Over The Air

[IslandsAC]

All I can pick up on my TV over the air is CBS. I went out and got a fancy antennae thing but I still only get the one channel. It comes in beautifully but I don't even get a fuzzy version of any other channel no matter what I try. Any ideas or is it common for only one channel to come in over the air?

[mothershipconnection]

Depends where you are. I get a crap-load of channels in the twin cities.

[RyDogg66]

When I lived in Milwaukee I had a crappy antenna and I got Fox, NBC, ABC and PBS. I could not get CBS. When I moved back to Oshkosh, the same crappy antenna got NBC, FOX and PBS (out of Green Bay) but no ABC or CBS. I went out and bought a fancy antenna and nothing changed except the ones I had came in clearer. I finally broke down and am paying for cable.

 

I dont think the fancy antennas are worth a darn.

[kgbaseball]

I'm basically in the heart of Milwaukee, and get every local channel BUT CBS. I get this Canadian channel (ch. 7) that has CFL games on it all the time.

[whizkid]

You should be able to get all the stations.

 

CBS in Madison is channel 3. Two things are different about channel 3. In Madison it's the only VHF station, the others are UHF. How old is the TV? There could be a separate hookup on the back of the set for UHF.

 

Channel 3 is also where TVs are set to play a VCR or other device. Do you have anything hooked up to the TV? There should be a switch to make them play on channel 4 on the TV for areas where channel 3 is an actual station.

[IslandsAC]

Booyah, thanks for putting me in the right direction, whizkid. There was a setting deep in my TV menu for "air" reception. Now I'm golden. Really kind of wish I would have looked into this earlier so I could have been watching these cool Packer games.

[GAME05]

I've got nothing but a couple fuzzy channels, too. it's not a tv/cable switch thing, just bad recepton from living in apartments. Should anybody else be in the fuzzy-channel-apartment boat, too, I've found that better than the expensive powered antennas (that do nothing), a good fix is to plug the antenna wire in to your tv as you normally would, then strip the other end of the wire and wrap it around the screw of an electrical outlet. it connects you (not electrically) to a lot of the metals that run through the building, essentially making your building the tv antenna. it isn't insta-fix or anything, and it doesn't always work great, but it does the same job that a $30 antenna would.

 

I've found I like having only the CW and Fox in fuzzy versions. I'll get my tv fix with some mediocre sitcom, but can't get glued to the couch with crystal-clear programming.