14 DAY TRIAL // So you bought yourself a 40-50 inch High Definition TV, probably paid at least a thousand dollars for it, you got home and something's missing. It's not the instructions manual....it's the antenna!
Don't laugh, because you can receive free HD signals from your local ground amplifier and you don't even know it. And I'm not talking about "borrowing" grandpa's old analog antenna from his roof, when he's not home and I'm not talking about expensive satellite dishes either.
People relied on antennas to receive analog signals from local TV stations' broadcasting towers, before cable and satellite existed. Stations still send out analog signals, but most now transmit HD digital signals as well, and the US Congress has even ordered them to shut off old-style analog TV broadcasts by February 2009.
So, many tech geeks say that the local channels available from over-the-air HD signals are superior to what cable and satellite companies can offer because some compress the signal, which may degrade picture quality. Consequently, they hook up their thousands of dollars LCD or plasma TV sets to $50 antennas that are not too different from old-style ones used in the past.
And it works.
Using compression applications, the companies remove some of the data from the digital signal, which reduces picture quality, so that they can still have enough room to send hundreds of other channels through the same cable line or satellite transmission.
Consumers who can get a digital signal from an antenna will get an excellent picture, said Steve Wilson, principal analyst for consumer electronics at ABI Research, which provides companies with research on technology markets. But getting the signal depends on an antenna's distance from the broadcasting towers.
Richard Schneider, president of Antennas Direct started a few years ago an assembly line in his garage and sold antennas out of the trunk of his car. Now his company has seven employees and did $1.4 million in sales last year. He expects revenue to double in 2007.
"Eighty-year-old technology is being redesigned and refitted to deliver the best picture quality. It's an interesting irony," he said.
If you're within 25 miles of a station's broadcast tower, you only need an indoor antenna to receive the HD signals; if you're up to 70 miles away, you need a roof mounted one.