About to cut the cord - Antenna recommendations greatly appreciated

I find building my own antennas to be cheaper & better than store bought.

Probably $20 worth of supplies but I just used scrap materials I had. Took less than 30 minutes to assemble, once I had the parts ready. 17-20 channels OTA in Baton Rouge

Single Bay Grey-Hoverman DIY Antenna

Search and you will find a lot of designs and info.

Depends. I have a big attic. I just mounted one in there and ran the wire through the back of a wall mounted cabinet.

If you have an attic you can move around in, it should be no problem to have the coax go in through the eaves.

You could. I've just never found a really good one until you get around a hundred bucks.

And if you like hands on projects, why not just do it?

The $15 one I got from Wal-Mart gets me like 17 channels. That combined with my ROKU is more TV than I can ever hope to watch. Cable is such a scam.

picks up the best signal in my opinion! i was using this up until i got eatel...

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Ha. My $15 one is amazing.

Those high priced ones are a scam similar to HDMI cords

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Depends on where you live. If you don't have a clear line of sight or are far from towers, your $15 antenna won't do much good at all. Building the one above for $15 would be significantly better. But in terms of being able to pick one up off the shelf and get a good signal when you're 15-30 miles away from a tower? You'll be in the $80-120 range easily.

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I use Windows Media Center

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It's tops if you've got it. If you want an off-the-shelf unit that's a bit easier to work with, they all have shortcomings. Now, I do not own or have any experience with these, but I have read reviews about them extensively:

Usually, I like the way Vulkano products work and are reviewed, but they don't have any that receive OTA signals, unfortunately. If you've got a converter box that will output HD over component, give them a look. Otherwise, keep reading.

MediaSonic makes an OTA DVR that requires an external HDD for recordings that comes in at $35. I'd heavily consider starting here, the rest of the options are substantially more expensive.

This Viewtv product is similarly rated and slightly more expensive. I don't know of one reason to go with one over the other. In terms of cheap products that are probably worth the gamble, you've got a coinflip here. Neither offer any sort of network streaming option.

Simple.tv is made by SiliconDust. It doesn't have the best reviews, but I know that SiliconDust makes great products. I do not know if the negative reviews mean a steep learning curve or actual lemon products. The device has 2 tuners (can record 2 shows at one time) and will let you stream them around the house for $199. If you go up to $250 or $350, you can stream your DVR anywhere in the world for 12 months or the life of the product, respectively. As said, reviews have not been great, but I do know this to be a fantastic hardware-producing company. I've considered picking up one of their older models on Amazon (~$100 or so) for OTA recordings due to my troubles of not being able to run an antenna properly to my TV, which doesn't have a good place to place for the antenna to get any sort of decent reception.

There's a TiVo option. It's probably fantastic. It'll cost you $15/month. I'll assume that's the sort of thing that turns you off, so I won't go further into it. There's a product called "Tablo" as well that has 2 and 4 tuner options that requires a $5/mo subscription for guide updates.

Lastly, the Channel Master DVR+ looks to be the front-runner in "premium" devices at present. I can't see where it says you can stream what's on the DVR. It does integrate some streaming services into the unit though- Vudu and Pandora. They say they're looking to expand (no Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Go...), but there's no real hints as to who or what services they'd be getting. They have two models: $250 which requires external storage, $400 which has 1TB of internal storage. The guide works. It's not the best. You don't get tons of info about what you're watching. You can tell it to record a whole series, but you can't specify new/new+old.


In the end, I'd suggest either going cheap (first two options) or building an HTPC (a discussion in and of itself as to how much you could/should spend) to take care of all streaming needs and throwing either an HDHomerun onto your network or something like the Hauppauge 2255 (2atsc tuners) in a PCIex1 slot.

Just FYI if you buy cable Internet you get basic cable for free. I even get espn and all the cable news channels but I'm not sure I'm supposed to.