Cable Chronicles

Well, it seems like I've painted myself into a corner. I do not have cable television for one very simple reason: I grew up in a house located near the bottom of a valley. So all I've ever known is cable television. I can tell you that when the cable was out due to technical problems, the best we could ever get on an antenna was a grand total of one single local channel... and it was a very snowy at that.

Imagine my delight when I moved to Gatineau in the summer of 1999 to discover that an antennae could get me some 5 or 6 channels! And that wasn't even including the use of a UHF tuner. Actually, I wound up getting cable at one point (it was kinda shoe-horned into my life).

Well, now I'm in my new house and I'm back to antenna life. The great thing is that I've discovered since that with a tuner, I'm even picking up stuff from Toronto ...on nothing more than rabbit ears!
In fact, the only thing that could be better when it comes to free television would be if my reception was just a tad better.

Well, I tested out a theory that I've had burning at the back of my head tonight. The house is pre-wired so I've actually got co-ax outlets in every room. I thought perhaps if I plugged my television set into the wall jack in the living room, and an antenna into an outlet upstairs, just maybe that would form one giant circuit. No such luck.

See, I'm subscribed to cable Internet... so plugging my television into my cable jack was actually giving me worse reception: that is, I was getting no reception... I was getting a very weak unboosted cable-tv signal! Which, I might point out with some irony, gave me access to a somewhat fuzzy but very watchable YTV (an specialty channel in Canada for kids).

Anyway, suffice to say that my experiment didn't work. I've got a splitter here that I was going to use for my cable modem in case the "giant antenna" attempt worked. But that would've probably just given my modem a bunch of interference if I tried. Oh well.