No more radios in cars?

Nope

 

You have to pay for Youtube TV. You also pay for internet service.

 

I don’t,
last time I paid for internet it was $4.99 a month for 56k dialup.

and I do not have YouTube TV, just plain ol YouTube, occasionally watch Pluto or Roku free tiers

 

Mmm...

Someone on the internet who doesn't pay for internet.

That sounds kind of suspicious.

 

Is that true even in places where the strongest "Signal Margin (dB)" is a negative number? Where the "Field Strength (dBuV/m)" is marked "Bad", and also a negative number?

Your answer sounds like a mostly-flat-land answer. In the valleys nestled in Western mountains, there are many places where it is very impractical to directly receive OTA signals at the home where someone wants to view them. Their own personal translator / repeater mounted on a ridgetop could do it, but would need a (possibly unlicensed) wireless link down to the house, and a good power source. A former coworker did this for a solar powered ham repeater to reach his vacation / retirement home near Stehekin (zip code 98852), but without any permissions from the relevant agencies.

 

There are 'free' public internet access points available, though the ones in my county library system are paid through the library levy in my property taxes.

 

My employer provides me with a phone and a 'puter that I use liberally - so it could be argued that that is a means of getting 'free' internet.
I'm currently evaluating a Starlink Mini (this connection) whose 'standby' mode would definitely not be free - but clearly affordable.
They claim $5 a month but I will remain suspicious until I see the junk fees.
At .5mb/s up and down it's not blazing fast, but it's probably 'good 'nuff' as a fallover to monitor IOT devices and a security system, make interweb calls, even watch Pluto.
I chose the mini for portability and the ability to work with limited power in a post-storm environment.
According to the dashboard I'm drawing less than the advertised 20w.

One of the advantages of coastal living.
I even have a 'sodium amplifier' for HF comms.....

This is why I prefaced my answer with "in MY experience..."
There are places in the Volunteer state where you just about have to run pipelines for sunlight - and THAT's EAST of the big muddy!
They actually have REAL mountains in Colorado.
You cannot compel a local broadcaster to serve customers at a loss.
They will simply sell out to one of of the giant monster mega-media outlets and communities will lose access to local news because there are no local news PROVIDERS.

I'm blessed (and cursed!) by straddling two TV markets, and I gave up about 20% of my signal strength by putting an expensive near-bedspring sized rig in my attic that can receive both with a little careful coax management and only feeding one TV at present.
If I start watching more TV then I will look into things like an amp and upping distro but life is far too interesting to be tethered in place by something as silly as a television.
If I lived in a valley, I would face very different challenges but the first rule in TV reception is that you have to have at least ONE local broadcaster.
There's no DX'ing television, especially with ATSC digital.

 

As noted above I can receive 115 channels but many are duplicates because of dual market location.



The two markets. Austin and San Antonio, are 180 degrees apart but most dedicated uhf antennas are bidirectional flat panels with integrated preamps and can receive in both directions.

Since full power stations are now only uhf regardless of their virtual channel number, a uhf panel antenna set high works well. However uhf is more line of sight than vhf and is degraded by trees and foliage in its path.

It used to be vhf (rf channels 2-13) were high power, could punch through walls and trees and could achieve greater distances than uhf - but most of that spectrum was sold off by the government. As a result the few remaining real vhf stations are low power and require a traditional highly directional vhf antenna carefully oriented for distant reception. However some station owners remained vhf due to its ability to handle buildings and trees within most metroplexes.

The best antenna setups for vhf and uhf at distance are often separate antennas connected on the mast with a diplexer, a derivative of a coax combiner with frequency filters and a dc bypass for a uhf preamp. With separate antennas, the vhf channels can be separately oriented. Most consumers have no idea of these details for good distance reception and the days of antenna installation specialists are over.

With that said, a consumer in the Gunnison area not living high on a hill might need streaming tv when the broadcast repeaters go down.

 

From what I understand it's portions of UHF spectrum that have been sold off, not VHF. VHF isn't great for things like celular data, which is what it is mostly being sold off for. In 2008, the transition from Analog NTSC to Digital ATSC 1.0 saw the 700 MHz band, which was a UHF TV band, auctioned off to cell phone companies by the US government. In 2016, the USA auctioned off the 600 MHz band, which was also a UHF TV band. And again, it was auctioned off to cell phone companies.

I also read that the ATSC 1.0 standard requires that all channels, both on VHF as well as UHF, be broadcast at much lower power levels than NTSC did. Repeater stations are even lower powered, from what I understand. This, like you said, affected the range, necessitating bigger and better directional TV antennas if you want to pick up the signal from many stations that you could get. The new ATSC 3.0 standard has better range than ATSC 1.0, but it has its own can of worms that broadcasters, patent holders and manufacturers decided to open up and smear onto their customer's faces.

I could see VHF being affected the most by the lower power because UHF is more line-of-sight. So, it doesn't matter that much how weak or strong it is, you have to be pretty close for it to work, and close proximity doesn't require much power. But VHF does go past the horizon a bit better. But with that extra range comes the need for more power. Hence, why limiting the power is more likely to be noticed by a user of a VHF station that's just beyond the horizon.

I'm afraid that's the only option, other than moving way up a mountain and installing a tower that extends beyond the top of said mountain. I do wonder, though, why is OTA TV free, yet you have to pay for your local channels on the internet.

 

broadcast tv is free because advertisers pay for it, along with everything else.
cable companies have to pay the broadcast companies for the rights to carry them. i suppose the internet is the same way?

 

But broadcasters also have their own internet services. NBC, for an example, has the Peacock website that you can subscribe to just to watch NBC. But it's their own website, not someone retransmitting their broadcast.

 

aren't websites and 'the internet' two different things? admittedly, idk how these things work.

 

They don't work very well without each other.

 

I wonder if the ads on (non-subscription) YouTube are the least bit effective. We're using Smart Tube on one TV, that skirts all the commercials, and the embedded-in-the-video "endorsements" as well, but currently having problems installed on another TV, we're occasionally watching "native" YouTube, with full, glorious ads. The latter are so grating, announcers/presenters always smarmy/cheery, not sure who they think they're convincing to buy their product/service.

If my reaction's not atypical, how long till that bubble bursts?

 

i feel that way about all advertising, so maybe it works, if only subliminally?

 

i skip ads where allowed, but how long will that last?

 

All the places I checked have multiple transmitters within the range you specified. The location I mentioned above has 7 transmitters in the 22-26 mile range, and about 20 transmitters within 50 miles. But at the main valley street intersection, the strongest signal margin is below -30 dB, far more challenging than my suburban home where over a dozen are above +50 dB.

 

Are you responding to @ETC(SS) or to me?

For my town, you will see several stations that were part of the original local entity array of repeaters. Most of those were already taken down. There is just one left, on Tenderfoot Mt. that is going to be taken down. It's a very well-known community fact that OTA TV will no longer exist here after summer of 2026, despite what certain websites might suggest.

 

To the former, following this item:

Numerous places familiar to me, and I suspect plenty more, just can't OTA TV through regular means, even before the current wave of shutdowns.