Sunday, July 06, 2014

July 4th weekend

On the 4th of July I attended a birthday celebration for my neighbor Jan's dad.  He turned 100 years old the end of May.  This weekend the family and friends got together at Kelly's house to celebration his long life. Lots of food.


I got another horse.  The two horses weren't eating the grass down as fast as I wanted them to.  I'd rather they eat the tall grass before it drys out.  The horses are in the NE pasture and haven't even gotten to the fruit tree & garden area yet.  The sooner they eat that area the better.

The owners brought Cowgirl, or as Tammy named her last year: The Bitch.  I left Cowgirl in the corral for the afternoon so the horses could get to know one another over the fence.  Maybe that would minimize the fighting to settle the pecking order once they were all together.

Cowgirl is smart.  When I entered the corral she knew I was going to go over and open the gate to the NE pasture.  There was a little ruckus when the horses got together but not too bad.  The white horse did want to fight and several times she would walk over to and then back up to Cowgirl to start a kicking war but Cowgirl would walk away.  They seem friendly enough today.



Now that Tammy has left I am dropping cable TV and its $75 a month cost.  I only got cable because she wanted it.  No cable means getting out the old outside TV antenna and pole I used before getting cable and reassembling it.  I did replace the old twin-lead (300 ohm) cable with a RG-6 coax (75 ohm) cable.  The antenna is 25 ft high and I happened to have a coax cable just long enough.

To make the project more complicated is that I have a TV, DVR and a home theater (receiver) setup.  Because of how cable TV worked due to the fact they wanted me to use their DVR I had to do a convoluted cabling setup to access the cable TV online guide while still having DVR ability with my DVR.

For a time I split the cable from the antenna to go to the TV and the DVR but I found that splitting the cable resulted in a loss of signal strength and would lose some channels.  I had a signal amplifier but found that picked up a few weak channels but 'overloaded' a few strong channels and therefore 'lost' them.

I found the antenna direction is important as there are two pair of stations where I would get one or the other pair with a small window of getting all four stations.

Finally I figured out a way to cable things together without splitting the antenna cable.  I *think* the DVR will still record TV shows- at least it does when I have everything turned on - I'll see once a timed show is recorded.  I didn't try a timed show as, after last evening and today, I am tired of working on this.

I spent time on the sound until I figured out the sound had been turned down to 1 and that was the reason I could not hear anything.

I was surprised to get 28 over the air channels when conditions are right.  I have almost 20 potential channels once I eliminated the QVC channel and the religious channels.

The antenna is actually old UHF and VHF antennas.   I hooked the TV up to the big top antenna, whichever one that is.  I left the smaller antenna and hooked some old speaker wire to it and ran it down to connect to my short FM antenna wire in the house.  I was hoping this would give me the boost needed to get my favorite low powered FM radio station.  My newer digital home theater receiver will not pick up the station while my old wooden console stereo will.  If I could get another decent radio to get the station I would get rid of the console stereo.

Alas, the extra outside wire had no effect on the receiver.  It may be the wire's fault for when I hooked the wire up to the console stereo the reception for this station actually got a little worse.  Someday I'll find a solution.

My antenna pole is actually a little higher than before.  I added a chain link fence pole left over from my corral rebuild.  To minimize disruption on really windy days I attached a few wires from the pole to the house. 

No comments: