Umm… Yep. The DTV dish is pointing at a geostationary satellite. Not an antenna, per-se.
Oddly, my mom gets good reception by just hooking up 6 feet of coax to her coax antenna ‘in’ on her TV’s. Just lets it dangle on the floor. And, she is getting hi-def, but or course only about 6 channels. She is in Denver if it makes a difference. But I think you need to be in a larger metro area for this to work. I would never work at my house (I have DTV).
The good news is that 35 miles is generally quite reasonable for VHF/UHF reception, although obviously a lot depends on your specific elevation, the amount of clear space around you, and the intervening terrain.
Unfortunately the rest of it is not good news. The antenna I mentioned is mainly for UHF. It does claim to support VHF but as you can see from the specs the VHF gain is quite poor and is not its design priority. And even then it only supports the so-called VHF high band – channels 7 through 13 - and not the lower channels at all (there is a big jump in the frequency allocations below channel 7). For your PBS station at 35 miles, you may need a more traditional VHF antenna, which tend to be a good bit larger.
However, since you’ll want a UHF antenna for other stations anyway, it may be worth a try. There is one VHF channel in the area that I was able to get with mine at a considerable distance, but it wasn’t reliable. I don’t bother with it any more as the UHF channels are rock solid.
The transmitters being located in all directions isn’t helpful, either. Most of these antennas, though, including the CM 4881, have a fairly broad beam making them somewhat omnidirectional. Sorry to say, it seems to be shaping as needing probably two of them with a signal combiner, and maybe a separate VHF antenna, too. Someone mentioned a transmitter locator site; another good one for planning is http://www.tvfool.com/. Give it your location and antenna height and it will pop out a list of TV stations, transmitter distances, and expected reception difficulty.
This is the sort of thing I imagine people used to do in the 50s (but without the aid of the Internet!) – it’s funny how the outrageous cost of cable TV and streaming alternatives have led to cord-cutting and a resurgence of interest in OTA!
Our family has had the best luck with the RCA products. Mine is
In the interest of full disclosure, we’re hills and mountains and I believe you are in a flatter region so if geography comes into play …
There were only three stations back then. So-called “educational tv” was no great shakes. The programs were stuff like televised classes. The outrageous cost of cable combined with the paucity of programs i liked got me to cut the cord. We’ve all experienced the case of access to 300 channels and not being able to find anything to watch, or else resorting to watching reruns of Seinfeld or Good Eats or something.
Maybe they’ve changed the mounting method, but the dishes used to have a bracket on the back that fit over the pole. Loosen a couple of bolts and the dish would slide right off, leaving a bare pole. My old apartment had a Direct TV dish which I removed and installed an OTA antenna on the pole. I used it for years.
Here is a close-up of the back of a dish. Loosen the two bolts on the left (one bolt head is partly hidden) and the whole dish, bracket and all, lifts off so all that’s left is a bare pole.
Here is a photo of the hardware included with a dish. The dish mounting bracket is in the upper right. The pole is in the middle (with a 45 degree bend) and has the roof mounting bracket on one end.
Very informative. Thanks.
I’m curious if you really need to just have an indoor antennae? If there is any remaining coax from your cable days, it would be very easy to just use the existing line and mount an antenna outside either near the old cable box on the outside of your place or just cut the line and splice on a connector to wire the antenna where it is convenient.
For years I had something like the ClearStream 2V Indoor/Outdoor HDTV Antenna (that cost ~$30) in which I had done just that and it was mounted to the old cable box on the outside of the house three feet off the ground and conveniently facing the major towers (I just “borrowed” comcast’s existing line for the same TV). We remodeled and painted two years ago and I put the same antenna in the attic to get rid of all of the eyesore coax on the outside of the house. Reception is a bit better in the attic but both are 2x as many stations as when it was next to the TV.
I don’t know what all of the other cables running from the antennae on Amazon are. Mine just had a single coax line (and an internal VHF/UHF loop).
I have been pulled off this project by some Major Life Events, but I will come back to it. Thanks to all.
For what it’s worth, I upgraded from a crappy off brand 720p 32" that I bought ten years ago to a less crappy off brand 43" 1080p Roku TV about six months ago, and my OTA reception increased dramatically using the same crappy off brand antenna.
I guess tuners have gotten better in the last decade. The new TV was $300.
I hope they aren’t long term ones.
For what it’s worth, I used to have three TV antennas feeding my set. Two were VHF, pointing at different transmitters and one was UHF. They all fed into a combiner mounted on the same pole as the aerials. Then hallelujah, New Zealand switched to digital television and all the stations are sent from each transmitter site. Where I live I have a choice of two sites. One is a high power one covering several hundred square kilometers from 30 km away and the other is smaller for fill in to low lying areas in town and is just a km away. Same stations on each, just different frequencies.
I now have one TV aerial (which is getting a bit tatty so needs replacing) and one aerial for FM reception, both connected to the same cable which was used for the previous aerials.
Not an indoor antenna, but $23 for an amplified external. You have to get someone to mount it where your dish is.
Discount code : QRRJ4Z5P
Wow, it’s so cool looking, I’d like to mount it on the roof of my car! 
