Meet Hilton Head’s king of cord-cutters

Hilton Head Island’s king of the cord-cutters is on his own wave length.

Steve Baer is not a millennial, the target market for the growing number of services that enable you to cut out cable television and the Shop Vac it hooks up to your bank account.

Baer is retired. And judging by his home in Indigo Run, he’s not scraping to juggle his monthly bills.

Furthermore, he’s an electrical engineer.

He writes a column about geeky things for the Hilton Head Island Computer Club newsletter. He is a HAM radio operator. He has a solar panel that provides enough power to charge a golf cart battery to keep his HAM radio operating when the power goes off.

When he served on Beaufort County Council, his public bio said:

“His background is in telecommunications research, development and network planning with Bell Labs, AT&T and Bell System spin-offs. Early in his career, he was part of a small team that designed one of the world’s first cordless phones. He led groups that did strategic, tactical, and economic planning for telecommunications networks, including assessment and expansion of the telecommunications network in Iran.”

And this: “In 1990, one of his team’s projects was placed into the Smithsonian Museum’s Information Age exhibit. Most recently he was the co-inventor of a technical and economic planning system for wireless and broadband networks. He holds one patent.”

So if you can do it in Iran, chances are you can handle Hilton Head. So long as you hide the antennae in the attic, of course. Try to hang one outside around here and you might get bombed into the Middle Ages. They are considered, at the very least, unaesthetic. Like a clothes line. Or a fence.

But when it comes to cutting the cord, Hilton Head really is in the Middle Ages because it’s hard to pick up the free over-the-air, local television signals.

Baer discovered this when he got tired of the steady rise in his bill for a satellite service that crammed his television with channels he didn’t want to watch.

So he got to work.

He has three antennae in the attic. One is dedicated to Channel 16 (PBS) in Beaufort. One is dedicated to Channels 9 (PBS) and 11 (CBS) in Savannah (“A quick look at their transmitter data showed they were only radiating 20-24 kilowatts, while the channels I do receive well were radiating 350-1,000 kilowatts,” he wrote in his “Gadget Corner” column outlining in great detail every step to cutting the cord). The other antenna picks up everything else. And his new system required an amplifier upstairs and a splitter amp downstairs. Total, one-time cost: about $200.

This works great, even in high definition.

He bought a Roku 3, a small HD streaming receiver, for $99.

This took him down the road of a la carte purchases of networks he wants and uses. It started with MLB.com for his wife, Sandy, a Yankees fan. She now gets spring training games. And all games are filed in the cloud for easy access. For movies, they stream Netflix. And they pay about $50 a year for Acorn British TV.

Now Baer has moved on to cutting the land line. He’s using an Obi 200 and Google Voice.

He said it’s all been cheaper, fairly priced, and easy to use.

He admits, “I’m kind of an extremist.”

But he says, “It’s all easy to do. Anyone could do this with a little guidance.”

This story was originally published September 16, 2016 at 12:38 PM with the headline "Meet Hilton Head’s king of cord-cutters."