Wednesday, April 08, 2020

Staying at home, getting some TV back into the home office after 11 years.

During this COVID-19 outbreak we are all staying at home. I decided yesterday to finally restore TV to my home office area. It has been 11 years since I stopped using the set for watching TV, but I never removed it. I finally decided to connect a converter and antenna so I could get some TV to watch while I'm on my computer or while teleworking.

I decided to go with off air reception for multiple reasons. One, the limited channels would reduce the likelihood of distraction during working hours. Secondly, my local cable system doesn't carry one of the stations I can receive off air simply because they are out of market, but this station carries news out of the neighboring state, something my family is missing out on. Lastly, since I already owned all of the equipment required, in fact the converter was originally bought for this set, but I had initially had issues with reception.

Many may consider me crazy for using a CRT television in this modern era, especially for something other than retro games, but again, the equipment was already present and this set was already installed as I had used it with many sources over the years even when I didn't have off air programming on it.

The picture is beautiful even with the distortions, but those distortions can likely be repaired with some capacitor changes. Even though it is standard definition, I can still read the small text on the local news even though it is a bit blurred and the picture is far better than the TV would have displayed when new in 1986.