Antennas for over the air 8-VSB reception

[Scott Fybush]

At 12:56 PM 9/11/2005 -0700, Matthew Osborne wrote:

>should I buy any special kind of
>antenna, like the "souped up DTV indoor antennas" sold
>at places like Best Buy, or should standard rabbit
>ears with the UHF loop antenna do the trick?  Keep in
>mind that I live in Schenectady, maybe 10 air miles
>from the Helderberg Mtn transmit site for pretty much
>all of the DTV signals in this market.

How are your analog UHF signals from the Helderbergs site? If they're nice 
and clean with the UHF loop antenna, you'll probably do OK using that for 
DTV as well. If they have some multipath (which wouldn't be a surprise in 
Schenectady, where there's some terrain blockage from the Helderbergs), you 
might want to upgrade to a better UHF antenna like the Zenith Silver Sensor.

Adding to the complications in this particular case is the weird DTV 
allocations setup in the Albany market, where several stations are on VHF 
for their DTV signals (WNYT on 12, WXXA on 7, and perhaps WNYA on 4 
eventually, plus WRGB's claim that they will use 6 for their DTV when the 
final selections are made.) This means you'll need a high-band VHF antenna 
- possibly rabbit ears, maybe something better - for NBC and Fox at the 
very least, while many markets will be able to dispense with VHF altogether 
in favor of UHF.

(Rochester's an all-UHF market for DTV now, but two stations - 10 and 13 - 
say they'll go back to those channels for DTV when analog goes away, and 
one of our UHFers is looking at taking channel 8 after it's vacated.)

s