Author Archive for Sam

They have television over the air now?, Part 3

Published
by
Sam
on January 6, 2010
in 930posts
. 1 Comment

In my two previous posts about antennas, I explained what I did to research and install an over-the-air TV antenna. Now that I’ve gotten everything installed, I’ll share with you my results.

The Channels

These are all the stations (including subchannels) that I pull in with my new installation.

If you take all the major stations and add their subchannels, that’s 30 channels!  Granted, there are three 24 hour weather channels, two children’s channels, a bible channel, and ten foreign news channels, but the ratio of channels I watch to channels I don’t watch is about the same as it would be on cable TV.

Quality and Reception

All the of the major channels (NBC, FOX, ABC, CBS, MyTV, PBS, CW, ION) are in HD. There is a mix of 720p and 1080i, but it all looks the same on my 32-inch 720p TV, and I have to say it looks pretty amazing.

The MHz channels and all other subchannels are broadcast in 480p, which while not as good as HD, does not look terrible.

Since this is all digital, it’s pretty much all or nothing. There is no graceful signal degradation like there was with analog signals. That does present a problem with a few channels.

WDCW is the worst offender, since the tower is located about two miles farther away and two degrees off from all the others. Occasionally I can’t get a signal from that station at all.

The other two that have issues are WJLA and WUSA, and problems usually happen when there is a heavy overcast. These stations are the only ones that broadcast on VHF, so my guess is that my antenna is less effective at pulling in that band.

Future Improvements

The first thing I plan on trying is a pre-amplifier, which should eliminate the problems we’re having with the stations I mentioned. Also, we sometimes get little tears or warps in the picture, which I assume is the result of interference. Hopefully a pre-amp will also take care of this problem.

As an alternative, I could always go with a bigger antenna. The longer the boom, the farther away I should be able to pull in signals. While I am totally in favor of this idea, I think my wife would rather stick with something smaller.

Conclusion

So far, my broadcast TV experiment has been going great. We are able to watch most of our favorite shows as they air. (Interestingly enough, sometimes we prefer to just watch them on Hulu). I get to watch some of the sports I’d been missing out on. Most of what we miss gets filled in with Hulu and Netflix streaming.

Most important of all, Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! keep my wife busy long enough for me to get other things done.

My next project in the home theater department will probably be putting together a PC with XBMC or Boxee, mainly to be able to watch Hulu. Sounds like another blog post!

Signing off…

Update: I almost forgot about this but I wanted to thank Joe for helping me install my antenna. He took an entire Sunday out of his time to help me out. Thanks Joe. You’re a true pal.

They have television over the air now?, Part 2

Published
by
Sam
on December 14, 2009
in 930posts
. 0 Comments

In my previous post, I discussed how to gather the necessary information for installing an over-the-air TV antenna. To sum up, you need to know where the broadcast towers are and what frequency they broadcast on. In my case, I needed a rooftop VHF/UHF combo antenna, and I needed to point it just east of due north.

In this post, I’ll talk about the equipment I bought and how I actually installed it.

I got pretty much everything from RadioShack. I have given RadioShack a lot of shit in the past for being a crappy consumer electronics store, but they were the only store around that had everything I needed, including the antenna and mounting hardware. Home Depot and Lowe’s had none of it.

Equipment

The antenna I decided on was the Antennacraft HBU33. I could have gone with any number of brands, but RadioShack had this one. It is a high-VHF (channels 7-13) and UHF (channels 14 and up) combo antenna, and it’s supposed to have a range of about 60 miles. These specs fit my situation, since I’m about 45 miles away from the towers, and, despite the fact that most channels are on UHF, there are still two on high-VHF.

Depending on your own situation, you might be able to get a UHF-only antenna. They are smaller and supposedly more effective than a combo antenna. Also, if you are close enough to the towers, an indoor antenna is the easiest solution.

I also bought a tripod mount and 5 foot mast, also from RadioShack. There are several options available for mounting the antenna, such as an eave mount or a simpler mount, but a tripod mount was the easiest way to go for my situation.

The rest of the stuff I needed was some coaxial cable, grounding wire, and a grounding block. Luckily, I already had two satellite dishes on my roof with connected coaxial, and the cables already had some grounding wire attached to it.

As I wrote about in my previous post, AntennaWeb told me I would need a pre-amplifier. I decided to go without the pre-amp for now, since the antenna’s supposed range was about 60 miles. (I’ll talk about this more in a future post, but I might install a pre-amp sometime soon.)

After gathering everything together, I was ready to go.

Installation

You can choose to do this later on, but I assembled my antenna first. Mine mostly involved snapping the elements into place.

For installing everything, I got Joe to help me out, since at the time he did that kind of thing for a living.

The first thing we did was bolt the legs of the tripod to the roof. The tripod came with all the necessary hardware. It also came with sticky putty pads to put on the bottom of the feet. These ensure that a good seal is made around the bolts so as to prevent your roof from leaking.

After securing the tripod, the next step was to place the mast into the tripod. The mast rests on an L-plate at the bottom of the tripod and is secured by bolts. (I would take pictures, but it’s December and I’m not getting on my roof.) After that we attached the antenna to the mast using the supplied U bolt.

Since these long range TV antennas are highly directional, it was important that we pointed the thing in the right direction. With the help of Joe’s iPhone and the signal strength meter he borrowed from work, we got it where it needed to be.

At this point, everything was in place, and the last thing to do was connect the antenna to my house’s coaxial network. I grabbed the coaxial off of the satellite dishes and connected it to the supplied 300-ohm to 75-ohm impedance matching transformer.

An important step we made sure not to overlook is to properly ground the connection. A grounding wire needs to be run from the base of the antenna mast to a grounding rod. Also, the coaxial coming from the antenna needs to be attached to a grounding block, which is then attached to the grounding rod using more grounding wire. We did all this, and it should prevent a lightning strike from taking out my TV.

Since I use a cable modem for my internet needs, there was already a feed coming into the coaxial network. For now, I just wanted one room to receive the antenna feed. After some trial and error, we found which cable to connect to.

Then we went inside, used my TV’s built-in tuner to scan for available signals, and sat back and enjoyed HD over-the-air TV, FOR FREE.

Tune in next time, and I’ll wrap up with a discussion of the results, along with ideas for future improvements.

100 posts!

Published
by
Sam
on December 14, 2009
in 930posts
. 0 Comments

Nobody noticed it, but the previous post, my first antenna post, was post #100. Much like our 1st birthday, this is a significant milestone for us. We toil day in and day out to provide all five of you with about six little nuggets of useless crap per month.

Congratulations Sector 930!

Also, there is no longer an “older posts” link on the homepage. I don’t know what that’s about.

They have television over the air now?

Published
by
Sam
on November 20, 2009
in 930posts
. 5 Comments

In this age of fiber optics, premium cable channels, and satellite TV, a lot of people have forgotten that there exist television stations that broadcast their content. You know, over the air. As in, they transmit electromagnetic waves through the air from a big tower. No cables required.

There is one important reason to be interested in this new-fangled wireless transmission: it’s free. What’s that? It’s ad-supported? Millions and millions of cable subscribers willingly sit through advertisements and they PAY for the privilege. It’s time to wake up America. You are getting screwed. Seriously. And somehow all these people have been convinced that cable television is a UTILITY, that is, something they can’t live without.

So in my personal quest to improve my life (i.e., watch less TV) AND stick it to The Man, I have been cable-less for just shy of one year. It’s probably one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I save over $60/month and I get more done around the house. I have since replaced television with Hulu and the Roku player.

As great as Hulu and Netflix are, though, a few things were still missing: the occasional sporting event, the local news (whatever that’s worth), and of course, Sesame Street. So a couple of weeks ago, I finally turned off the Roku (so much for getting things done!) and installed an over-the-air TV antenna.

Gathering intel

I had been sitting on this project ever since I dropped cable, so I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. A while back I did some Googling and stumbled across the site AntennaWeb. There, you can type in your address and get a list of broadcast stations are near you, what RF channel they’re on, how far away they are, and what direction they’re in. The site will also tell you what kind of antenna you will need to pick up each station. Since I live about 45 miles away from the DC area broadcast towers, indoor rabbit ears weren’t going to cut it. Plugging my address into the FCC’s DTV Reception Maps page confirmed this.

Here are the results from AntennaWeb for my address:

antennaweb

Because the digital transition finally went through on June 12, virtually all major broadcast stations require the use of an ATSC tuner to be able to view. Modern TVs have these, but the old tube TVs don’t. This is the reason a lot of old people need one of those converter boxes.

Notice that I didn’t say you need an HD or a digital antenna. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN HD/DIGITAL ANTENNA. AN ANTENNA IS JUST A BIG PIECE OF ALUMINUM.

If you look at the chart, you’ll see the column “RF Channel”. This tells you which frequency each of the station broadcasts on. Channels 2-6 are the VHF low-band, channels 7-13 are the VHF high-band, and channels 14 and up are the UHF band. Look at these when choosing an antenna. Many stations in the US have switched to UHF, which means you might be able to get an antenna specifically designed for that band. Unfortunately, I have to use a combo antenna just to accommodate two stations.

The other “Channel” column tells you the channel that the station will use on your TV. Thanks to PSIP, stations can be broadcast on one RF channel but displayed on your TV on another channel.

The next step was to figure out how big of an antenna I needed, which depended on the stations’ power output and distance. According to AntennaWeb, I was going to need a large directional antenna with a pre-amplifier.

In a future post, I will cover the other phases of this project: selecting the equipment, installing everything, and admiring the results. As they say in the industry, tune in next time!

I Want You… But All Your Money Will Do Instead

Published
by
Sam
on October 15, 2009
in 930posts
. 2 Comments

The other night I was doing what I always do at home, which was sitting at a computer. You might think that the 8-9 hours at work that I spend sitting in front of a computer would be enough (it’s not). There is plenty of shit to do around the house, but none of that is as important as keeping my Google Reader unread items count below 10.

While sitting in front of this computer, my mind wandered. I suddenly had one of those “huh” moments that should have occurred to me sooner, but didn’t.

I have 2 brothers. Should one or both of them have children, I will Uncle Sam. This is a total disaster.

I do not want to be Uncle Sam. Uncle Sam is the drunken uncle that goes into his nieces’ and nephew’s rooms while they sleep and takes 50% of what is in their piggy banks. He uses that money to pay back the giant loans that he couldn’t afford. What was he doing with that money? Buying shiny toys for his house. Giving it away to people who didn’t give anything back. Was he saving it or investing it in anything that would produce a return? Nope.

Uncle Sam reminds me of Huckleberry Finn’s dad, who was a drunk, suddenly became “born again” and promised to do good, then quickly reverted back to being a drunkard.

But I digress. Maybe the name Uncle Samuel won’t have such a connotation.

I don’t need any help, I’ll handle this one myself

Published
by
Sam
on August 20, 2009
in 930posts and The more you know...
. 4 Comments

Scenario: You move into a new house. You notice that the smoke alarms look kind of old. You’re not sure if they’ll actually work in a fire. One of them actually chirps for no reason every so often. You decide to replace them, but you keep putting it off.

Then one night before you go to bed, your wife decides to throw her favorite pair of pants in the dryer so they’ll be ready for her in the morning. But during the night, that bird’s nest in your dryer vent, which you’ve been meaning to clean up, causes a lint clog. It catches fire while your sleeping, the alarms fail to go off, and you die a slow, horrible burning death.

In order to avoid this type of thing, I got to work and replaced my old smoke alarms.

A Quick Interlude: How Alarms Work

There are two types of smoke detectors: photoelectric and ionization.

Photoelectric detectors are set off when smoke particles pass in front of a light beam. They are better for detecting large smoke particles created by smoldering fires, e.g. your living room couch after you drop that lighter you’ve been playing with.

Ionization alarms are set off when alpha particles in the smoke pass through and disrupt an electrical current. These are better for detecting flaming fires, e.g. the deep fryer explodes in your kitchen.

A third type of alarm detects carbon monoxide levels. These are not technically smoke alarms, but they are still recommended in a home, since you could just be standing in the basement next to that old gas furnace, minding your own business, and suddenly fall over dead.

You can learn more about smoke alarms at the Wikipedia page.

What I Bought

After doing some homework, I chose the Kidde KN-COSM-IB. It is one of the higher rated smoke alarms on Consumer Reports. Some of the features:

  • Combination CO/ionization detector
  • AC powered (no need to keep replacing a battery)
  • Battery backup (you don’t want to burn alive even when the power goes out)
  • Interconnectable (a wire connects each alarm, allowing one to set off the others, which means you won’t choke and die when you don’t hear the alarm going off downstairs)
  • Voice warnings (sexy)

Installation

Installing the alarms was surprisingly easy. I made sure to turn off the circuit to the alarms, which I double checked with a multimeter (that’s right, I own a multimeter). Then it was a matter of matching up the red, black, and white wires.

After I turned the circuit back on, the system initialized with a self test and a sweet angelic voice called out, “Fire! Fire!”

You’re supposed to install an alarm in each bedroom, but my house is small enough. Besides, installing any more would involve real wiring, something I’m not qualified to do and too damn lazy to learn.

You’re also supposed to install both photoelectric and ionization detectors, but the combination units are expensive, and I don’t value my family’s safety that much*.

My next project is to change the thermostat, something even more potentially dangerous.

*JKLOLLuvyahoney

Because we’re so cutting edge…

Published
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Sam
on August 8, 2009
in 930posts
. 0 Comments

We finally have email! Since we’re as paranoid as Dale Gribble, we’ve never given away our everyday email addresses. So, as an anniversary gift to ourselves, we got sector930.com email addresses. If you would like to get in touch with any member of Sector 930 and let him know the amount of your medical bills from gouging your eyes out after reading his post, please use one of the follow addresses:

  • charlie@sector930.com
  • edwin@sector930.com
  • joe@sector930.com
  • joel@sector930.com
  • sam@sector930.com

Another option is to tell us how Sector 930 brings joy to you and your family. Here is a projected breakdown of the types of emails we will get:

  • 72.4% – Telling us how much we suck at life
  • 0.2% – Telling us how awesome Sector 930 is
  • 20.7% – Wives/girlfriends telling us to get off the computer
  • 6.7% – Moms telling us how proud they are to see their son on the Interwebs

Now that we got the hang of this newfangled e-letter thingy, we’re on to the next project: a calendar of events! Check back with us next year!

Space is big.

Published
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Sam
on August 1, 2009
in 930posts
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You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the drug store, but that’s just peanuts to space.

–Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Anybody that’s talked to me recently or read my recent tweets knows that I’ve got the space bug, and I’ve got it bad. Ever since I watched the 40th anniversary real-time replay of the Apollo 11 moon landing, I’ve been reading Wikipedia articles, watching NASA TV, and following a bunch of cool stuff on Twitter.

I came across an excellent article by Rand Simberg at The New Atlantis. It’s a long article, but it’s a rewarding read if you can make it through. This was an education for me, since I’ve always had a romantic view of the Apollo landings and NASA in general. I haven’t done any fact checking, so Simberg could just be a crazy nut, but he makes a compelling argument: the U.S.’s, and the world’s, manned space program is headed in the wrong direction.

From the article:

Access to space should be almost as routine (if not quite as affordable) as access to the oceans, and with similar laws and regulations. …we should explore the solar system the way we did the West: not by sending off small teams of government explorers—Lewis and Clark were the extreme exception, not the rule—but by having lots of people wandering around and peering over the next rill in search of adventure or profit.

Let companies and ordinary citizens do the research and the exploration with the hope that they’ll get a huge payoff. The beauty of it this time around is that there won’t be an indigenous civilization exploited or exterminated.

NASA’s place in all of this should be as an enabler:

It isn’t NASA’s job to put humans on Mars; it’s NASA’s job to make it possible for the National Geographic Society, or an offshoot of the Latter-Day Saints, or an adventure tourism company, to put humans on Mars.

NASA should concentrate on the infrastructure in space: fueling stations, communications networks, outposts. The initial costs are huge, yes. But once the infrastructure is there, marginal costs are small. Leave the rest to the miners, settler, inventors, and tourists.

Simberg adds a lot of comments about NASA’s past and present state of affairs. It’s mostly about the political whims of Congress and job creation. Congress is happy keeping the status quo so that their constituents don’t lose thousands of aerospace jobs. But space is too important to be handled by a single government entity. Everybody should be involved.

NASA is also too risk-averse to do what has to be done to push the boundaries of space. They take baby steps only when they deem it “safe.” But space will never be safe. There will always be danger. We have to overcome this fear of danger if we are to become a truly spacefaring species.

A word on the risks of space: no one has actually died in space. So far, it’s been the getting to and coming back from space that have been the only threat.

Personally, I’m excited about the future of manned space exploration. But I’m also worried that NASA will get in the way of the real deal. I’m not afraid of people dying in space, but I am afraid that I’ll never live to see anything more significant than a space station in low earth orbit.

Rand Simberg wrote about this much better than I can, so check out the article. If you’ve got the space bug like me, I recommend subscribing to Simberg’s blog, Transterrestrial Musings.

A Look Back… Disaster or Triumph?

Published
by
Sam
on July 27, 2009
in 930posts
. 3 Comments

Guess what guys? Sector930.com is almost 1 year old. That’s right, we’ve reached that age where we get to shove our fists into a big cake, while all the adults (a.k.a, better blogs) take pictures and note how adorable we are. Let’s take a look back on the year to rediscover and admire our accomplishments.

We started out in my tiny, one bedroom apartment on July 29 of last year with an immature duel of posts between Edwin and me. Then, we introduced ourselves in turn before we started our famous journey through sex, back-stabbing, and money grabbing.

I started, and never finished, a series of SQL tutorials. Joel went on about a bunch of math stuff that the rest of us don’t understand. Charlie contributed -5 posts. Edwin wrote our most popular post about OpenDNS. And Joe wrote a ridiculous post about energy drinks. We also (barely) managed to move our hosting and develop a high availability solution.

I had quite a blast rereading old entries.  I noticed how we started out with a lot of excitement and ambition, posting often. Lately, though, posts have dribbled out every few weeks. That sounds like most IT careers. But everyone has been quite busy. Here’s the score:

  • Weddings: 1
  • Home purchases: 3
  • Relocations: at least 5
  • Job changes: at least 3
  • iPhones: 4
  • BlackBerries: 1

Overall, it’s been a good year. Thanks to all 3 of the readers, and thanks to the other authors. Sector 930 has been one of the most important things in my life for the past couple of years, and sector930.com has been doubly important for the past year. Here’s to another year of posts about boring jobs, math gobbelty gook, ham radios, and ADD.

We better enjoy this birthday while it lasts because we’ll never get to eat cake with our bare hands again.  Was our infancy worth all the diapers, vomit, and breast feeding? We might find out when we hit puberty. In the meantime, it’s time to start growing up.

Google did something exciting again!

Published
by
Sam
on June 19, 2009
in 930posts
. 0 Comments

Network World just reported some crazy awesome news: Google Voice just picked up 1 million phone numbers. Holy @#$&!.

Ever since Edwin told me about the old Grand Central service, I’ve been wanting to get my hands on an account, and now it looks like I might be able to do that soon. With it, I’ll be able to set up a number that will ring both my phone and my wife’s phone. This is especially helpful since we don’t have a land line. No more waiting for my wife to find her phone at the bottom of her portable black hole (purse). Now I can pick up my phone, hand it to my wife, and say, “It’s your mother… again.”

Apparently, you can use one of your current phone numbers instead of getting a new one. That way, you don’t have to tell everybody you know about a new number. That would be handy for a household getting rid of a land line (that’s right, since I got married, I think of people in terms of households).

The service has all kinds of other cool features you can read about on the homepage.

Unfortunately, I don’t think 1 million phone numbers is enough. There are enough people interested in Google Voice that those 1 million numbers will be devoured.

Nevertheless, this is exciting news.