Quote:
Originally Posted by benman94
Meh. I'd rather deal with the snow and have cooler summers. Winter weather doesn't bother me, any kind of heat does.
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Me too Ben! The UP is very under appreciated. Although at 71 I am afraid I would not be as able to do winters as easily as when I was your age. We have owned a lake home just inside the Wisconsin Michigan boarder about 17 miles south of Wakefield Mi for about 30 years. In my early to mid 50's I did a lot of show mobiling up there. The UP's big attraction for me is that it is still fairly isolated and offers wonderful opportunity for outdoor recreation. I get the distinct impression if it were not for tourism and government employment, the UP would have a hard time economically. If you ever get to Wakefield Mi, stop in at Randal's Bakery. They have great bakery and what I consider to be the best pasties in the area. I often make the 17 mile run from our cottage in Winchester, up HY 'O' to Randal's just to get a pasty.
We have a 50' tower at the cottage and receive all of the network digital stations OTA. Prior to the switch to digital we received stations out of Wausau Wi and Duluth MN. The transmitters in Duluth are on top of the hill bordering Lake Superior. I also used a 10' C band dish for subscription tv at that time, but technology moves on and that is all but dead for consumers now. I have DirectTV Now. My next door neighbor at the cottage lets me use his WiFi internet connection. He put a WiFi extender in the corner of his house closest to our cottage and I get a very good signal. So I run the DirectTV Now app on my laptop connected to the internet via the neighbors WiFi and feed my flat screen TV with a HDMI cable from the laptop. It works great. Unfortunately being in the boonies disadvantages people who depend on OTA to get their TV programs. We get a total of 12 channels OTA at the cottage, where as I get about 60 in at my home in Milwaukee. So for people in isolated areas, far from the transmitters, who have an internet connection, I think OTA is pretty much going to fade away because the population density is so low in those areas that it makes no sense economically for broadcasters to put up repeaters in those areas. Actually, my neighbor is using a small DirectTV dish to get all of his programming now. He uses the same service at his home in Illinois and drags his receiver up to his cottage when they come up. IMHO the FCC screwed the pooch for people in rural areas when they mandated the switch to digital. Perhaps the government, (who wastes so much money on other crap), should have subsidized the construction of repeaters in the rural areas for those of us who are too far away to get reliable OTA digital reception. Don't get me wrong, I am all for the switch to digital tv. Digital is great if you are in a large metro area with a ton of channels, but people in isolated areas still have a very small offering to chose from.
In this photo (follow link) you can see the bottom half of our 50' self supporting tower at our lake cottage.
http://antiquetvguy.com/WebPages/Abo...PhotoPage.html