Dave
What is your go to antenna? Our TiVo and cord cutting customers need to know. This world is rather new to me.

I don't have a goto antenna. It really depends on the client, location and how they are oriented to the transmitters/antennas.
Then is the budget, for tower, pole , possible rotator and labor.
I do tend to use channel master more than others.

I don't see why it depends on the client unless the client doesn't want to see the antenna and is ready to give up performance in favor of appearance. At the distance we're talking about here, the antennas are NOT subtle!

There can be a go-to antenna for each particular situation -- distance, need for VHF, need to conceal, etc. -- but that's the opposite of what we mean by "a go-to."

So, to work out the best antenna, review ALL the stations you want to receive in your area. Are any of them located on VHF frequencies? By that I mean, on your list, WSPA is ABC network on Real Channel 7 and is just south of west from you. If you're trying to receive that station you'll need an antenna with a VHF section. WCYB will be harder to get for two reasons: it's low band VHF, while 7 is high band VHF, and its signal is weaker in your area. Again, go back to your private reference list of TV channels to see what frequencies we're talking about.

Go to and look at these two antennas: the HD7698P and the HD8200U. The main difference between the two is that the latter one receives low and high band VHF (2-13) while the first one receives only high band VHF (7-13).

Looking at your situation, I say you don't need a VHF section for your antenna. But it appears that Winegard doesn't have an antenna for that distance without at least upper band VHF. So you choose the HD7698P or keep looking.

My favorite for years was the HD7210P, called the "Ghost-Killer." It received all frequencies but had better rejection of signals off the back of the antenna. A nasty little fact about antennas is that sometimes the sensitivity off the back is only a few dB down from sensitivity off the front. (The Ghost-Killer also had no elements going up or down at an angle, so I was able to get them mounted in attics only three feet high.)

ChannelMaster is also excellent and the same procedure would be used to choose a ChannelMaster antenna.

I agree with Ernie on a lot of the things that he stated. 95% of the OTA installs we do are with the Winegard HD-7694. It is not a big antenna but the facts are that you can double or triple the size of the antenna and only gain 2 or 3 dB from the smaller antenna.

We have found that when we pull out on of those monster antennas the customer starts saying that they want the antenna to be low and where it can't be seen. With the smaller antenna we can install the antenna higher and where the signal is the strongest. If you are installing antennas today you need a digital signal meter to measure signal levels for all the channels at different locations on the roof.

In the old days we would go up on the roof and simply strap the antenna on the chimney and the customer accepted the reception that he got. But when we tried that with the HD signals often times we had problems where major networks broke up and pixelated when we put it on the chimney. We found that if the antenna was moved to other locations on the roof it was possible to get 6 to 12 dB more signal from some channels . It is just like a cell phone. On one side of the house you may get no signal on the other side you can get 2 or three bars.

If you can get signal levels -10dBmv or more then with a 15-20 dB preamplifier you can hook up to at 8 TVs.

If you are willing to go up on roofs to install these antennas you can make good money. Customers will pay alot of money if you can deliver quality reception so that they can cut the cable cord. If they are saving $100 a month then an antenna that costs $600 can be paid off in 6 months.

Dave simply speaks truth. A lot of antenna limitations and abilities is simple physics that you can't escape.

Antenna size: think about audio amplifier power. Doubling the power gives you only 3 more dB of audio volume. It's reasonable to expect that actually doubling an antenna's size gives you in the best cases 3, no more than 6, dB more signal.

As for antenna styles, the GhostKiller worked wonders when I had to mount on a single-story roof on Ventura Blvd where Mt Wilson is very much in line with many tall buildings and reflections from behind the antenna messed up a lot of the signal. Even with the back signal limited, I had to try a couple of roof locations to get decent VHF reception.

I learned the power of aiming away from a transmitter with an FM antenna in the Hollywood Hills. The client wanted to receive 88.1 FM, KLON, The Jazz Station, some thirty miles south AND on the other side of the hills AND a low power station, to boot. I aimed her antenna at that station and she got it! Other stations came in well, too.

But there was some kind of interference there on 88.1. I spent some time listening to the interference and I realized it was a radio station, so I got another receiver and tuned around until I found it. It was 98.7, a rock station, with a transmitter on the top of the Hollywood Hills about a mile from the client.

Why was 98.7 such a problem? Well, it's 10.6 MHz away from 88.1. 10.6 is close to a REAL familiar number: an FM tuner's IF frequency is 10.7 MHz. Apparently the strong 98.7 signal was powerful enough for some of it to blast past the filtering sections of the tuner's IF section.

That made me grin. All I had to do, I hoped, was to lower the signal coming in from 98.7.  I went up on the roof with my signal meter and rotated the antenna. About 15 degrees away from the best aim toward 88.1, I found the worst aim for 98.7, and the interference totally disappeared.

The excellent nulling ability of the antenna allowed me to kill 98.7. The normal wide hot spot 90 degrees away allowed her to still get plenty of (weak) signal from 88.1. The signal meter made it possible to do it at all. Case closed and it's ten years later.

In installations where there are multiple antennas requiring rotor or 'compromised' aim, is there a way to install 2 or more antennas and combine the signal, or will that create ghosting due to reflected signal?

There is a way, but I'm not sure if the products are or have been made.

Probably the best you can do to avoid multipath is to do what I did with the FM station in the example above, and null out multipath from one station, or one direction, and depend on the comparatively broad reception pattern of the antenna to give you the station you want. But this then limits you to avoiding one direction per antenna.

When the major LA TV stations were on VHF channels, Pico/Macom and Qintar both sold the same unit, a passive equalizer that split VHF into the seven channels in the market. That's how it was possible to run 400 TVs off one antenna. I can't find this product today using google.

No wonder: in what market are there enough stations on VHF, and enough people using antennas, for a company to provide an equalizer tuned to that market's VHF stations?

Yes, you will have multipath problems. Digital tuners are sometimes better at rejecting multipath than analog tuners, but YMMV.

Let's say you want antenna A to get channel 54 and antenna B to get channel 37, and the antennas point 60 degrees apart. You put a filter on antenna A that kills its channel 37 signal and a filter on antenna B that kills its channel 54 signal. Thus the multipath signal is not there to combine with the direct signal. But this is just theory so far.

When I first seriously looked at equalizing UHF antenna signals, signals in my market were as much as 20 dB different. That VHF equalizer that I mentioned allowed me (with an external 10 dB amp) to equalize the VHF signals to within 1 dB. The reason you want to do this is so that the lowest level signal can be amplified enough to be usable before the highest level signal causes the amplifiers to distort. But I was not able to find equipment that would let me adjust single UHF channels.

There were filters, tunable with a screwdriver, IIRC, that attenuated three or four stations. I never pursued this because it did not look like a reasonable thing to do.

I've had to do stacking of antennas for reception. When the stations are 90 degrees apart is when it is worse. Call these guys they will direct you to the right product.
[Link: dennysantennaservice.com]

Antennas can be designed with any sort of sensitivity pattern, but most have very great signal rejection 90 degrees from the aiming direction. Maybe somebody figured out a long time ago that multipath coming in at 90 degrees is always horrible, and just designed all antennas to reject those signals.

This is the case where, if single channel UHF filters were available at a reasonable price, they would be really helpful.


I read that page and it makes a lot of sense. One thing doesn't add up, though. If you're stacking two stacks (which I think is what he means), each of which is rather large, how do you get away with a short (four foot) cable from each antenna to the antenna coupler?

To call those antennas "stacked" is BS. When you stack antennas you mount two or four identical antennas either vertically or horizontally. You do this to either gain signal strength or to increase the increase directivity of the antenna to reduce multipath or ghosting. All antennas must be pointed in the same direction and connected with the exact same length of coax cable from the antenna input to the combiner(which is simply a hybrid splitter).

That link is just for a VHF antenna and a UHF antenna mountted on the same pole.

I know we had an installation where the main stations came from the south and the west. Using one larger antenna facing southwest did not work. Using two antennas one facing south and one facing west did. In this situation I referred to people that work with antennas more than I do and did what they suggested.

Bob,

I am glad that worked for you. We are problem solvers that have to come up with solutions that work. My comment was that was not a true "stacked" antenna. It is just a VHF antenna and a UHF antenna that is connected with a band joiner. The advantage of that system is you can point the VHF in one direction and the UHF in another direction.

Dave, when you vertically stack antennas pointed the same direction, is some particular distance required between antennas? A minimum distance? A distance related to some wavelength?

The formula for determining the minimum vertical spacing between the two antenna booms is a half wave of the lowest channel to be received. To calculate this distance take 467 and divide it by the lowest TV channel frequency that will be received by either of the two antennas. So for example, if the lowest channel received by either of the two antennas is channel 14 UHF, you would take 467 and divide it by the lower frequency of channel 14 (470 MHz). This would give you the minimum vertical spacing of .97 feet or 11.66 inches that would be needed between the two antenna booms.

Generally, a rule of thumb is to measure the longest element. Cut that distance in half for the separation of the antennas.

I didn't notice what they showed on that link. In our situation we had tried a customer supplied antenna and didn't work for getting all the stations. We tried one of those HD stackers big antennas and it didn't work either. What we ended up using because stations were less than 25 mile was two of these per their recommendation.
[Link: dennysantennaservice.com]

Their website is hard to follow but I just call them when I need help.