I have a client that has indoor antennas all over his house. I would like to get rid of all of those and stick something on his roof. He is not too far from the towers in Cleveland (less then 30 miles). Any suggestions? I am trying not to put up a monster if at all possible but I would rather have it work better then what he is using.

NOTHING still works better than the yagi's that were on your grandparents roof. Split 10 times and keep going

I always had the best results with the UHF 4-Bay bow tie style and currently using this one. [Link: amazon.com]

Used to use the Winegard and Channel Master but I think they both quit making them.

If all of the stations are in the same direction a fixed yagi in an attic space is effective.

Analog TV reception degrades slowly while conditions, such as multi-path and signal strength deteriorate. At some point with analog the user decides that the picture is not good enough for a channel and conditions can vary by time of day. Digital, on the other hand is all or nothing and the threshold between perfect or nothing is very sharp.

When all of the channels are UHF, smaller antennas can be effective. Low band VHF channels can be a pain because effective antennas are much larger. In my area one station has been allowed to keep its low band VHF channel. Initially, because low band VHF requires significantly less transmitter power and this is a cost savings, the station felt that it had an advantage over the others. Unfortunately, the coverage area shrank because users balked at the larger antennas required for reception. Relatively small (crude in my opinion) UHF antennas that would not be practical for analog UHF/VHF reception, often work OK for digital because digital is mostly UHF at this point.

I'm not familiar with the situation in Cleveland, but in may areas most of the digital TV transmitters are clustered in a small geographic area, many times on the same tower, thus making use of a yagi more practical.

Go to tvfool.com or antennaweb.org. Pretend you're putting in an antenna (hey! you are!). Put in the address. Get the map that shows the directions from your location to the stations.

Study the list of stations. It will give you two station numbers -- one is the channel number it would have been in the old days. The other is the channel number that it calls itself. For instance, in Los Angeles, NBC calls itself KNBC 4. In analog days, it broadcast on ACTUAL channel 4 (66 MHz per one way of describing it). Nowadays they broadcast the digital signal on another channel... let's say UHF 36 (it might be different; sorry, I'm not going to take the time to look it up). That means that the TV tuner is going to look for NBC on UHF channel 36, but the channel will be called 4.1.

In general, the VHF channels are not used. VHF-Lo are actual channel frequencies 2 - 6. VHF-Hi is 7 - 13. If no VHF channels must be received, then you can get away with a UHF-only antenna.

However, in some areas, one or more upper VHF channel is used. That means you need a UHF antenna with a couple of elements to pick up VHF-Hi channels. It also means that any needed amplifiers must be able to amplify two ranges of channels, Upper VHF and UHF. The bandwidth (and I mean that technically) of TV amps is not wide enough for a single amplifier to amplify all the channels.

Whew!

Anyway, armed with that you can see if it's possible to just aim one antenna in the right direction, then amplify and split the signal as needed to wiring that gets the signals where you need them.

I've done this before with many antenna systems. Three of them had one antenna, a crapload of amplifiers and splitters (drop taps, actually) and ran more than 400 TVs and 60 FM tuners (FM is located in the 20 MHz above TV channel 6). If you have questions, ask me.

Let me make a comparison with computer network wiring, though. Wiring a house for antenna is similar to installing CAT cable throughout the house for computers. Does wifi now serve all your locations perfectly? If it does, why would you toss it out and wire up your entire house, only to end up where you started, performance-wise?

There are other subjects to go over, too: if you have to point your antenna in more than one direction to point at all the stations, what are you going to do? What if one station is monstrously stronger in your location than all the rest? In that case, that station's signal, put through an amplifier, might cause distortion products that will degrade the performance of other channels.

It's a can of worms that I'm really familiar with and that I cannot exhaustively write about. It's a Saturday and I'm not on the clock.

RC has a forum concentrating on TVs, which evolved from a general purpose all sorts of TV forum into more or less a reception forum for Toronto and Buffalo. There's lots of good info there if you look for it.


edit: added the section about VHF channels.

edit: added the section about RC's TV Forum

My personal experience:

I am using the ChannelMaster "Extreme80" (quad bay) at the beach and it works great because all the towers are generally within the direction and range. This antenna is mounted on the roof but the height is only about 18 feet.

I am using the ChannelMaster Omni+50 at the main house since the quad bay would not work there (towers are way off in different directions), and other than needing to be mounted higher, it too is working great. This antenna is mounted using an old DTV sat mount, and is on an extension pole so it's up around 38 feet.


I have a client where there are two quad bays run into a splitter/amplifier and they are mounted at 40 feet. Didn't know it would work since you couldn't do this with analog antenna's but with digital it seems to work fine. This was done in the area of my main house, again due to the way off axis towers.

Use antenna web to find out where the towers are and go from there. Also bear in mind the antenna may not work worth a bean but if you move it laterally it will all of a sudden work like a champ (the wave can get you).

antennas direct is still around. I use one of theirs and get good results.

Back in analog days, I did this a couple of times with VHF signals. Pico/Macom and Qintar both had passive EQs that allowed you to have a separate antenna for each signal if you wanted, and also allowed you to combine amplification and attenuation to get 2 to 13 all at the same signal level.

There never was a similar device for UHF.