TV

[Bfrnk]

What is the easiest or best way to watch tv on the road?

[wa8yxm]

ford truck guy wrote:
IF you have the old style " BAT WING" you can add - The Wingman . . I had this 2 RV's ago and it improved my antenna signals .. I also used like above - TV Towers app.. That along with the directional wingman made for good pictures..

I did that. and I also changed to a "Sensar Pro" wall plate (Well it's a bit more complex on my RV but that's what I did)

And when I forgot to lower the beast one day and ripped it off replaced the III+Wingman with an IV (3/4) which has the wingman built in.

Very good reception out to many miles.

Alas that's the one thing I do not like about my apartment.. Wrong side of a steel frame building can't get but one station OTA.

But in other news I'm going to try Ham Radio 75 Meter operation this evening now that my Jeep is 13'6" tall (Ok so that's the 75 meter ham stick magnetically attached to the roof. Parked only folks I'm not driving that way)

[ford_truck_guy]

IF you have the old style " BAT WING" you can add - The Wingman . . I had this 2 RV's ago and it improved my antenna signals .. I also used like above - TV Towers app.. That along with the directional wingman made for good pictures..

[dedmiston]

We have a hybrid approach.

I use the crank-up antenna and an iOS app called "TV Towers" to find the nearest towers. It's catch as catch can when you dial in the channels. In the spot where I am this week I hit my personal best: 69 channels and sixty of them are in English.

We also have TONS of DVDs & BluRays in the RV. Hit the $5 bin at Walmart if you want to cheaply stock up your library.

We've got a wifi hotspot that works great for streaming if we've got a good cell signal. The TV in our living room is a smart TV and has plenty of streaming apps. I use this Dynalink Streaming Media Player in our bedroom to stream TV in bed. I was skeptical about it at first, but it works so well that I bought one for home and three more for our kids for Christmas this year.

Yeah, we're supposed to be "roughing it", but it's still pretty primitive since we don't have any DVR functions in the RV and can't rewind live TV.

Speaking of that, we have one more viewing option if there's something on DirecTV that we're dying to watch. (And when I say "we", I mean my wife.) It's a hassle, but I can log into DirecTV on my laptop and then Miracast the signal from my laptop to the smart TV. It's more trouble than it's worth, unless there's a game on and it's only playing on a cable channel and not OTA.

[ford_truck_guy]

We like to stream but the Wi-Fi signal used to be questionable .. We now have the Dish Travl'r Satellite system... Push a button, wait for it to raise and automatically find the sats... watch TV. This works very well especially in the areas that we can hardly get a cell signal...

We also carry an unlimited Hotspot and connect out TV's up to it to stream.... We found this particular devise after we purchased the Winegard, Dish system...

[Lwiddis]

If cost is of no concern, DirectTV or Dish, but local channels are free and local news is interesting.

[tomman58]

We stay at casinos across the USA Some are really advanced for this old mind. We are currently at the Coushatta in Kinder La the middle of nothing. We were hocked to get Detroit news casts. We travel the US but mostly at RV locations and in the last few years there seems to be better internet and TV. Now if I can find a way to win at the casino life would be perfect.

[Sandia_Man]

We have been RVing over 3 decades and initially used our rig's OTA antenna, works okay in large cities, just unreliable reception anywhere else, and that's the problem as we don't do much RVing in major cities. Even with a good OTA signal, channels were limited and all commercial driven, makes it difficult to watch marginally good tv with all the interruptions from sponsors. Practically 100% of RVing back then was with our kids, not an issue as VHS and DVDs made every night a movie night, kids had a blast and DW and I could have some time to ourselves.

We have satellite service at home and as most of our camping was on weekends I was missing out on keeping tabs on scores throughout the day. Again, this is going back a couple of decades, we started to bring along a spare bedroom receiver and manually setting up Directv satellite antenna, only one satellite back then and acquiring sat 101 was easy peasy. The advent of HDTV and having to acquire 3 sats did not pose much of an issue, dealing with the skew parameter only adds a couple of minutes to our pointing routine, overall a 10 minute process to begin downloading program guide.

Today there are more options, plus OTA has several dozen channels to peruse making it a more viable although we rarely use it. We do occasionally stream video content and still use DVDs here and there, but our bread and butter is satellite tv, and all the satellite recorded programming on our DVR. We have Dish and their mydish app works great, makes it easy to change local channels to your location. There are many automated satellite acquisition domes available, all we do now is plug rig into shorepower upon arrival, we have same channels we have at home all before we have finished setting up rig.

[d1h]

Cell phone hotspot with youtube tv and a little $25 Roku hooked to tv. As long as there is a strong cell signal. If not then its over the air antenna.

[CA_Traveler]

I move the sat receiver from house to MH with all of it's recordings etc. But be aware that local and national programs are spot beamed, meaning that driving several hundred miles and you have to contact the provider to change to the local spot beam.

My experience with CG cable is poor quality and SD only. CG WiFi is often over used (think streaming etc) and marginal at best. CG cable and WiFi are generally provided for marketing so you'll stay there. There are exceptions.

[wa8yxm]

Bfrnk wrote:
What is the easiest or best way to watch tv on the road?

Don't. only watch when parked... (joke I know what you mean)

There are basically 3.x ways
1: over the air.. Free, but your selection of stations and networks may be limited... NOTE I used a pair of chatty DVR's when I did this (What is a chatty DVR? Well I could be in the bedroom and program a recording on the living room machine (or the other way around) Do it from Watch a recording on either machine OR.. I could also schedule recordigns via my laptop (or desktop), or Phone and watch on same, even download for remote viewing or long term storage and stream back to the DVR's from long term storage.. Like I said "Chatty" via Cat-5 cable that is)

2.1 2.2 -3-4 and possibly more Satellite TV the biggies in the US are Dish and Direct, Dish is easier for RV's but Direc has advantages too.

3: Streaming services. however some of these "eat" your data limits Please do not stram other than short clips via park Wi-Fi.

[pianotuna]

Hi,

I use my cell phone as a hot spot. Netflix, youtube and the like.

[CA_Traveler]

Easiest for me is DTV, push a button and it will setup and record in HD based on the prior recording settings or switch to any channel. Past and future channels to watch as desired. A standard recorded 1 hour show is watched in 30 minutes skipping the ads.

[KD4UPL]

Just about every RV comes with a TV antenna. That's got to be the easiest in my opinion. Best? That depends on what you want to watch I guess.
I always enjoyed scanning around to see what channels I could pick up from a new location. The local news, different sports teams, etc.

[wanderingaimles]

stream also, from an att hotspot and our cell phones.
Between Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Sling, most everything is available.