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What’s the best way to aim a cell antenna?

A cellular signal booster is a complex system with several parts. One of the most important is the outdoor antenna. The outdoor antenna picks up signals from cell towers that are too weak for your phone to get them. It does this two ways. First it is much larger than your phone’s antenna so therefore more sensitive. Second, you mount it up high above your roof — 15 feet above the booster —so it has a better chance of picking up distant cell signals. Do you need to aim your cell booster antenna? If it looks like the picture above, then yes you do. That wedge-shaped antenna is referred to as a log-periodic antenna and it’s the most sensitive type of cell booster antenna. It’s the one that will do its best work for you if you know where...
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Podcast #562: Satellite TV problems in cold weather? Listen to this important message!

If you’re living through some extreme weather right now — who isn’t? — here are some tips you’ll want to know about your satellite system. Listen, shop at Solid Signal - Signal Solutions including HDTV Antennas, DIRECTV and DISH Network satellite equipment and home entertainment supplies and accessories, and call 888-233-7563 for top notch customer service. Listen to the podcast your way! Just choose one of the following: Option 1: Click on the image above to stream the podcast in your browser. If you use the YouTube player above, be sure to subscribe to get future videos delivered to you! Option 2: The Solid Signal Podcast is available on several podcast aggregators. Search for us, or tap on the links below on your mobile device. If...
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How to clean out your DIRECTV Genie series manager

It’s been a long time since there’s been any scripted TV to watch, at least on DIRECTV. Whatever you think about the actors’ and writer’s strikes, whether you think they were justified or not, they happened. And they essentially killed the fall TV season. We’re seeing a slow trickle of scripted shows coming in, and that means you actually might have something to record. If there are new things to record, you might want to take a moment and clean up your Genie’s Series Manager. Why worry about it? Your DIRECTV DVR can record 100 series. That’s a pretty high number but not infinite. That 100-series-link limit has been around since the days of the HR34 in 2011. Before that it was lower — only 50 series. Back then keeping an eye on your...
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If you have a satellite dish on your boat, do you need to power the dish separately from the control unit (ACU?)

Marine satellite TV. It’s been the smart choice for entertainment for almost 20 years. You know what, though? It’s still the smart choice. In the last year or so, a lot of people have been talking about satellite internet and I get it. Who doesn’t want full internet access while you’re on the water? But, before I dig into the subject of this article, you need to know that that new internet connection might not be everything you hope for. Unlike land-based satellite internet, most marine internet plans have a data cap. Go over that cap and you’ll find your bill gets high, quickly. The worst part is that depending on your plan, you can blow through that cap after watching as little as four hours of streaming TV. That means marine...
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Should you buy an antenna from a drug store?

I was in a Rite Aid drugstore recently and I saw they had several small TV antennas for sale. Some promised hundreds of channels. One was about the size of a roll of quarters. Each made the same promise that I make here on this blog when it comes to antennas: buy it once and use it forever without paying any more. There’s only one problem with these antennas: you really don’t know what you’re getting. I wanted to buy a few and test them but I could tell even from the box that I wouldn’t have to. Here’s what you need to know about drugstore antennas. A lot of them aren’t even antennas. There were five “antennas” in the electronics aisle at Rite Aid and two of them didn’t even have a coaxial connection. I dug a little deeper into the...
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STREAMING SATURDAY: Will more streamers follow Paramount’s lead?

After essentially killing off the Showtime app on streaming and folding that content into Paramount+, the parent company (also called Paramount) has taken the next step and rebranded its pay TV product as “Paramount+ with Showtime.” They are promising a selection of content that was previously only available on streaming. We’ll see how much content actually migrates over and whether the newest stuff will make it there. The weirdness So if you’re a pay-TV subscriber, at this moment you get Paramount+ with Showtime, and you also don’t. Despite the streaming service and the pay-TV channel now having the same name, you can’t use your pay-TV credentials to log into the streaming app. That link was broken last year and I have to say I...
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Hey, wasn’t USB 4 supposed to be a thing by now?

Believe it or not, it was close to four years ago that I asked, “Is the world ready for USB 4?” The USB 4 standard was first introduced to the world during the height of our lockdown era and promised all sorts of things. It would spell an end to proprietary power adapters, be the last nail in the coffin for the old-school USB type A plug, and let you transfer data so quickly you’d never wait for anything again. Except we did wait, and we’re still waiting, for USB 4 to really take over the world. You’ll find it in high-end laptops and of course Apple is using it in its new computers. But for most of us, even if we have a relatively new device it’s not using USB 4. The biggest device to tout USB compatibility in 2023, the iPhone 15...
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Will “smart home tech” die in 2024?

Believe it or not, it’s been ten years since the launch of the original Amazon Echo. In the beginning, it was a fairly self-contained device. It would be another four years before we started to see Alexa-enabled smart devices and the development of “skills” that would let the smart home assistant actually control anything but itself. Google followed suit with a smart speaker, and by 2018 the two technologies were fighting head to head. Apple followed suit, with their HomeKit protocol in development since 2014. All of a sudden it seemed like the future would be voice-controlled and internet connected. Except, it didn’t work out that way. A strange turn of events For most of the last six years, you’ve had two choices, You could choose...
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How to Increase the Value of Your Home

Explore strategic ideas and practical tips for home remodeling, renovation, and curb appeal improvements. From updating interior rooms with modern fixtures to reviving the outside with siding replacement, our article is a fountain of useful information. Discover how these little improvements may optimize the value of your house in the competitive real estate market, whether you are considering open floor layouts or the appeal of enhanced lighting. Join us as we reveal the secrets to designing a house that not only meets but exceeds current standards, resulting in a living place that is both visually beautiful and financially rewarding. Interior Upgrades Upgrade your kitchen with these clever upgrades: Improve Appliances: To obtain a...
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Will 2024 be the year you get serious about over the air antennas?

Think back, if you will, 25 years. Depending on who you are, that could mean reaching back to your childhood. But, based on what Google tells me about who reads this blog, you were probably an established adult by that time. Chances are your entertainment came from watching pay television. If you were like most people in the late 20th century, that meant traditional cable TV. I know that some of you hardcore fans had already jumped on the satellite TV bandwagon at that point, but let’s be honest: without local channels satellite TV could be a little hard to love. Now think back 25 years before that, if you can. When you thought about entertainment you had really the one choice: live TV delivered by an antenna. This meant a snowy...
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What is the proper way to use a install a SWM-30 for commercial use?

DIRECTV’s SWM-30 multiswitch is the way you should go today. Period. If you’re still using SWM-8s, SWM-16s, or heaven forbid a SWM-32, it’s time to get current. The SWM-30 is the only multiswitch currently made for DIRECTV commercial use. You can still get the others, but they’re “old stock.” Why is the SWM-30 better? It’s better in pretty much every way. The SWM-30 is the size of a SWM-8 but it has almost the same capacity as a SWM-32. It runs a lot cooler and draws less power. It’s the only multiswitch that’s going to let you do 4K down the road, too. You get all that for the same retail price as a SWM-8, meaning it’s a lot less expensive than the retail price of the SWM-32. The SWM-30 was designed around the ability to supply 26...
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“How do I know my cell booster is working?”

I have said before that up to 90% of people experience poor cell service every day. Seriously. If you doubted the need for cellular signal boosters, there it is right there. There are a lot of reasons, but it comes down to two that really make sense: 1. No one wants a phone with a two-foot-long antenna. Yep, that’s the big problem. Remember those phones from the 1980s, remember the ones that had their own luggage? They had plenty of naugahyde, but they also had big honkin’ antennas to make them work. That wasn’t so popular, and even when antennas (and phones) got smaller, no one wanted one popping out of the top. Digital technology went a long way toward eliminating the need for a large external antenna, but it didn’t change the...
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FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Unix

What do your phone and washing machine have in common? More than you’d expect. Any device in your home with even the slightest bit of logic to it is probably developed using some sort of computer operating system. The days when you could connect physical switches to motors and lights are long gone. Today, everything in your modern life is governed by software. And that software almost always owes its existence to Unix, something you might not have even heard of. A quick history of Unix There are a lot of really long histories of Unix out there, and if you’re interested in them, you can search using Google, another system which is derived from Unix. So, I’ll just recap and hit the high points. In the 1960s, AT&T was one of the most...
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Time for another reminder: ground everything

About once every three months or so, I tend to run an article like this. I’ve called grounding “the most important thing you’re not doing” and I stand by that. Even some professional installers don’t do a good job of grounding equipment, and in the end it’s up to you. You need to make sure that your home is protected. If you’re not the homeowner, you need to make sure the homeowner is protecting you. What is grounding? Grounding is a simple idea. When the air gets charged with electricity (as it does in a lightning storm), eventually that electricity has to go somewhere. We see the result of this all the time as lightning. Lightning is the air discharging its electricity and literally putting that electricity into the ground...
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