Umm...RON. There IS no 'cheap cable package' here and the price would take most of my portion of the HUD-assisted rent.
I worked for a short while at the cable company that had bought the mom and pop company that took a languishing TCI owned franchise right and actually started the service was bought by Carolyn Chambers (who owned KECI channel 9 in Eugene), just before AT&T Broadband and then rumors of TCI returning, followed by Cable One, which owns it today.
Oh SURE it was just clearing the digitally tuned set top boxes and retuning the Pioneer knob tuners and SURE, the state agency that gave me the food stamps back in 1999 said that the BARTER for full cable service counted as enough to lose my food stamps etc so I actually had to QUIT to survive and it sucked and Cable One sucked worse...
By that time the entire system was microwave fed...I watched the head tech build an entire 55+ channel BTSC (aka Better Television Sound Committee, or NTSC with MTS audio) headend...then all the offices were closed except Boise and Caldwell and by that time Dad and I had bult my antenna network in my previous place in 2000 (which I transferred and never subscribed again).
The last antenna served me for 13 years before I had lost most of the low VHF lobes to wind and Mom brought me one my parents had no longer used when they moved into their apartment before Dad passed away. It's not broken but maybe shorted after the frozen rain and the possibility of two VHF lobes in the range of 9-13 possibly touching despite me reinforcing the locks with heated packaging tape and it's 22 ft up with no ladder available at the moment.
After I had over 1/4" ice glaze on my bicycles and it looked like Ice Station Zebra for a day I suspect I might need to take it down and clean it up and get those connections covered.
Since I have TWO stereo CED players and a third mono one in reserve to fix, two working laserdisc machines, DVD players, SVHS and SuperBeta HiFi and a tonne of stuff to watch or tape on dozens of blanks and good reusable tapes PLUS over 20 signals on the HDTV subchannels alone including ABC/NBC/CBS and The CW, Spanish, shopping (like I'm doing that) variety sports, MeTV, THIS, THAT, Heartland (formerly TNN), NorthWest Cable News and KTVB plus "24/7"-it's channel 7 so that's the name-with local, regional news and programming via Boise from Gannett, six TV channels of PBS service in Oregon and Idaho plus OPB Radio's News, KOPB-FM's HD2 service OPBmusic and KMHD-FM Portland jazz on the audio services of that OPB TV channel for FREE I could really care less now. Cable is as alien to me as when I walked into a bar I used to sing karaoke at in my early 30s and even with the band playing and the same white haired biker guy playing pool with the kids it felt alien too as the people in their were still twentysomethings and there was nobody much to relate to. I would only miss TVTV which has awesome blues programming and such on a regular basis and I really enjoyed it whil;e I was in the hospital in Boise in July 2012...helped me recover much faster I think.
So I guess I'll go find a section of the galvanized pipes I wanted welded into a tower and try to move the two elements apart and see if that works, but if not I have to try the connections and possible broken coax.
Oh well, I still was happy and ate like a diabetic pig and all my medicine, groceries and bills will be done and taken care of today AND I have two pairs of speakers I'll be posting about this afternoon. Done, BROKE and happy.
PS It snowed some today as well which couldn't have helped.
