This is an amplified TV antenna we bought at Best Buy a couple days ago. As I have mentioned before, we are looking to cancel our DirecTV subscription. We have had it on hiatus for several months and have not missed it. We find ourselves doing a lot more stuff because the couch potato incentive is not there. There are some times I want to watch TV, like when Antiques Road Show is on. I find that interesting and it is on PBS, a broadcast channel.

There was only one rub with that idea. My reception of broadcast TV on the upstairs TV was miserable. Now this is interesting. We had a crappy old rabbit ear antenna kicking around, so we hooked it up to Ginny's TV in the bedroom to see how it works. This is on the first floor. She was able to receive all of the local channels. We took the antenna upstairs and found that I could only get half of the channels. That's odd. I would have thought that the higher the antenna the better. I got curious and went to a website called antennaweb.org. You tell it your location and it tells you the location of all the local broadcast TV antennas. Not surprisingly, all the antennas in Houston are located in the same position on the southwest side of Houston. The bearing is about 270 and the distance about 23 miles. It made no sense to me, but that was the reality of the situation. So we went and bought an amplified antenna and tried it out. It works fine. I am in business. I can now watch broadcast TV. But, there ain't much worth watching. That is a good thing. I have lots of other better things to do than watch the tube. Whenever I want a break and feel like watching, I can dial up Hulu and watch another episode of the Twilight Zone.