FTA (Free-To-Air) and free HDTV in Montreal

Hello adventurous readers,

Today, I decided to start my own blog in order to share some thoughts, ideas, software problems and solutions and maybe even discuss politics at some point. My main goal being first, to help people and second, maybe get my 15 minutes of fame someday :-)

My first topic concerns FTA (Free-to-air) and how I managed to watch free HDTV in Quebec, near Montreal (Canada).
I've been watching free HD TV for some time now, but it was not an easy task. First of all, here in Canada, we only stopped receiving analog TV at the end of 2011 (as opposed to 2009 in the US).

When I started my FTA adventure, I was still paying for analog cable TV from Videotron, so I was able to completely setup my system before eventually calling them to cancel my subscription.

Inside my house, using rabbit ears antenna, I could only get 3 channels and since I didn't want to put a big ugly antenna on the top of my house, I choose to try putting a big ugly antenna inside my attic instead.

Now, if you search on the Internet to find which antenna is considered the best for that purpose, you'll surely found-out that everybody uses the ChannelMaster CM-4228HD.

You may find this surprising, but I don't use this antenna! Here's why:

I went to a small retailer in Laval to buy this exact same model, but after being rudely answered by the owner, I decided to use the only real power a customer has, namely leave and go buy from someone else.
Since buying an HDTV antenna in the Montreal area is not as simple as one would think, I ended-up buying a Digilogic UHF 4-bays antenna (or something like that, I don't remember the exact name) for something around 70$. It's actually very similar in size and look to the ChannelMaster antenna.

After endless-hours going up and down to/from my attic in order to do the wiring, I finally installed the UHF antenna and got it working.

One thing I forgot to mention: If you want to see which channels you can get from your location, there is a great site named www.tvfool.com that will give you just that! Just go to the Maps section and enter your home address. After a few clicks you'll get the list of channels you can theoretically get. I must say that it gave pretty accurate results in my case.

After installing the antenna in my attic, I then tried to change the orientation to get as many channels as possible.
Here's the list of channel I can watch:
2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 10.1, 12.1, 15.1, 15.2, 17.1, 24.1, 35.1, 45.1, 57.1, 57.2, 57.3, 62.1

I then realized that 2 important channels for which I expected to have strong signal were actually very weak.

TVA (10.1) and CTV (12.1)

Damn! I realized that both channels were on the VHF-Hi frequency range and unfortunately, the antenna I bought, while pretty good for UHF, it is not very good for VHF.

At this point, I tried many things, one being to buy and try a "pre-amp" (CM-7777). This is a two-pieces gadget that amplifies the signal of the antenna without requiring to bring electricity in the attic. Perfect for me, but the end-result was still the same. I had some channels with a slightly better signal, but the two VHF channels were still very weak.

The last thing I tried (that actually ended-up working) was to use an home-made rabbit-ears antenna that I fixed in the attic.
I went to Maddison (an electronic store in Laval) and bought for less than 5$ of material in order to built the home-made antenna. I then used my pre-amp to combine signals together (the CM-7777 pre-amp has a switch that allows combining a UHF signal and a VHF signal originating from two different antennas).

Bingo, that worked. I now get both signals very strong (nearly 100%).

I will conclude this small post by saying it was a very interesting adventure and that it kept me busy for many week-ends and many evenings.... but not as much as setting-up my PVR (Windows Media Center) to work with my newly installed antennas... But this is a story for another post.

Thanks for reading!