Hi Everyone...well I have gone through numerous antennas from a channel master 4 bay to an 8 bay ... at least 4 different digiwave yagis and my last major pair of antennas were antennas direct AX91G's. I have a pair of CM7777 pre-amps and 2 100' drops of quad shield rg6.
My antenna systems are at 30 ft above ground. I'm in the northeast end of Guelph.. N1E-3P7
Anyhow since the re-allocation of ch9 and ch11 I essentially lost those channels (or I had no visible signal strength on the TV).
I had the opportunity to try an Eagle star antenna over the long weekend. I was at Guelph lake at a campsite picking up my daughter.. The camper onsite asked if I could look at his TV /antenna solution as it was not working.. he essentially had 50' of rg58 no pre-amp. and an eagle star antenna mounted on a 5' broomstick held upright by a christmas tree stand... We were in the lull of the valley with a 40' bluff of trees directly in our path to Toronto as well as shooting in between motor homes and pop up trailers..
I told him I would expect to see nothing but I'd give it a go..he had an HD converter box which was not selected properly on the LCD tv input.. We got it sorted out and scanned. I stepped out of the camper figuring there would be "no channel detected"..
I came back in and low and behold he had CBC 5.1/TVO 19.1 and Global 41.1!!!!
I was not expecting this...... I did some research and found out that there are a few versions of this antenna. The box information is pretty cheesy. I'm an RF engineer by trade and there was no way based on the box information that it should make the claims it did!!....There is a pre-amped version but apparently the pre-amp is not very good with dips and valleys in the response curve and subject to overload.
I purchased the passive version 53-6165-1V and put it up top at 11:00 today.. I dropped the XG91 down and put the coax to the eagle star not expecting much to occur.. SO I had the same pre-amp cable and cable length that was on the XG91... The eagle star received ALL of the channels I was receiving as well as the missing ch9 and flaky ch11... I went from 0 signal strength on channel 9 to 78 %.. I was also picking up ch23 off the side of the antenna at 70% and it's still at that level tonight (actually a little higher).
So off-shore manufactured or "cheap".. whatever you care to say... I have had success with this unit and it's asthetically pleasing to the neighbors. and for $39.00 it was the best bank for a buck. I now have 2 of them deployed, one pointed towards Totronto the second pointed towards Buffalo..
