How to get Free High Def Television Channels Over the Air

As some of you may or may not have heard, I recently canceled my Rogers Cable Television service. After doing some online research, found that there are many HD Over the Air (OTA) signals that are free for use if you have the right equipment can be setup very easily. The number of channels and signal strength depends on your location. The ideal location is if you have the ability to aim an antenna south with line of sight to the CN tower. Lucky for me, my apartment is up on the 18th floor and faces south, and I have some sight of the CN tower so I thought I would give this a shot after seeing that you can make a “HD antenna” using a piece of wood and coat hangers!

Things you need:

  1. HD capable television (obviously)
  2. If your HD tv does not have a built in ATSC tuner, you will need to buy a separate set top box. Ebay is a good place to find one for about $100.
  3. Screws, coat hangers, piece of wood and maybe 20 minutes of your time

Follow the simple tutorial to build your own HD antenna:

Tutorial to build own antenna:

The final result (sorry about the quality….I had to take them with the camera phone):

antenna

Looks kind of ghetto but suprisingly works great.

sampleHD

Just about every sport looks great now.

In the end, I got 20 totally OTA channels with 12 in HD. Very happy with the results. Once you go HD, you can’t go back!

More useful links:

http://www.redflagdeals.com/forums/showthread.php?t=461924
http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=81

March 14, 2008 | Filed Under tutorial 

Comments

One Response to “How to get Free High Def Television Channels Over the Air”

  1. Global HD is now up and running! : brantheory on April 18th, 2008 5:36 pm

    [...] first gave a tutorial on how to get Free HD over the air. The one major local Toronto HD channel was missing: Global TV. Well they have been testing for the [...]

Leave a Reply