My folks live far enough into The Sticks(tm) that their only options are satellite and Over-The-Air. The use a combo actually, since rain fade during severe storms kills the Sat reception, they have the OTA to get weather info.

I recently reworked their setup and added converter boxes.

They now have two sub-channels that show actual *gasp* “weather” as opposed to what you might find on The Weather Channel at any given point in time (like “The day the polar bears died and why men in Texas are to blame”).

And even 30-40 miles from the towers, the picture is stunning.

In case anyone wants to know.

Antenna: Radio Shack VU-90 XR. Location has good line of site to the transmission towers.

RG-6 quad-shield, used outdoor connectors as needed (cut and prepped my own cables). Treated all outdoor connections with dielectric grease.

Converter Box: Zenith DTT-901 (made by LG).

And no, I didn’t have to use a signal booster, even considering that I had to split it for two TV’s.

We too have an analog version but with three years before the HD versions are necessary, we’re not worried.

And yes, “Psych” and “Burn Notice” are two series we record regularly.

One interesting side effect of being able to record almost a terabyte (at 2 Gig per hour) … I now have a tendency to let a season of shows spool up and them watch them all on a designated weekend.

For those that haven’t noticed what USA Network is producing these days. Psych and Burn Notice are good shows.

Myself, I’ve never owned a desktop system (unless you count the Atari 800XL from 25 years ago). I’ve had notebooks for 10 years now, and routinely keep my eyes on both screens (as I am while writing this). I can’t say my TV consumption has declined much, although it’s largely restricted to sports and movies now.

On the other hand, the last post on my blog is almost two weeks old.

Maybe there’s data in them thar anecdotes.