hd antennas (1 Viewer)

[jimmy garcia]

I live about 40 miles away from the nearest hd broadcast tower. Can anyone recommend a good indoor antenna that will pick up these signals?

 

[ThomasC]

Your best bet is probably the Zenith Silver Sensor:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...lance&n=172282

I live about 30 miles away from the nearest towers with hills in between, which make the signal weaker. The best I can pull in is 60%, and that doesn't happen very often. I mainly only get 2 stations around 40-50%, but I don't get too many breakups.

Is there any possible way you can set up an outdoor antenna? 40 miles may be stretching it.

 

[Dick Knisely]

One place that will be useful is here:
http://www.antennaweb.org/aw/welcome.aspx

And this is another
http://www.tvantenna.com/support/tutorials/uhf.html

Keep in mind that there's no such thing as an HD antenna. It's just a UHF antenna. Digital TV stations (HD or not) are, in the US, all assigned UHF channels for broadcasts.

The first site above will help you figure out where the transmitters are and recommend the general type of antenna needed. At that distance I expect it will recommend a mast-mounted, directional antenna outside. I've got an old TV antenna on the roof that works very well pulling in digital stations from about that distance.

And you'll be hard pressed to get much with an indoor antenna I suspect. Maybe with an attic antenna but you'll be much better off with a multielement bowtie on a mast outside.

 

[DougRuss]

Message Deleted

Info was Duplicated...

 

[Robert_J]

There are a handful of VHF digital stations. WBBM-DT in Chicago is one example. Its analog channel is 2 and its digital channel is 3.

-Robert

 

[Dick Knisely]

I stand corrected. You are correct but it seems more than a "handful" to me. Checking the channel assignments sheet again (www.dtv.gov) there are a fair number of them. That's strange since I thought after the conversion the entire VHF freq band allocated to commercial TV was to be returned to for reallocation. Guess that's not completely true somehow.

 

[JeremyErwin]

Adjacent NTSC channels tend to interfere with each other, so the stations tend to be widely spaced. For instance, in Washington, there are channels 4,5,7,9,20,26.32,50, 56 and 66. The Baltimore market adds 2,11,13,45,54, and 67. Except for 4 and 5, there are no adjacent channels. I think we had a 53 once, but it was located rather distant from 54...

ATSC channels are less vulnerable to interference. If the country switched to digital transmissions, a sizable chunk of the spectrum could be devoted to other uses. ("first responders" and all that politically powerful stuff...). After 2007 or '08 or '09, or whatever, analog broadcasting will switch off. The owners of those old analog assignments will be given the choice of switching their dtv signals to their old analog assignments, or keeping the new dtv frequencies. This choice, however, will not be extended to channels between 60 and 69. That block will be reserved for new uses.

Many stations will transfer back to their old vhf frequencies, which are, (allegedly) less vulnerable to weather related inteference, trees, multipath, etc. This will no doubt offend hdtv aficionados such as myself.


as any antenna upgrades will have been uhf only.

ok. some markets have a single digital vhf station. But it may be more cost effective in the short term to buy a decent single channel antenna--perhaps a Yagi pointed in the direction of the tower.

 

[Dick Knisely]

Good grief... just when I thought I was starting to understand this stuff... :rolleyes

 

[JeremyErwin]

Of course it's complicated. Politics are involved.