I don’t have cable or satellite-- I cut the cord three years ago and just have a Roku and whatever I can pull in over the air. I bought a Mohu indoor antenna at the time, but its performance isn’t great. The only station I really want to get is my local PBS channel, but I often can’t even get it. My tv is over 10 years old, but its a flat screen with a great picture, and works fine with streaming and dvds.
Today I got an “offer” from Amazon for another flat sheet-type antenna, but there were as many 1-star reviews as there were 5-star.
I think I’m in the wrong part of town for good OTA reception short of an old-timey antenna on the roof. Any suggestions?
Go to a site like Antennas Direct | TV Transmitter Locator and Mapping Tool and see where the transmitters are located in your area. Then see if you can orient the antenna so it’s facing them with the least obstructions. If you have a lot of walls, houses, or trees between the antenna and the towers, the signal will degrade. If your TV is in a bad orientation to the towers (e.g. TV in the north side of the house while towers are to the south), try moving your TV to a different location to see if the signal is any better. If you can find a place where the signal is good, you could try putting the antenna there and running a line to the TV. If the TV and antenna are too far away, you’ll need an amplifier so the signal doesn’t degrade along the way.
In my house I have the antenna in a room on the south and the TV in a room on the north because I can’t get good antenna reception at the TV. I send the antenna through the cable coax in the house with an amplifier. NOTE Only route the antenna through the cable coax in the house if you know for certain the coax isn’t connected to the actual cable outside.
Size matters, and positioning matters. I would recommend an antenna like this one: https://www.amazon.com/Element-Bowtie-Indoor-Outdoor-Antenna/dp/B0074H3IU6/
If you can almost get the channel you want now, one of these behind or nearby your TV will probably get what you want reliably. Mounting one of these in the attic or even near the roof of your current room oriented correctly will probably get you more channels.
But definitely follow the antennasdirect advice on positioning and such.
Also see if you can find out if the station(s) you want to receive are transmitting in UHF or VHF. It will make a difference as to what kind of antenna you will want to buy.
This may not be any help to you, but I have tried a few of the flat TV antennas (Mohu and others) but been dissatisfied with their directionality. I couldn’t put them on top of my flat screen and they just didn’t seem to do the job when mounted behind the TV. I could reach behind the TV and rotate them a bit to improve the situation, but this was very channel-specific (based on the direction of the transmitting tower). I finally moved one of them to a nearby window and hung it from the curtain rod behind the valance. Fortunately, this window has a 12"-15" valance that conceals the antenna completely. I just used some string to hang it and then ran the cable to the side of the window and down the trim. (I used white coax cable to match the trim. I rotated the unit so the attachment faces upward, which makes no difference at all.) That helped tremendously. The additional couple feet of height and having no obstructions really did the trick, even for transmitters that were in a different direction.
Do you donate to PBS? With a $5/month donation their streaming app gives you access to almost all their shows. Many can be had for a few days without a contribution. (I use an AppleTV but I’d bet they have a Roku app too)
I’m finding the same things you talk about. If I want PBS, I lay the Mohu flat on my mantelpiece and hold it down with a big candle (unlit, of course). If I want ION, I stick the Mohu behind the curtain rod of the window behind the tv. It’s like the old days with the rabbit ears, “No, to the left, to the right… that’s it! Hold it right there!” :rolleyes:
I make a substantial donation to PBS every year because I love it and value it. I’ve found their Roku channel less than satisfactory. For one things, they take programs down pretty promptly. And they have these stupid things called “clips”-- one or two minutes of a show. Who the hell wants those?
Question: I used to have DirecTV and the dish is still on the roof. What would happen (i.e. anything bad) if I connect the DirecTV cable to the antenna connector on my TV? The coiled up cable is right there on the floor next to the TV and would easily reach. Could the DirecTV dish function as an antenna?
I don’t know how well the dish would work, but you could remove the dish and install an outdoor OTA antenna on the pole. You’ll almost certainly get much better reception than you would with an indoor antenna. Hopefully you can get all the channels you want with the antenna pointed in one direction so you won’t need a rotor.
It’s extremely unlikely that just hooking up the cable would do anything harmful. It may even improve your reception, being outdoors on the roof, but it isn’t designed to pick up OTA signals. I don’t see any harm in giving it a try.
There wouldn’t be any danger to your TV by hooking up the satellite coax. Hook it up and try, but don’t get your hopes up too high. But it is great news that there’s a dish with coax already run! An outdoor antenna would likely give you all channels without having to futz with orientation all the time.
I found this article about what to do when you need different antenna placement to receive different channels:
They say you can get a combiner so you can have two antennas go into one signal. That way you could have one antenna setup for optimal reception of some channels and another antenna setup for reception of other channels.
I thought there was a DVR out there which had two antenna inputs and it would pick which one to use based on which was receiving the channel strongest, but I couldn’t find it. Anyone heard of such a thing?
Yeah, i can see that installing a rooftop antenna would be fairly easy with the cable already in place. If I were 40 years younger, I might crawl up there myself.
This probably won’t be a lot of help, but I’ll offer it for what it’s worth.
The main points I want to make are that (1) antennas are not created equal, even when they look the same, and (2) under the right conditions one can have good success using an outdoor antenna indoors, such as in an attic or even discreetly placed in a window, since UHF-only antennas are fairly small and many have a compact flat-panel configuration. I assume the station(s) you’re interested in are UHF.
Channel Master is one of the well-regarded makers of outdoor antennas, and for years now I’ve had excellent results with an older version of this Channel Master 4221 which I’ve used indoors. A critical factor here is the direction your house faces and whether the stations you’re interested in are all within the beam angle of the antenna so you don’t have to rotate it. From a purely aesthetic standpoint, you also need to consider where you can put it – maybe in a window or up in the attic – and how you’ll run the cable. If you’re mounting it in an attic or rooftop and have a long cable run, you may want to add a preamp like this, but over a short cable run a preamp will almost certainly make no difference whatsoever to what channels you do or do not receive – it’s all about gain at the antenna.
The 4221 also has a big brother, the 4228, which is like two 4221s bolted together side by side. This is too obnoxiously large for use indoors except in an attic, but as an outdoor or attic antenna it offers greater sensitivity.
What would happen is: absolutely nothing at all. The dish can’t function as an OTA antenna for a long list of reasons – it’s designed for a completely different frequency range, it’s extremely directional to within a fraction of a degree, and the “antenna” part is actually a low noise block amplifier (LNBA) that needs power from a satellite receiver to function. If you got any kind of TV signal from it, it would just be RF ingress – you’d have much better odds sticking a coat hanger into the TV’s coax input!
My PBS station is VHF. However, I’d like to be able to pull in some other stations, too.
My house faces due south, and the PBS transmitter is about 35 miles to the southeast. However, the other transmitters are arrayed around me like the numbers on a clock face.
I’m in a rented house, so don’t plan to poke any holes. However, as mentioned above and alluded to below, there is a cable running from the unused dish on the roof that comes out of the wall right near my TV.
This is helpful to know. Another question: if I could get someone to go up on a big ladder, could they just unscrew the cable from the dish and screw it into the antenna? And then use whatever the dish is mounted on to attach/support the antenna?
The cable could be reused, but you’d have to see how the dish is attached. Usually, the dish is not on a pole that could be used by the antenna. Rather, the dish has it’s own base which typically bolted to the house. It’s unlikely the antenna could reuse the dish’s mounting configuration, but you’d have to look to be sure.
