Goodbye Television

Soon I will lose all my TV channels. I’ve lost NBC and ABC. Tomorrow I will lose CBS, Fox, and PBS. That’s all the channels my TV receives.

I’m a cord-cutter—I gave up cable TV a long time ago. I don’t watch a lot of television, and antenna TV satisfied my TV requirements. Because all the local stations were on the UHF band, I didn’t need an outdoor antenna. A small UHF antenna the size of a book is parked in my front window and it’s all I need for local stations.

But the FCC has reassigned my local stations to the VHF band, which is lower in frequency than the UHF band. To receive those VHF stations I will need a larger, rooftop antenna. There was a time when almost every house sported a rooftop antenna mounted to its chimney. That time is long past and I’m not going back.

What bothers me is the lie being propagated by the FCC that we don’t need to buy any new equipment. They tell us all we need to do is rescan our TVs. While that may be true for some TV owners who live close enough to a transmitting antenna, I (and doubtless others) will not receive TV signals without a VHF antenna. For me, that means buying an antenna with a rotor. My brick chimney is old enough that I fear the mortar might be damaged by the stress of a chimney mounted antenna and rotor, so I’ll have to find another method of mounting an outdoor antenna—most likely, I’ll have to attach an antenna mast to the end of my house, a method that comes with its own set of challenges.

So no over-the-air TV in my house for a while. But there’s the Internet. Some TV shows are available there, though not necessarily on the day they are aired. And if worse comes to worst, there are books. Remember those?