Meador Manor

Linear television is dying, but with retirement approaching, I decided it was worthwhile to restore free over-the-air broadcasts to Meador Manor.

I bought our home in southeast Bartlesville in 1994. Built in 1981 near the end of an oil boom, it came with coaxial cable wired to two walls of the living room and to each bedroom, but I noticed that it lacked a television antenna. I had grown up with them in Oklahoma City, which did not have cable TV service until 1980, when I was 14 years old.

Analog Broadcasts

Back in my hometown there are huge broadcast aerials on Britton Road, less than three miles from my parents’ first house. So until I was in first grade, we just had “rabbit ear” antennas atop 1950s black-and-white televisions. We later moved to about 8-10 miles from the transmitters, and larger very-high-frequency (VHF) antennas hidden up in attics captured the analog signals for channels 4 (NBC), 5 (ABC), 9 (CBS), and 13 (PBS) for our color cathode-ray-tube television.

Our vacation cabin in Missouri, however, was over sixty miles from the towers for Springfield’s stations, so it needed a huge antenna on a mast to pull in their signals. When I finally purchased my own home in Bartlesville in 1994, I didn’t need an antenna, since I subscribed to cable television.

Funly enough, I had first seen cable TV in the 1970s up in Bartlesville, when my parents and I visited some of their former co-workers here. They could watch a few dozen channels in little Bville while metro OKC at the time was still limited to just the four broadcast channels.

Televisions once came with tuners for analog Very High Frequency (VHF) channels 2-13 and analog Ultra High Frequency (UHF) channels 14-83. Eventually a few UHF channels began broadcasting in OKC, but since our old attic antennas were not designed to pick up those frequencies, we attached little UHF antennas to the televisions’ UHF terminals. Those were loops instead of rabbit ears and worked fine since the UHF towers were not far away.

Then little microwave antennas started sprouting up on some neighborhood roofs to pick up pay television like Home Box Office, and finally coaxial cable service became available.

Cable TV

When Cox Cable first launched in OKC in May 1980, it carried 31 analog signals. The four VHF and two UHF broadcasters were represented, plus things like the USA Network, WGN-Chicago, WTBS-Atlanta, a weather channel, and the extra-cost channels of HBO and Showtime. The first full-time cable news channel, CNN, debuted that June, and Music Television (MTV) arrived over a year later.

When I was in high school in 1982, I would tune in TMC 43 on KAUT Channel 43 for music videos until I convinced my parents to subscribe to cable, which allowed me to watch MTV. That greatly broadened my awareness of popular music, although MTV later became symbolic of cable’s decline.

As Michael Girdley noted in his video about it, MTV long ago switched away from concentrating on music videos to reality programs and game shows that snagged higher ratings. Like me, he is a member of Generation X, and despite not seeing any of MTV for decades, it caught my attention that at the end of 2025 they finally shut down their remaining music channels, with just one hour of music videos airing each week in the USA on their main channel.

When I left for college, I had my own cable TV subscription and my parents cancelled theirs, reverted back to analog over-the-air broadcasts. A decade later, in January 1995, my recently-purchased home in Bartlesville was one of almost 60 million across America that had cable television. However, none of the available channels had elected to carry the premiere of the syndicated Star Trek: Voyager show on the fledgling United Paramount Network. As a Trekkie since 1972, I was pretty frustrated.

Meador Manor’s First Antenna

Voyager was airing on one of the over-the-air broadcast channels not carried on the local cable system, so I went to the Radio Shack in Eastland Center and bought an antenna, chimney mount, mast, grounding rod and wire, conduit, signal booster, and coaxial cables. My friend Carrie helped me get the antenna mounted to the chimney, and I was able to pull in the analog television signals from various transmitters.

Wouldn’t you know, a few days later, before the second episode of Voyager even aired, one of the cable channels belatedly started carrying the show. That meant I actually made no meaningful use of the antenna while paying for cable, although the hard-won experience prepared me for helping my father replace the larger antenna at the cabin in Missouri and, years later, I was ready to replace the antenna in my parents’ attic in OKC to improve their UHF reception.

Cutting Basic Cable

Cable television had expanded to 9 out of 10 households by 2008, the year I cancelled it. It took 17 years for the majority of the country to catch up, but by 2025 reportedly only about 1 in 3 households still had cable TV.

I cut off my basic cable TV service while retaining the cable system’s internet service. My reasoning was that the last of the Star Trek series, Enterprise, had been cancelled in 2005 and the last cable television channel I regularly watched was the SciFi channel, just to see the reimagined Battlestar Galactica and old reruns of Mystery Science Theater 3000. By 2008 I could get those fixes via the internet, so it no longer made sense for me to pay for oodles of basic cable channels I never watched. It shouldn’t surprise you to be told that I had no interest in satellite TV, either.

Analog to Digital Broadcasts

The switch from analog to digital broadcast television signals in the 2000s allowed broadcasters to send out both high-definition signals as well as multiple DVD-resolution subchannels. I could then pick up dozens of broadcast digital channels with my chimney-mounted antenna, although the only time I bothered with that was from 2006-2009 when the old Star Trek original episodes from the 1960s were remastered and broadcast in high definition, plus an occasional PBS program I would record for use in my high school classes.

Digital television was great for my parents back in OKC, although many broadcasters shifted away from using VHF channels 2-6 to broadcasting digital signals on higher frequencies. For example, old WKY, Oklahoma’s first television station in 1949 and the state’s first color station in 1954, which became KTVY in 1976 and then KFOR in 1990, stopped transmitting on channel 4 and instead that NBC affiliate began transmitting on UHF channel 27, masked as virtual channel 4. Similarly, the CBS affiliate shifted from analog signals on channel 9 to digital ones on channel 39 and then shifted again to channel 25 when the FCC reallocated more bandwidth away from television. Now most stations actually broadcast on channels 7-36, although there are a few in isolated locales which still broadcast on 2-6, with many virtual channels allowing broadcasters to pretend they are still using their old analog frequencies.

I helped my parents negotiate the analog-to-digital transition with converter boxes for their older bedroom televisions and a new high-definition 16:9 LCD television for their living room. Since their 1960s antenna up in the attic was only designed to pick up VHF signals, and many stations were now broadcasting on UHF, I also installed a new VHF/UHF antenna and booster in their attic, with coaxial cables snaking to three different rooms below. Tyler the Antenna Man has a video explaining the three types of television antennas.

The Decline of Linear Television

My father died in 2022 and my mother moved to an independent living facility in Bartlesville. It had local cable TV available at first, but then Sparklight reportedly stopped providing service to it. The elderly are the most engaged demographic for linear TV, so a new provider was promptly identified using alternate technologies.

Another indicator of the contraction of linear television came in December 2023, when the Tulsa ABC network affiliate, KTUL, shuttered its local news production. KTUL is owned by the repugnant Sinclair Broadcast Group, which is now also influencing Tulsa’s Fox 23, with an allied company holding the broadcast license to dodge FCC restrictions. The percentage of US adults reporting they regularly watch local TV news declined from 46% in 2016 to 29% in 2022. By 2025, in the key advertising age demographics of 18-29 and 30-49, television news was only preferred by by 12-23% versus 19-24% for news websites and apps and 16-31% for social media, with print and radio their least preferred news platforms.

The inexorable decline of interest in linear television explains why there wasn’t more outcry about the Republicans’ cutting off federal funding for public broadcasting. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is gone, with the surviving Public Broadcasting Service reliant on individual donations and various underwriters.

CBS will cancel The Late Show in May 2026, and while the urban left-wing politicization of the various late night talk shows’ monologues has presumably alienated at least 40% of their potential audience, the general decline of linear television also explains the monetary argument behind CBS terminating its offering, which was hosted by David Letterman from 1993 to 2015 and then by Stephen Colbert.

Nielsen’s nationwide summary showed that at the end of 2025, cable and broadcast TV were each only attracting about 1/5 of viewers.

Restoring Linear TV to Meador Manor

While Wendy and I rely heavily on YouTube Premium to reduce advertisements in its on-demand offerings, we have no interest in paying for YouTube TV to get linear television via the internet. However, I’ll be retiring in June 2026, and I will have much more time for things like shows on the OETA educational station. Its high-definition broadcasts on channel 11-1 are much clearer than what it streams over the internet.

So I thought it would be nice to have that and other over-the-air broadcast channels available not only on the big TV in the living room but also on our iPads and my desktop computer. I also wanted the same digital video recording capability that I had once enjoyed with Tivo DVRs, allowing me to skip commercials and pause live transmissions.

Back in 2018 I had briefly experimented with an HD Homerun unit for that purpose. So I reinstalled that box, splitting the antenna booster’s output to it and the television’s own tuner and plugging the HD Homerun into the network router. I loaded the HD Homerun app on my iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and while I had to turn off my Virtual Private Network (VPN) for the Mac application to work, the iPhone app didn’t mind.

The old antenna had lost its ability to pick up low VHF channels 2-6 many years ago when its longest log-periodic dipoles were snapped off in a storm. However, that didn’t matter after the digital transition when all of the regional channels shifted to broadcast on channels 8-36, as shown at rabbitears.info and antennasdirect.com. The shorter dipoles on my old antenna could still pick up VHF 8-13 and the Yagi-Uda end-fire array could still pick up UHF 14-36.

Well, at least it could a few months back, when in a test the television was pulling in 72 broadcast channels. Now the HD Homerun was only receiving Channel 2 and its seven subchannels, which actually broadcast on VHF channel 8. Did splitting the antenna signal across the TV and the HD Homerun weaken it that much? Or had a recent snowstorm dealt the antenna a near-death blow?

I disconnected the splitter, hooked the TV back up directly to the antenna, checked that the 1995 Radio Shack signal booster in the living room was on, and found that the TV was only receiving Channels 2 and 6 and their various subchannels, so it was only picking up high VHF channel 8 and UHF channel 26.

I wasn’t sure what was wrong. The old booster had a cranky connection in my recent test, so while waiting for decent weather to brave climbing up on the roof, I ordered a Winegard Boost XT pre-amplifier. By the time it arrived, the weather had improved from snow and a high of 46° F (8° C) to a sunny 65° F (18° C). I climbed up on the roof with the booster, tools, and coaxial accessories.

I discovered that the coaxial cable was screwed into a balun right up at the antenna, too high for me to reach. The mounting hardware was still in decent shape despite over 30 years of weathering, and even the electrical tape holding the coaxial cable to the mount was still okay. Ethel, one of our outdoor cats, and a couple of neighbor dogs thought I was a rooftop menace, while if my human neighbors spotted me, they were kind enough to leave me to my work.

I was able to slowly loosen the bolts on the clamps, remove the upper clamp completely, and then lift and tilt the mast out of the loosened lower clamp to lower the mast and antenna to the rooftop.

Unfortunately, the insulation on the balun adapting the balanced 300-ohm twin leads on the antenna to the unbalanced 75-ohm RG-6 coaxial cable had degraded, and the leads felt quite flimsy. I had no replacement on hand, so I went ahead and wired the pre-amplifier onto the antenna and remounted everything. Back down in the living room, I hooked in a box to send power back up the coaxial cable to the booster and hooked up the television. However, now it wouldn’t pull in any stations at all. I figured the balun up top was shot, and it was time to reconsider my approach.

Amplification and Reception Limits

Pre-amplifiers can’t make up for an inadequate antenna; they are more about addressing signal attenuation through the downstream coaxial cable and any splitters. Practical and reliable reception can be expected for stations up to 70 miles away with a high-quality long-range antenna; while there are plenty of antennas advertised as having longer range, the curvature of the Earth makes such claims bogus.

There are 20 transmitters within 70 miles of Meador Manor. The closest broadcast antenna, for a religious station, is 16 miles away, and the important antennas for the NBC, CBS, and PBS affiliates are 50 miles away, the ABC affiliate’s one is 55 miles away, and there is an Ion affiliate in Muskogee that broadcasts from 63 miles away. Thankfully they are all situated to the south, so I have no need for a rotating antenna.

Since I was going to have to endure the cumbersome process of dismounting and remounting the antenna again, I decided to give up on the damaged 31-year-old antenna, which had been designed in the days when television was broadcast on a wider range of VHF and UHF frequencies. While I was still young enough to handle the task, I would erect a new long-range antenna with a built-in pre-amplifier that was designed to pick up channels 7-36 and reject 5G cellular signal interference.

A New Antenna

Tyler the Antenna Man and several other sources recommended a Televes High VHF/UHF antenna for weak long-range signals. It was pricey at $215 but at least I saved money by not ordering the even more expensive model that includes Low VHF reception since I don’t need to pick up signals from VHF channels 2-6.

The new antenna arrived in a few days, and I assembled it in the living room.

I took it up to the roof and lowered the mast and old antenna.

The new antenna is 86 inches long while its rear UHF reflectors and VHF array make it 29 inches tall, and I was concerned if it would clear the chimney with the old chimney straps and mounting pole. Thankfully, it did.

I used the compass on my iPhone to guesstimate the orientation of the directional antenna, trying to point it at 165 degrees to aim for the PBS, NBC, ABC, and CBS affiliate transmitters between Broken Arrow and Coweta.

I tossed the old antenna down and then crumpled it into a trash can. Down in our living room, I wired up the power unit that sends power back up the coaxial cable to the built-in booster within the antenna housing, and I hooked up coaxial cables to the television and the HD Homerun.

Huzzah! Both devices were picking up 73 channels, including the off-axis channel 44 broadcasting on UHF 28 from 63 miles away. Only seven of the 73 channels, from the low-power KUOC, a far-off-axis transmitter 42 miles away at Chandler Park in west Tulsa, were too weak to lock in reliably.

I deleted the seven weak channels along with twenty religious channels. (Can you tell we live in the Bible belt?) That left me with 46 channels, nine of those being high-definition. For those who love details: we get 1920 by 1080 interlaced signals for KJRH 2 (NBC), OETA 11 (PBS), KOTV 6 (CBS), KQCW 19 (CW), and KRSU 35 (RSU); 1280 by 720 progressive signals for KTUL 8 (ABC), KOKI 23 (FOX), KMYT 41 (MyN), and KTPX 44 (ION); and either 640 by 480 or 720 by 480 interlaced for the remaining 37 channels. Rabbit Ears has all the details.

Linear Limitations

All of those signals use the original ATSC broadcast standard for free over-the-air digital television. There is a newer ATSC 3 standard, but the Tulsa market doesn’t yet have any such transmissions. ATSC 3 is a mess since it includes digital rights management that could require an internet connection and even pay-to-view. The oligarchs running our corrupted federal government might eventually change the FCC rules and no longer require broadcasters to provide free over-the-air signals, but for now I can access more linear television options, with no subscription fees, than I had years ago with my first basic cable offering, and we can also stream them to our tablets, phones, and computers.

I paid the $35 annual subscription for the HD Homerun DVR feature, configuring it to record shows on my Mac Mini. I tested it by having it record an episode of the 1950s Adventures of Superman show broadcast on the MeTV network affiliate. That worked fine, but it also reminded me of its two major turnoffs for me: advertising and editing for time.

The episode I watched was only interrupted by advertising a couple of times, but they were long strings of commercials, much longer than what I experienced watching reruns in my youth a half-century ago. My DVR recording allowed me to skip past them, but their length led me to expect that some of the original episode would have been cut for time, something that also plagued the original Star Trek series when its reruns were syndicated in the 1970s.

The rather formulaic Adventures of Superman show typically had a closing scene in the offices of the Daily Planet, much like the original Star Trek series a decade later often featured a coda on the starship’s bridge. Those wrap-ups were used to tie up any lose plot threads and usually ended on a humorous note. The episode I watched on MeTV lacked such a coda and left a major plot thread hanging.

To confirm my suspicion, I bought that episode on Amazon Prime for $2. The print quality wasn’t great, but it did include the expected final scene. For research purposes, I also bought that episode for $3 from Apple TV. Same lousy print, but also the expected coda.

That sort of thing limits the value of linear television for me, although I don’t expect that to impact the high-definition versions of PBS programming. Linear TV will continue to contract as the Silent and Baby Boomer generations age out and as cable TV becomes increasingly expensive. I expect some cable companies will eventually discontinue their linear TV operations and just offer internet access. However, thanks to our new antenna, linear television lives again at Meador Manor.