Cutting the Cable - Easier said than done.

Every month for the past several years, I have winced as I paid the DirecTV bill. When it climbed to more than my first house payment, I decided that it was time to do something. But, what? Giving up the addiction to the exponentially growing variety of shows coming to the market was not a realistic option. My son, David, had gone cold turkey and was living on Off The Air TV in Jacksonville. He supplemented this with downloaded content he found using a program called Sonarr.

My first attempt at Sonarr was a disaster. All the different configuration options and the lack of good documentation made it almost impossible to get, and keep, it working. Then, there was the problem of OTA. In Jacksonville, David was close enough to the local stations that he could get them all with a minimal antenna. I am on the west side of Columbia in South Carolina, and all the local stations are on the more populous east side of town, from 15 to 28 miles away. Good news, they are all in the same general direction. Bad news, a couple of them are impossible to get using "rabbit ears" on each TV. Various attempts at distributing a signal from the attic antenna to TVs other than the one in the main living room, failed. Running coax around the house where DirecTV has already run cables, is just too messy and expensive.

Cable Channels, Where Art Thou?

Then there is the issue of cable channels. They are not available off the air, but some of them do stream over the Internet. All I needed was a way to feed them to the various TV sets around the house. I came up on two viable alternatives - Apple TV and Amazon FireTV. I now have a combination of both in use. I keep telling myself I am going to go to one platform, but I can't decide on which one, so I am still using both. I have experimented with using KODI on a Raspberry Pi, but the performance is just not good enough to make it viable, plus the lack of a remote control, make it a no-go.

DirecTV To the Rescue

About this time, AT&T came out with DirecTV Now. It appeared to have some potential for replacing DirecTV, but with a lot lower cost. I just needed good fast Internet to make streaming possible. After some haggling around with AT&T and Spectrum (Time Warner Cable), I ended up with a 100MB Internet connection from Spectrum. It is not perfect and goes down probably an average of once per day, usually at a very critical point in a football game, or when the criminal is revealed in a TV series. But, it does offer an increasing array of cable channels, and lately, even local network TV channels. Well, if you consider Charlotte North Carolina, as local.

It is available on both the Apple TV and Amazon streaming boxes, but not, oddly, on the Android smart Sony TV in the living room. I still don't understand why, since the Amazon box is also Android.

PVR

OK, this stuff is not for the faint of heart now and you have to have the soul of a tinkerer to make it actually work. It is annoying, perplexing, frustrating and aggravating, but it is $165 a month cheaper. DirecTV Now is $35 a month, and DirecTV was $200, or thereabouts. It will get better, I keep telling myself, and my wife, who is down to an average of about one on site technical visit a day. 

I discovered HDHomeRun along the way, so they provide the OTA service. These amazing little boxes (I have two) allow you to plug in a TV antenna on one end, and a LAN connection on the other end. Apps that are available on Apple TV, Amazon FireTV and the Sony smart TV allow you to tune the local channels, including the digital secondary channels. To provide Personal Video Recorder, PVR, functions, I have settled on PLEX. I originally had one 2-channel HDHomeRun box, but it soon overloaded, and I bought a 4 channel version and both are now in operation. The PLEX PVR is configured only to the 4 channel box. Kludgey, but it works.

Getting a PLEX server up and running was a job in itself. I started with PLEX running on my iMac. It sorta worked, but if I was doing something heavy on the iMac, it would bog down PLEX. The iMac could not record more than one channel at a time without causing the TV signal to break up. So, after a series of attempts, I have set up a Zotac server, running Ubuntu Linux with PLEX as its only application.

But, and this is a BIG BUT, Plex does not have access to cable channels. Recording cable channels is nearly impossible, if you want HD reception. This is bad news, but the good news is, if you have a DirecTV Now or other cable subscription, you can usually get recent shows on the cable channel's streaming app. Not 100%, but can work. DirectTV Now has promised a PVR "this fall," but I have not seen it yet. It is in beta testing and invitations are reportedly rolling out. 

The Final, for now, Configuration

We start with a Winegard Platinum series HD7694P VHF/UHF antenna in the attic. The NBC affiliate in Columbia is still VHF, so a combination antenna is needed. This goes through a ____ 4 way splitter/amplifier. I am only using one port right now, and that goes downstairs to a 2-way TV type splitter feeding 2 HDHomeRun CONNECT boxes, a 2-channel box and a 4-channel Quatro box. I bought the 2-channel box first, and it was not enough, so I bought the 4-channel box. Probably the one 4-channel box would be enough. Both boxes are connected to an 8-port Ethernet switch.

PLEX is hosted on a Zotac ID-81 mini PC running Ubuntu 16.04.3 server. This is also connected to an Ethernet switch. An external 5 TB USB-3 hard drive is used to store programs.

Around the house, I have a combination of Apple TV (v.3) boxes and Amazon FireTV boxes. I can't decide between them, for now, I have both.

The network is a Arris Surfboard Cable Modem with 100MB service from Time Warner feeding an Apple Airport Extreme Router. There is another switch located near the Zotac upstairs.

For software, I have PLEX with the PVR option, recording on the Plex server. I have a bunch of apps running on the Apple and Fire boxes. I have not found one that works so well I can standardize on it.

For content, I have DirecTV Now, waiting on the DVR option, and a bevy of channel specific apps.

I said this was not for the faint of heart, and I am sure it will get better, and maybe even simpler, but for now, saving almost $165 a month is worth the effort.

More to come.

$50 100 Amp 12 VDC Power Supply

Wait, a 100 amp, 12 VDC power supply and it is only $50, complete with metering? What's the catch? No catch, just a little homebrewing and you are ready to go. There are scads of server rack power supplies in the market for $30 each, delivered. A couple of simple hacks, a ready made digital meter, and you have a top notch DC supply to power your transceiver and other gear.

To start with, you need to get a server power supply. Go to eBay and search for "server power supply." You will find dozens for $50 or less. I bought mine for $29.99, free shipping. It is an HP Proliant DL580, 1200 w power supply. At 110/120 VAC, 9.9A, it will deliver 12VDC @ 75 amps all day. Hit it with 220v and you can get 100 amps, 1200w out of it. It has a standard office equipment plug, over there next to the red lever.

It is small, about 10" x 3.5' X 1.5" and weighs a couple of pounds. It is a switching power supply, which accounts for the small size.

I KNOW, I KNOW! Switching power supplies are notorious for having RF noise. This one was made for use in a crowded environment with lots of low level signals floating around, so it was engineered to be clean. And, it is. I heard nothing from 160 through 6 meters. My Ryobi drill charger is noisy as Hell, but this is not.

On the business end, it has an edge connector with 5 normal connectors on each side, and 2 - 1" connectors. These 1" connectors are what is used to pull out the 12 V DC. Edge connectors are nice, in that you can solder to them easily.

In order to turn the power supply on, you have to put a 1k resistor (1/4 w will work) between pins 33 and 36. You can also wire an external switch here as long as you series the resistor with the switch. I soldered Anderson Powerpoles directly on the edge connector to match the rest of my station. The positive is on the outside of the edge connector, the negative is in the middle.

You can see how I arranged this in the illustration.

There is a company called Gigampz that sells an adapter that plugs into the edge connector on the power supply and supplies the switching interface as well as power connectors for the DC. It costs $37, so I didn't order one, but it would make a neater installation.

Next, I needed a way to monitor the voltage and current. I found a Hall effect current meter on Amazon for $18. It is a very cool little device, displaying both amperage and voltage. Because it uses Hall effect technology, you do not have to have an expensive shunt. The system includes a current loop that goes around the positive DC lead. The display can be configured to show DC voltage, current or both, by cycling between voltage and amperage. Again, I used power poles and integrated this into a cable. You connect the + and - of the meter to the DC power out and you are ready to go.

Here is the display showing first voltage, then current.

You can integrate this into your station somewhere, or build it into a box or just put it on a steel shelf as I do. The power supply is designed for 24/7 operation, and should be able to handle any amateur radio station requirements.

The power supply was $30, the meter $18, so the whole thing, less connectors and wire, cost me less than $50. I am very happy with it and hope you will be too, if you give it a try.