On 11/12/2014 2:02 PM, wrote:
On Wednesday, November 12, 2014 4:29:07 PM UTC-5, J Burns wrote:
On 11/7/14, 4:49 PM, badgolferman wrote:
badgolferman wrote:

I bought a GE Enhanced TV attic mount HD antenna (60 mile range) from
Wal-Mart.

http://www.walmart.com/ip/GE-Attic-M...tenna/20976617

I have two TVs in the house, a 42" Sony and a 32" Vizio. My plan is
to install the antenna and run a coax cable from it to the junction
box where the cable comes into the attic.

1) Can I use one antenna for TVs?

2) Does it matter which side of the attic I install the antenna? I
think the stations are closer to the opposite side of my ranch house
than the cable junction.

The instructions are mute on these questions.

I tried out the attic antenna today. It is supposed to have a range of
60 miles and the broadcast towers are around 25 miles south of me. I
pointed it in that direction and hooked it up to the attic amplifier
where the cable comes in. I then auto-scanned for channels on both TVs.

A total of 8 digital channels were detected. Only one of them was HD
and that was the ABC affiliate. All the other channels were local
useless ones I would never watch. I went back up there and moved the
direction of the antenna around a few times and rescanned. Not much
changed. According to the antennaweb.org site all the major affiliates
should be easily reachable for me.

I am dubious of the attic antenna although my friend who lives 5-10
miles closer to the towers is pleased with his. I may get an outdoor
type and try that next.

I believe the government site is better than antennaweb.
http://transition.fcc.gov/mb/engineering/dtvmaps/

If I give them my street address, I get a different list than if I
simply give my zip code. I find it much more accurate than antennaweb.

When antennaweb recommends omnidirectional indoor antennas in some
cases, I'm very skeptical. When they make recommendations in terms of
antenna color coding, I'm very skeptical.

Antennas are often advertized in terms of miles. That's nonsense. The
FCC groups stations by the calculated signal strength at the user's
site; I can even click a button to get the decibels for a station.
That's what the consumer needs to know. It correctly shows that I may
do fine with stations 70 miles away but not with one 11 miles away.

The FCC shows the carrier channel for each station. That's likely to be
different from the DTV channel number. If I miss a channel when I scan,
and the FCC shows I should have a good signal, I can probably get it by
pointing my antenna in that direction and punching in the carrier channel.

By showing the calculated strength of signals from various stations at
your site, he FCC site can help you figure out if there's something
wrong with your setup.


Unfortunatly DTV in the US is very suseptable to multipath. With analog, multipath caused ghosting but the picture was for the most part watchable and ghosting had no impact on the sound. With digital, multipath instead of ghosting, causes blockies and total loss of reception including loss of the sound. But digital can give an excellent picture with a weaker signal as long as there is little multipath. So the best defense against multipath is a directional antenna amimed correctly. But if the reflection is inline with the desired signal , there is not much you can do except hope the engineers develop better demodulators.

Mark


The other problem with the web site is it doesn't know about repeaters.
I get my TV signals from repeaters on Grizzly Mountain, directly West.
The web site thinks the signal is directly South towards Bend, Oregon.

Pretty useless!!!!

Paul