Cutting The Cable: $56 Investment Saves Us $448 Per Year

Note to readers:  This article refers to experience in Corvallis, Oregon.  In other cities the same principles would apply,  but local differences might change things quite a bit.  Still,  nothing lost by experimenting.  

Cutting The Cable: $56 Investment Saves Us $448 Per Year

If I told you that a $56 investment could save you $448 per year, you would probably tune me out. True, if something sounds too good to be true it probably isn't. But I recently made an investment that really is that good.

Be warned, however: it might or might not work for you.

Our cable company recently raised its lowest package from $34/month to $40. I decided enough was enough.

I knew an indoor antenna might not work at our place, but the $28 amplified antenna I selected came with free shipping, free return. We wouldn't cancel the cable until we checked things out.

The antenna came promptly. I hooked it to our main TV set in the family room and scanned to see what channels were available. With the antenna just sitting on the nearby floor, it pulled in all four local OPB channels (OPB, OPB World, OPB Kids, and OPB FM) very nicely. When I put it up near the ceiling on a nearby external wall, it added several channels from Eugene, but nothing from Portland.

Aside from a noon newscast from KGW-TV (cable channel 8) in Portland, we never watch anything except OPB. But we really like that newscast, especially its main weather guru. So that could have been a deal breaker for the antenna.

It didn't break the deal. I connected an old laptop to the TV set with an HDMI cable. We can pick up KGW over the Internet. The noon newscast comes in beautifully!

The computer will also allow watching Moscow TV (www.m24.ru) on the TV screen instead of on the desktop computer in my study. There are probably many other stations in the U.S. and around the world that can be watched this way.

On our bedroom TV set, the antenna pulled in the OPB channels. It also got the additional channels that had come in in the family room when I put the antenna high on an outside wall. The bedroom antenna is on the floor behind the cabinet holding the TV and DVD player.

Since we need a separate antenna for each set, I ordered a second one, which ran the total price up to $56. Within an hour of installing that one, I called up to cancel the cable service. They said I would get about $14 refunded for the unused portion of the month we had already paid for.

At a monthly cable rate of $40 we will be saving $480 per year. Actually, we'll probably save more than that since the cable will undoubtedly raise its price even more in the future.

Would this kind of system work for you? It depends on the location of your house, what TV channels you like to watch, and perhaps if you have a spare laptop. But if you get an antenna with free return, you have nothing to lose by trying it out.

If you try it out, please note that the location of the antenna makes a huge difference. OPB, which is a local transmitter, comes in everywhere, but the out of town stations appear and disappear abruptly when the antenna location is changed, or when weather changes. So you need to be experimental.

The orientation of the antenna (which is a flat pad of about one square foot) also makes a huge difference. Try rotating it 90 degrees on its different axes to see what difference that makes.

Since nearly all of our monthly bills are going up, it is refreshing when we can eliminate one of them without reducing our standard of living.