El Gato Mont S

Tips and tools for the over-the-air TV enthusiasts

In an earlier Globe Technology article , I wrote about how consumers in major Canadian cities are saving a significant amount of money each month by viewing free over-the-air (OTA) television signals, sometimes referred to as terrestrial or conventional television signals, rather than subscribing to a cable or satellite television service.

For the OTA viewer or soon-to-be OTA viewer, just putting up an aerial to watch OTA signals is only the first step in maximizing your viewing pleasure. In this article, I take a look at four ways to expand and improve your OTA viewing experience.

The first way is to maximize the number of television stations you can receive. This can be done by installing a more powerful outdoor antenna – or even multiple antennas.

OTA experts can debate for hours the myriad ways homeowners can improve their reception as well as debate the merits of antenna design. However, simplistically speaking, there are three ways to improve reception: get a bigger antenna, mount your existing antenna higher so it’s elevated above as many reception-blocking obstacles as possible, and point the antenna directly at the transmitter.

Installing a bigger antenna or moving an existing antenna higher needs little explanation but how do you align your antenna when the incoming signals come from opposite directions?

One way is to use a rotor, which uses a small mechanical motor to rotate the antenna to point in the required direction. Change the channel and the rotor moves the antenna so it points in the direction of the incoming signal. The downside of a rotor is that it’s really meant for a single-TV home, because a second TV watching a different channel may not get a strong signal.

A second way to deal with signals originating from different directions is to have more than one antenna. For example, if you live in the greater Toronto area you might mount a relatively small discreet antenna for receiving stations broadcasting from the nearby CN tower and mount a larger antenna specifically set up to receive distant and weaker signals out of Buffalo or upstate New York.

El Perro & El Gato – Fun Bilingual Teaching Tool for Pre-Schoolers ...

Are still best buds – and totally bilingual.  Featuring lots of vibrant colors, catchy music and plenty of attitude, the specials show the friends in their daily routines as they tackle problems and mount wonderful adventures that create non-stop fun and laughter – all the while teaching kids how to speak in English and in Spanish. 

I got such a kick out of these El Perro y El Gato cartoons by HBO. First, let me say that they held all four of my children’s attention and that is a great feat! First, it was just my 3-year-old son and my 7-year-old daughter watching the cartoons with me, but my 5 year old and 8 year old soon followed: “What are you watching? Can I watch too?”