Anyone remember the bad old days when almost every house in the Vancouver area had an TV antenna on the roof? Some were pretty basic, with no more than a few working parts. Others were behemoths, like the Channelmaster with its motorized drive that could be used to point the antenna to various transmitter sites.

Let’s not forget that brown ribbon cable that ran from the antenna down to the TV. After a while it would break down in Vancouver weather and have to be replaced.

Fast forward a few decades! The antenna is making a bit of a comeback, in some cases in the form of a variation of the old-style indoor rabbit ears, in other cases as a roof-mounted unit, but looking quite a bit different from the antenna of old.

It is no secret that Canadians are increasingly fed up with steep cable TV bills. When cable first appeared locally in the 1970s, a typical monthly bill was $5. Today it is not unusual to find households with combined Internet and TV bills in excess of $150.

Cord-cutting, in which households forego any form of cable-based television service, is a problem for all the major telcos in Canada. Although the CRTC mandated an inexpensive basic TV service at $25 a month, it does not appear that this has materially slowed cord-cutting.

For some cord-cutters, the withdrawal from TV viewing is complete. Some switch entirely to streaming services such as Netflix and CraveTV. Some purchase grey market Android TV boxes that offer the promise of access to all sorts of programming, from broadcast TV to pirated pay TV events.

Yet others look to the TV of old and install an antenna. And it is an antenna that behaves very differently from those antennas of yesteryear.

Why? Because TV signals nowadays are digital. It’s an all-or-nothing matter. If you’ve got a signal, it is pretty much perfect. None of those snowy images, or vertically scrolling distorted images. Better even than content delivered over cable because the signal is not compressed. The cable companies and telcos need to compress signals to deliver evermore channels over their lines.

Colleague Quentin Paras took the plunge by cutting the TV cord a year ago and switching to an outdoor antenna and an Android TV box. After a year using both platforms he says that the antenna has become his primary source for TV viewing.

Paras purchased the cheapest motorized antenna he could find: US$35. He wasn’t expecting much. The unit is mounted on his roof (the previous owner had left behind a small satellite dish mount).

He’s pulling in about a dozen channels, most from the Vancouver area, along with a number from the Blaine-Bellingham area.

His antenna has survived a rather nasty winter. He’s pulling in about a dozen channels, most from the Vancouver area, along with a number from the Blaine-Bellingham area. For the Vancouver channels, the transmitter signals are so strong in the Maple Ridge–Pitt Meadows area where Paras lives, that the antenna does need to be oriented in any particular direction. For the American channels he simply rotates the antenna from the indoor control box and points it roughly southwest.

So reliable has he found the antenna system that he even has the signal split to serve a suite in his home. The only issue is that the suite does not have control over the rotator motor, limiting the suite’s signals to Vancouver channels.

He has several distinct groups; two CBC channels, English and French, two CTV channels, three KVOS Bellingham channels (MeTV, Movies!, H&I). (See below for the channel lineup Paras is able to pull in.)

What you won’t find here is an all-news channel. No CNN. No CTV Newsnet. No CBC Newsworld. Those are strictly cable services with no over-the-air (OTA) presence and hence not accessible via an antenna. And you won’t find an all-sports channel with an OTA presence either.

That aside, Paras and his family are more than happy with the free TV service they have. He reports that besides paying for the antenna with just a few weeks of savings from his previous TV bill, he has plowed some of the savings into beefed up Internet service.

Although Paras purchased his antenna through Amazon.com, the same unit is available on the Canadian Amazon site for approximately $78. Check it out here: https://goo.gl/y1XqNN.

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Paras' Channels:

2-1 CBUT-DR
8-1 CHAN-HD
10-1 CKVU-DR
12-2 MeTV
12-2 MOVIES!
12-3 H&I
17-1 CIVI-2
24-1 KBCB
24-2 JTV
26-1 CBUFT
32-1 CIVT
42-1 CHNM-DT