live TV, and you can start right now. A TV antenna lets you get dozens of channels of live TV for free. The technology is built into every TV in your home and it can be added to mobile devices and PCs as well. Once you buy the hardware, you won’t pay another dime. Best of all, all the top-rated shows are available with an antenna. You won’t miss out. Knowing which antenna to buy Choosing the right antenna is...
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5 Services you didn’t know Signal Connect can offer you (#1-5)

When most people think of Solid Signal, they think of our great web site. I don’t blame them. It’s the perfect place to find tens of thousands of pro-quality parts that you can’t find anywhere else. But, there’s another side to our company, one that most folks aren’t aware of. Signal Connect is the division of the company offering the kind of service that customers expect. We plan and execute some of the most complex audio, video, and wiring designs ever made. We’ve worked with some very recognizable people and companies, and even governments! How do we do it? There’s a team of experts of staff who really know their stuff. Sales engineers and qualified technicians work all day on custom applications, while our team of consultants are...
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What should you do with old RG6 cable?

I know this guy. He’s got maybe 500 feet of old RG6 cable spooled up in his shed. I’m talking stuff that old cable companies strung, antenna cable, cable that came with stuff that wasn’t used. It’s an impressive amount of cable and it took him decades to build it all up. I’m kind of curious if he’ll ever find a use for it. But I get it, I hoard stuff too sometimes. Never know when you’ll need an adapter to go from 75-ohm BNC to PL-259. Just because I haven’t needed one since 1987 doesn’t mean I won’t need one tomorrow. Seriously though, is there a downside to keeping old RG6 cable? It’s the real world and stuff degrades Even with the best care, RG6 cable is going to degrade over time. The outer jacket could get brittle with sun and...
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STREAMING SATURDAY: The distopian view

Here’s a little parable, something I hope never happens. It’s January, 2027. After all the streaming mergers were done, there was only one service left. Called “Zaslav,” it was formed from the bones of Netflix, Max, Peacock, Disney+, Paramount+, and Apple TV+. It costs $400 a month and it has more commercials than today’s pay TV packages. Roughly 90% of the content is some variant of house hunting show and the rest is reruns of Green Acres. The service claims 12 billion subscribers and yet it’s still losing money. Why? Because in truth, no one uses it. Most people use the latest version of Kodi, an open source program designed to find and pirate content. It’s full of malware and that’s been a big problem. At one point the entire...
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Does DIRECTV’s wireless boxes work as well as regular ones?

DIRECTV has actually had a wireless client for almost 11 years. It first rolled out back in 2013 and my review of it was very positive. In the years since, it’s pretty much stayed the same, with the exception of a new logo on the front on some clients. Things were pretty stable in DIRECTV-land until last year, when the next-generation Gemini box was released. The Gemini is the first DIRECTV satellite device to get video both wired and wirelessly. It’s ignited a decade-old argument about which technology is best, and whether wireless actually even works at all. Yes, it really does work. There’s a small group of people who believe that a wireless client couldn’t possibly work. They talk about things like bandwidth and attenuation and...
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Is a bigger antenna actually better?

This antenna is big. Something like 12 feet long. And in case you’re having trouble thinking about what that looks like, think like about the length of a Chevy Suburban. On your roof. But is bigger always better? Yes and no. Let’s take a look. It’s about gain. A bigger antenna, properly designed, will always have more gain than a smaller one. And it will be the best kind of gain, much better than using a small antenna and simply overamplifying it, because a small antenna just won’t pull in truly weak signals like this gigantic one will. However, you need to understand how digital signals work. With a digital signal, it’s digital (I know, right?) and that means you either get it or you don’t. Sure there are cases where a signal goes...
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FUN FRIDAY: They haven’t replaced me yet

I think at one point or another we have all worried about losing our jobs to machines. After all, in our grandparents’ day most factories were full of people. Modern factories have traded people for industrial robots. Still as capable as those robots are, they can’t take the place of most forms of labor. Maybe someday, but not today. In order to illustrate my point, I have shamelessly stolen this article from Gizmodo. It’s been around a few years but it’s still pretty much on point. Go check out the original if you want, or follow some of the links in this list, but basically you won’t get far. This is a list of 99 jobs that we have been told at one point or another would be obsolete. After all, the robots would come in and take our...
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NICE AND EASY: Will an air conditioner interfere with a cell booster?

Call this one confirmed. Roof-mounted air conditioners can absolutely affect the performance of cellular signal boosters. It’s a big enough problem that at least one manufacturer recommends considering the location of the AC unit when installing a booster. Let’s take a look. It’s all about noise. Let’s be honest here. Noise is a big problem for all forms of digital broadcasting. This includes cellular boosters, because cell phones are all digital and have been for 20 years. When you’re trying to receive a digital signal, you’re getting ones and zeroes. If you can tell the difference between a one and a zero, it doesn’t matter how strong the signal is. All that matters are the ones and the zeroes. That’s why I’ve called signal-to-noise...
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How to understand how much amplification you need (and don’t need)

Are you the sort of person who thinks you always need more power? A lot of us are like that, and I don’t blame you. But when it comes to amplifying signals, more power isn’t always best. Believe me, Solid Signal sells great amplifiers for all sorts of signals, and I’d love to sell you one. But I don’t want to sell you something you don’t need. So, let’s go over why an amplifier might not be what you think it is. The three different kinds of amplifiers When it comes to amplifiers for signals over a wire, there are three different kinds. Now, I’m not talking about audio amplifiers here, that’s a completely different article. I’m talking about an amplifier you might use with a TV antenna, satellite dish, commercial headend system or even...
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Should you mount your dish on the eave or on the roof?

If you’re thinking of satellite TV, you might be driving around seeing a lot of dishes and thinking about where to put yours. Most new customers today let someone else install the equipment. However, you have the right to say what part of your home is used. Let’s look at the options Roof mounts It was very common for a long time to have the dish mounted on the highest point on the roof. After all, this gives you the best chance of avoiding problems from nearby trees. If you were worried about line-of-sight for any reason, you tended to put the dish up on a roof. Roof mounting can involve something like a tripod (such as this one) to get the dish even higher if needed. However, the big downside to roof mounting is that you’re making...
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TV and Internet Brokerage from Signal Connect

Why limit yourself? When you move, you have a lot of tasks to do very quickly. You have to deal with moving, turning on utilities, and at the end of the day, you’re going to be exhausted. That’s why most people choose the easiest, simplest, most popular option for TV and internet. When you do, you may be locked into a contract and won’t even have a chance to chance services for quite some time. That’s why it’s important to use Signal Connect’s TV and Internet Brokerage service. Rather than giving you one choice, we’ll help you choose between everything that’s available in your area. We’ll lay it all out for you quickly and help you make the right decision. Then, we’ll help you get those services installed at a time that makes sense to...
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THROWBACK THURSDAY: A day without a DVR

Back in 2013, I decided to live without a DVR. At least, for one day. Even back then, a lot of people had moved away from live TV. So I decided to try it. I wrote: You can read all my experiences here. Without the ability to pause, I needed to plan things better, perhaps not gulping down massive amounts of fluid before sitting down to watch an hour of entertainment. I came to both love and hate commercial breaks, and I remembered why it was that I was so entranced with a DVR in the first place. TV the way it was intended It’s funny, I do love old TV shows but I didn’t always watch them as intended. A lot of times old TV shows are found on streaming apps now, and you don’t see commercial breaks. You also don’t wait an entire week...
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IT’S TRUE: you can use an external hard drive with a DISH receiver, but not until you tell them about it

There’s a neat feature of DISH DVRs that pretty much no other provider has. You can transfer your recordings to an external hard drive on some DVRs, and you can connect a hard drive to a standard receiver and turn it into a simple DVR. It’s something that I wish more providers would do. Even though it doesn’t come up often, it comes up enough that I think it would be worth building this capability in. But, you can’t just order any old hard drive from Amazon and have it work. First of all, it needs to meet these specs: USB 2.0: The drive needs to support USB 2.0. Most USB 3.0, 3.1, and 3.2 drives will do this but some won’t. USB-A Connector: The drive has to use the old-fashioned rectangular USB connector, not the new one that cell...
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Ken Reid and Dan Frischman

May 16-22, 1987 This week Ken welcomes actor, magician, host of the new show “Head of the Senior Class” and all around solid dude Dan Frischman to the show. Ken and Dan discuss growing up as magic nerds, Fred Kolb, being a magician at an early age, asking how the tricks are done, Ken’s mastering of mediocrity, buying magic at Macy’s in New York, magic on TV, Doug Henning, Mark Wilson, Harry Blackstone Jr., Ricky Jay, TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes, Head of the Class, pitching to Henry Winkler, fake biohazards, doing stand up in NYC, growing up in New Jersey, Sea Monkeys in the tub, Dennis Miller’s prop comedy days, driving out to LA, living on Sunset Blvd, Jimmy Brogan, guest spots on Facts of Life, being a returning character...
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What’s the difference between “cloud DVR” and “on demand?”

Every so often, our tech support department gets a question like this: The answer is generally that the customer searched for, and found, on-demand versions of a program rather than recording it when it aired. This is easy to do with DIRECTV since you’ll find both in the same search. Our advice is simply to look at the channel you’re recording from. If the channel number is greater than 1,000 then that’s an on-demand program. If it’s not, it’s a regular satellite-delivered program. Matters get stranger when you change over to DIRECTV’s internet television service. You’re getting both “recorded” programs and “on demand” programs through the same internet connection, but there’s still this distinction where if you “record” it, you can...
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