Quote:
Originally Posted by MartyG
Mike, here's what you do. Buy this for your home, and hook up one TV to it. Turn in that cable box. Keep the cable if you wish for any other TV's. I may someday go back to part-cable, I'd like to have HBO and some other channels. But for right now, the only thing I'm paying for is internet, using my own modem. Amazon.com: RCA ANT800F Flat Digital Outdoor Amplified Antenna: Electronics
|
When cable companies stopped carrying FOX network a couple years ago I built an antenna out of coat hangers and a impedance matching transformer.
http://www.combobulate.com/images/antennapole-sm.jpg
Don't laugh. It picked up a bunch of over-the-air (OTA) channels including FOX and it was free!
Point is you can receive radio frequency over *any* antenna. That said, some antennas work better than others because of the frequencies in use.
All television broadcasts, digital and analog, are in the VHF and UHF radio frequency bands. Over 90% of the HDTV broadcasts are in the UHF, and less than 10% are in the VHF band. That means you need an antenna with good UHF/VHF but favoring UHF bandwidth unlike older antennas that favored VHF. I'm thinking about the one my mom still has on her roof.
What makes a signal to be HD is its content meaning the way a signal is modulated, and not the radio carrier frequency it's transmitted on. It's the job of an HDTV tuner and HD television set to demodulate those signals and to present the actual content on the screen.
Some might disagree with me on this but I've always favored directional TV antennas over omnidirectional because they're better at rejecting signals received from multiple paths. That's what causes "ghosting".
On the other hand the omnidirectional antennas work pretty well even if you can't pull in channels from 100 miles away right? And you don't have to turn them when you change channels.
You have to do what's easiest and most cost effective for you.
Ken
Hey! Here's a thought... Remember when you had to get up (no remotes!) and turn the vertical roll control on your set to stop the rolling pic?