Cable for TV antenna

Just recently I saw a notice in my building saying that they have put up some parabola antenna and now we all can receive in our rooms some free TV signals.  My rented apartment came with cable TV, so I already have a lot more channels I care to watch, but today I had some spare time and decided to go out and look for this cable.

I've never bought one of these, but I expected it to cost no more than USD2.50.  I went first to a nice hardware store, and mother fucker, those freaking cables were being sold at about USD35!!!  Dude, at this price you can plunge your cable up your ass; I don't want it.  I wonder if there's any moron out there who's paying that kind of price?

Since I still had plenty of spare time, I went to a shopping center full of small electronic parts shops.  Very quickly I found the cable I need, and yes, the price was about USD1.25.  This makes sense.  But what puzzled me is when I took a closer look at the cable's endings.  They actually have a male and a female plug!  I hadn't thought about this, and to my surprise at first I found mostly only male-male cables.  This was very odd to me, as you'd expect these things to be male on one side and female on the other.

The girl at the store insisted that what I need is a male-male, but I thought this didn't make sense.  Anyway, since they're so cheap, I bought one hetero and one homo version.

I brought these cables to my apartment, and I'll be damned... the girl was right!  This is very odd because if it's going to be a homo cable, then it should be a female I think, I've seen it to be female in other countries I've lived before.  Anyway, next came the reprogramming of my TV set, which was done in a flash.  Gee, I only got the same local channels that I already get in cable (cable perfect signal, new aerial poor signal), and like three crappy free satellite channels.  So much for the new parabola antennas.