Thanks very much for the comments, Steve! Interesting that we'll lose
stations when the UHF to VHF transition takes place.
How do you tell, before you purchase, which antenna will give you the
most "gain"?
We'll have to look into the Channel Master 4228. Baltimore has a
Channel 2, but we don't watch it much. The channel I'm currently
trying to get, that I have lost except for the one TV with the Comcast
box, is WETA, Channel 26, from Washington, DC. We're in Baltimore, so
I can - sort of - understand that it's hard to receive. But it's on
the list of stations we should be receiving, but are not.
I'll keep everyone posted as we continue to experiment. Longer cable
is being purchased now, so that should be installed in a day or two.
Mical Wimoth Carton
chrper...@aol.com
From: "phartz...@gmail.com" <phartz...@gmail.com>
On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 9:17 PM, chrper...@aol.com
<chrper...@aol.com> wrote:
We have also tried replacing our home-made antenna (a la the YouTube
instructions) with an RCA "super" antenna. Same results whichever
antenna we
used, so the RCA antenna, with booster, goes back to Walmart
tomorrow. No
real need to throw away $30 for nothing.
When June 12 rolls around, a number of the current DTV broadcasts
that are on UHF frequencies, which your home-made antenna is designed
to receive, will switch to VHF frequencies. That home-made antenna is
not designed to work on VHF.
The next move will be to buy some more antenna cable and try
extending the
antenna outside, and above the level of our (flat) roof to see what
difference that makes. This is all pretty ridiculous, but at this
point it's
the principle of the thing. If the antenna works outside the house,
we'll
have to think about whether, or not, we want to get a "real"
adjustable roof
antenna for another couple hundred $$$s. What a rip-off this whole
thing is
turning out to be.
You will most probably need to get an external antenna if you want
the best reception possible. This was true even back in the "good old
days" of nothing but analog TV. However, you will certainly not have
to spend, as you put it, "another couple hundred $$$s" unless you
decide to go fulll tilt from the outset.
All you will need is a regular VHF/UHF TV antenna. There is no such
thing as a specially designed HDTV or DTV antenna no matter what the
ads say. Just get an antenna that has sufficient gain to enable you
to receive whatever stations you can reasonably expect to be able to
receive. You'll need that cable, but you can get it cheap if you look
around a bit. A rotator? Maybe, but you can add that later if you
install now with an update to a rotator at a later date in mind.
I use the Channel Master 4228 which works well on channels 7 through
69. This is an 8 bay bowtie antenna, basically designed for high-gain
UHF reception, but providing good VHF coverage down to channel 7. It
does not work that well on the lower band VHF channels of 2 through 6.
To my knowledge, no TV stations in the DC/Baltimore area are going
broadcast on any channel below 7 anyway after June 12. Here is a link
to an XLS database of channel assignments for stations all across the
country:
http://www.rabbitears.info/ss/DTV-Channels.xls
Steve
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