[twobjshelbys]

Are you referring to an "Over The Air" antenna installation? Many areas have a company that advertises a "Free TV, get rid of cable or satellite", but all they are selling you is an antenna that receives "Over The Air" (OTA) channels that are locally broadcast. Ie, your local CBS outlet and whatever other broadcasters have a broadcast tower on the highest hill around you.

Up until the digitial conversion the old UHF/VHF antennas got you three channels (ABC, NBC, CBS, and not all of those in some regions). There might be a few independents too. In some areas with a good antenna and city overlap (for example, we could get both Sioux City and Sioux Falls. South of us could get Sioux City and Omaha). But even then you might have gotten at most 10 channels.

With the mandatory digitial conversion, the "channels" not only became "virtual", but the bandwidth is shared, so for example, here in Vegas, our CBS outlet on channel 8 has two additional channels - 8.2 is MeTV and 8.3 is a movie channel. Here every base channel has at least two digital subchannels and many have as many as 6 or 7. The thing about having alot is there is only so much channel bandwidth available so the owner has to decide how to divide his bandwidth up. If the main network uses HDTV then the subchannels might only be 720 or 480.

So basically what these places are selling is a well aimed antenna to maximize the capture and deliver most or all of the digitial subchannels in your market.

What I find in Vegas is that the subchannels are mostly foreign language, religion or jewelry sales. Out of 50 channels we use maybe 20 total.

If you are lucky you can just buy a flat bowtie type antenna and tape it to your window. We use Dish as our primary source and I run the OTA stuff into the dish box because it lets us view all the programming in one setting and dish lets you record the OTA content. For a while with their battles with the local network affiliates Dish was actually pushing the OTA add on as a substitute.

Bottom line is these kinds of things (We have Mister Antenna in Vegas) are selling you a new implementation of an old idea. If your house is wired for cable they basically run the outside antenna to the cable location and the splitters take it everywhere else. Note some may require amplification to get a good digital signal to every location.

Digital TV didn't really reinvent - the basic broadcasting still occurs on the old frequencies, it's just they use "digitial packet transmission" and so can pack much more into the same bandwidth. The same technology exists within FM radio, and some countries, Norway for example, have nationwide converted FM analog to digital radio. I'm sure that the US and Canada will some day recognize the "value" of those frequency bands and do the same thing.