mike27oct wrote:
A basic rabbit ear antenna works best, because it can be turned for best reception, and because all TV off-air channels are still on the same frequencies they always were on.
Sort of true, but not completely true. While a portion of the same frequency spectrum is used for OTA DTV as for old analog TV in the US, many stations do not broadcast on the same frequencies they used to. So while you may think of a channel as 3, a VHF channel requiring a VHF antenna, the station may actually now be broadcasting on a UHF channel that requires a different antenna for best reception.
The best source of info on OTA DTV in the US is from the FCC here:
http://transition.fcc.gov/mb/engineering/dtvmaps/
Type in your zip, and you will get a list of channels in your area, with their IDs, but also with the actual frequency band they now operate on. You also get antenna direction info, which can be critical to maintain DTV reception in bad weather.
To give an example for our area, channel “3”, which was low VHF, now broadcasts on RF channel 39, UHF. Try using a simple rabbit ear antenna for it now and you will be very disappointed unless you are very close to the broadcast tower. Since we are in relatively weak signal area for many stations, and have a mix of VHF and UHF, I eventually gave up on OTA. It would have required a substantial mast mounted, rotatable VHF/UHF antenna. Picture quality was great when we got it, but any bad weather and in and out the picture went.
Oh, yes, then there is the fun of new TVs that often will let you tune in only channels that they picked up during their scan. How do you suppose you get all possible channels in such a scan when your antenna needs to be rotated to different directions to get different ones??? This is exactly the question I asked Samsung support, about our expensive LCD TV when I was playing with OTA. They have no answer. I did manage to program our little emergency TV: stood out in the front yard holding the antenna, with a map of station directions on the ground, watching TV scan through channel numbers, pointing the antenna in the correct direction for each, Does that sound idiotic? Yes–but it worked. The Samsung? Never was able to get more than about 3/4 of the OTA channels to scan at any one time. Truly idiotic design.