The Redneck Antenna - Phase II

Many of you know the grand experiment last fall with the home-made redneck HD antenna I made. It worked pretty well, until I accidentally lodged one of the "whiskers" into the back of the TV and blew it up. So in all, the antenna cost me $5.00 in parts and $750 for a new TV. Let's say that Laura was less than impressed, and our $150/month subscription to Shaw cable was renewed.

But that was a year ago, and with the looming lack of a hockey season this year, Laura agreed to give it another try. This time with some more commercial solutions.

While we were on vacation in Oregon, I found a commercial HDTV antenna at Costco for $30. It looks good, has a very small footprint, and is now stuck unobtrusively in our living room window. I get about 11 channels off the air, with all three local networks (CBC, CTV and Global) coming in very well.

Because we're now relying on the internet for most of our on-air entertainment, I got a US-based proxy service (this means that for all intents and purposes, it looks like we live in Seattle as far as our internet connection is concerned). This provides us with all the benefits that only a US resident could appreciate.

So far, this US-based proxy has given us access to:

• HULU, which is a service which puts all of network TV and cable TV at your fingertips.
• The Netflix feed, which looks at your location and then decides what programs you have access to. We now have access to hundreds (thousands?) of additional programming over our old Canadian feed. I watched reruns of Adam-12 off Netflix last night.
• All those YouTube links that don't work because you're not in the USA. They now all work.

With this proxy service, we can use hundreds of worldwide locations as our "point of presence" for the internet feeds. An interesting aside to this is that I can "look" like I'm in London, England, and have access to all the local BBC programming (like live feed of BBC news). I can also look like I'm in Amsterdam or Africa or Australia or ....

The proxy service costs about $65 a year, and has the important benefit of anonymizing everything you do on the net. Shaw now knows nothing about what I do, including any streaming or torrents I might be viewing. You become invisible.

We've cancelled cable TV again, and our bill has dropped from $150 to $70 a month (I have a very high end internet connection - you  could probably get by with much less).

It's early days, but I think it will work well this time. So far I haven't blown anything up.