Augie Posted July 7, 2019 Posted July 7, 2019 On 7/5/2019 at 7:29 PM, Gugny said: For an elderly, you're pretty hip to modern technology! Yet he’s still a moron! I stood next to him and offered him MORE money in US currency, but he insisted on Venmo. I may or may not be capable of that now, but cash was not acceptable. If anyone here wants to offer me cash, I’m open for business! I’m sure Mr Peg’s agrees! (OK, that was just for you!) 1
Greybeard Posted July 7, 2019 Posted July 7, 2019 14 hours ago, Steptide said: Interesting. It says an indoor antenna shouldn't have any issue picking up my local channels. However I can't get any but one. Maybe I need a more expensive antenna Maybe you do or maybe you don't. Everything affects reception. With whatever antenna you have, start with direction. If all your stations are on the North side of your house, and you have an indoor antenna on the South side, you are at a huge disadvantage because the signal has to go through your house. Use the TVFool chart to aim your antenna to the correct direction. Note most antenna's are directional. If you are 90 degrees off, you may get nothing. If you are lucky, all the channels you want are in the same direction. If they are in radically different directions, first see if you can turn the antenna and get the others. Then go from there. Here is what I went through to get reception. It will give you an idea of the obstacles I had to overcome. I had a room in the back of my house, I wanted to get local stations on. I can stream with a fire tv stick on that TV, but the Bills games are on channel 5 in Syracuse, so there are times Local would be better. I purchased one of those flat antennas from Walmart which also had a little amplifier with it. The only place it would work at all was when mounted to a window. It received two stations. I also had an old pair of rabbit ears I tried. No luck, zero stations.. After some thought, I was ignoring the obvious. I have aluminum siding on my house. It basically turned my house into a Faraday box, knocking down most of the signal. So if I was going to use an indoor antenna, it would be close to a window. I tried with and without the amp. With the amp I couldn't get anything. I thought I might try basically the same style of antenna but maybe try one from Amazon, again with an Amp. This one had slightly better results but still missed two stations and that was with the amp. I thought I would do some testing, so I went to the bedroom above the room I was using. The higher the better. Basically after testing all kinds of combinations, all mounted to a window, I determined the amp of the first unit was bad. I ended up returning that unit to Walmart. The second unit was still missing two channels upstairs but the amp did help. I had a friend that stopped cable and built an antenna that was working 12 miles farther away from the stations than my location, so I thought I would give that a shot. After getting it build I could get every channel but two of the channels were still inconsistent. I put the amp from the amazon unit in and I could get everything, although it is very sensitive to how I aim it. Also I wasn't paying attention to what was outside of my window, as that room has those old aluminum storm windows that slide up and down. They also have an aluminum screen in them, so when I stick the home made antenna in the window, the screen still blocks part of it. So I am still not optimized. I get all the channels now except the one I need for the Bills game is intermittent. Turns out the weather seems to play into this also. The one thing I have yet to try is putting the antenna just outside of the window. I expect when aimed in the correct direction, that antenna will get everything without an amp. I considered the HDHomeRun mentioned by /dev/null, but I don't have a good place to mount the antenna in my attic. I like the idea of it though. It was a bit more of a commitment than I was willing to make. I also considered getting a signal strength monitor so I could actually get a signal level to compare, but that is a bit more of an investment I was willing to make. If I was you I would get an antenna that I was sure I could return and use the TVFool diagrams. Worse case you only invest some time. In general I am a bit bewildered by the comments you read in the reviews of antennas. " I bought the Nuclear 999 antenna for $250 and it did not do any better than the $20 dollar Amazon cheap flat model." A lot of reviewers seem to think antenna's are toasters and you can just plug them in and they all give the same results, independent of where and how they are mounted. That is obviously not the case. One last thing to mention. When I went from my back room to the upstairs bedroom, I was using different TV's. They are both 32 inch Sony's but they are from different years. One TV had better reception than the other. I was aware that different makers would have different sensitivity but was a bit surprised the two Sony's would. Good Luck.
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