Something a lot of people don't seem to know today is that you can get free HDTV channels off the air. All you need is an antenna that can receive HDTV signals. I have personally tried out several of these HDTV indoor antennas starting with RCA, moving on to Philips, and then settling for what is called a Silver Sensor antenna made my both Zenith and Terk. These are different from your regular rabbit ears antenna and are highly directional in nature. This means you have to figure out where the TV stations transmitters are located with respect to your TV's location and then find the optimal spot to place the antenna facing those transmitters. This can be found by trial and error, or by a visit to antennaweb.org. While the latter is not very intuitive, it gives out a detailed result of the compass directions of the transmitters based on your home address. If you have a compass handy, you can point the silver sensor in that direction. Even otherwise, you should be able to find East/West fairly easily, use that as reference.
I tried this and then tweaked the direction slightly based on trial and error, and managed to get NBC,CBS,ABC,Fox and MyNW all in full HD. The catch here is that all the towers might not be in the same direction. I have tried this at three locations and they seem to be more or less in the same direction, but you might have to end up picking favourites, or be ready to get up and turn the antenna a bit to watch your favourite program on a different station.
The best thing to do initially during setup would be to find a neutral direction which can tune in to all the channels so you can save them (even if some of them skip badly to an extent that they are unwatchable, your TV should atleast be able to identify that the station exists) and then fine tune the direction when you are watching TV based on which channel you want.
The other thing to remember here is that your TV needs to have an ATSC tuner built in or you need to get an ATSC tuner. External ATSC tuners seem to be hard to come by and quite expensive. Several name brand HDTV's have built in tuners, but there are a few smaller ones that don't. Make sure you check for that before you invest.
I tried this and then tweaked the direction slightly based on trial and error, and managed to get NBC,CBS,ABC,Fox and MyNW all in full HD. The catch here is that all the towers might not be in the same direction. I have tried this at three locations and they seem to be more or less in the same direction, but you might have to end up picking favourites, or be ready to get up and turn the antenna a bit to watch your favourite program on a different station.
The best thing to do initially during setup would be to find a neutral direction which can tune in to all the channels so you can save them (even if some of them skip badly to an extent that they are unwatchable, your TV should atleast be able to identify that the station exists) and then fine tune the direction when you are watching TV based on which channel you want.
The other thing to remember here is that your TV needs to have an ATSC tuner built in or you need to get an ATSC tuner. External ATSC tuners seem to be hard to come by and quite expensive. Several name brand HDTV's have built in tuners, but there are a few smaller ones that don't. Make sure you check for that before you invest.
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