Mohu Curve: the Centerpiece of Our Cord-Cutting Stragegy

Mohu Curve 30 and Mohu Curve 50

Apparently 2014 was the year for cutting the cord: it's the year streaming went…wait for it… mainstream. No longer was streaming just for early-adopting millennials who gave up or never even got a cable subscription, even their parents grandparents said “So long, sucker!” to Comcast and ATT, and bought Rokus and Apple TVs. I ought to know – I’m one of them.

Sick of inflated prices and even sicker of paying $120/month for 200 channels, 160 of which we never watched, we cut our cord last year. In place of cable, we bought several streaming devices (two from Roku, two Google Chromecasts) and some high-end antennas to pick up over-the-air broadcasts. Let’s look at one of those antennas.

Over-the-Air Broadcasts

If you’re planning to cut the cord, you’ll (probably) want to pick up over-the-air broadcasts from the big five networks (ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, PBS), as well as ION and CW - it depends on where you live. Since everything’s digital now, with "second channels" in most places, the big five translate to at least ten channels. Not only that but you can pick up HD over the air for free, a "service" for which cable companies tack on an additional charge. The first step is to figure out how far it is from your home to the local broadcast towers. There are several websites that will do that such as antennaweb.com and antennapoint.com. Once you’ve determined the distance, it’s time to choose an antenna. A word of advice: round up to the more sensitive antenna if it’s “close.”

We’re about 22 miles from a cluster of antennas, for more than sixty stations. Since our televisions are all on the opposite side of the house and the antennas would be mounted no more than ten feet off the ground, we opted for amplified versions of the antennas.

These days every maker claims their antennas are powerful and can pull in HD signals for free: well, duh: of course they do. The differences are in how well they pull in the signals and what the antennas look like. A “rabbit ears” antenna like the one on your grandma’s television way back in ought-six looks ugly next to your 80-inch flat-screen, which is why modern antennas are either decorative or nearly invisible.

The Mohu Curve

photo: author

We picked a Mohu Curve 50. Mohu’s antennas are made with the technology the military uses in their mudflap antennas. They make paper-thin sheets imprinted with metal features to capture the signals.  That’s their Mohu Leaf (we have a Leaf as well as a Curve). Mohu bends the sheet into a simple curve and mounts it in a plastic frame. The sheet is white on the front side and black on the back. The whole works, which is the size of a sheet of copier paper, is the Curve.

To connect to the TV, Mohu supplies a 16-foot white coaxial cable. For the Curve 50, they supply a small signal amplifier between the antenna and TV set. The amplifier needs power, which you can get via an outlet or from the television’s powered USB outlet. The Curve 30, which isn’t amplified, is has a claimed range of about 30 miles from the tower; while the Curve 50 is said to pick up signals from up to 50 miles away.

Setup is simple: you screw one end of the coax cable onto the antenna and the other end onto the amplifier. Then connect the amplifier to the television set and plug in the power cord. All that’s left is to find a good spot for the antenna – the part. Mohu’s documentation doesn’t talk about a preferred orientation. It looks like you’re supposed to aim the curved face at the tower(s), but in our experience it works better if the rear (the black side) faces the tower. With our antenna in this position, we pick up signals from a tower more than fifty miles away. Reception seems to be influenced by the position of the cable – I’m not sure why.

When you come down to it, our Mohu Curve performs as advertised, grabbing HD signals more than fifty miles away cluttering up the room with ugly rabbit ears.