Question about OTA signals

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ryanjg11

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Aug 16, 2002
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I'm dumping Comcast and my $120 a month cable bill and going OTA. Just purchased a "paper thin antenna" from Amazon and have installed it, going direct into my old Pioneer Kuro HDTV. When I do a channel scan, the TV finds about 14 channels, which is great, but the picture and audio distorts every 10 seconds or so. I've also done the "signal test" in the TV settings and I'm getting a signal strength of around 50-60 out of a possible 100. I'm guessing the low signal strength is contributing to the picture distortion.

I have an HTPC with Windows Media Center, and I'm curious if my results would be any different if I purchased a TV tuner card (like a Hauppage card) and fed the antenna signal into my computer, rather than the television. Is this any possibility that the tuner card might be more sensitive and would receive a better signal? Or is my limiting factor the signal strength of the antenna and there's no getting around that?
 
while its true tuner sensitivity or whatever you want to call it will very sometimes greatly. Its really hard to say for sure. I think antennaweb.org can offer at least a little guidance for what type of antenna is needed for your area. I tried 2 different in door antenna, and even made a 3rd homemade one (which acutally worked the best out of the 3), but all had weak signal. I had to go with an attic antenna to make it work where i live
 
what antenna did you buy? I'd spend the money on a bigger / better antenna before going to a pc tuner.

Use antennaweb or tvfool to find out what direction your tv stations broadcast from and move & align the antenna for line of sight to that direction.

pc tuners used to be more sensitive, but i think the tv ones have surpassed them in the last couple years.
 
phatnadz: i've gone through several generations of OTA tuners. the sensitivity of the built in tuners have gotten better, and now they are all pretty much about the same. your kuro is old enough where it might be 1 or 2 generations old, if you get a modern day tuner it may be better.

The antenna you got doesn't sound like it's right for you. You should get a directional antenna where you can aim it towards the right direction. Unidirectional antennas really drop the signal. In addition, put the antenna as high in the air as possible.

I use an Antennas Direct Clear Stream 4, which I have mounted 20 feet in the air to clear the height of cars. I found that when a car drove by, it would drop my signal enough to loose audio.
 
valve1138 said:
Have you tried moving the antenna?
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This.

Shooting RF through walls is hit or miss, and a few feet of movement can make a difference in an urban environment...as can time of day and weather.
 
You need a signal booster. I needed one for my antenna. I run 2 tv's and 4 computer tuners with it now.
 
I thought they phased out OTA a while back?

We still had our 3 channels here for a while even after the "big phase out" but they recently shut off the transmitters.

Kinda too bad though, OTA was fun when camping. There was always some alien show or something to watch late at night. :p

The newer TVs have really crappy antennas as well probably since the makers assume it will be hooked up to an external source. Mine would not pickup anything while the other older TV I have would pick stuff up fine while it lasted.
 
Red Squirrel said:
I thought they phased out OTA a while back?

We still had our 3 channels here for a while even after the "big phase out" but they recently shut off the transmitters.

Kinda too bad though, OTA was fun when camping. There was always some alien show or something to watch late at night. :p

The newer TVs have really crappy antennas as well probably since the makers assume it will be hooked up to an external source. Mine would not pickup anything while the other older TV I have would pick stuff up fine while it lasted.
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No the point was to free up spectrum, by cutting off analog OTA signals and replacing them with much more compacts digital signals. Catch being, digital signals are either there or not-and crap out far more easily whereas before you might have had a bit of snow you may no longer even get a channel.
 
I've been without cable or satellite for 6 years now. OTA+Netflix+Online Tv shows suites my viewing needs just fine. Here in the St. Louis Mo. area, there are a ton stations broadcasting OTA. You also get a better/clearer picture since the HD signal isn't compressed like it is with cable/sat providers.

If you have a HTPC, consider the HDHomeRun tuner and putting a ClearStream4 from AntennasDirect up in the attic on on the roof. Then log onto AnteneaWeb and find out what direction you need to point it to get the best signal. OTA HD signals are very directional and are best with direct line of sight so a slight adjustment to the left or right can make a huge difference.
 
Thanks all for the advice. I might return this antenna and get a directional unit, though I had the same issues with those in the past. Unfortunately, I'm in a middle unit in a condo right now and my mounting options are very limited.
 
phatnadz said:
Thanks all for the advice. I might return this antenna and get a directional unit, though I had the same issues with those in the past. Unfortunately, I'm in a middle unit in a condo right now and my mounting options are very limited.
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Make sure it is a powered (ampilified) antenna.
 
To clarify, an amplifier is used to boost the signal when your signal is degraded due to a long run, or it's split over too many sources. Typically, each 100 feet of coax cable will drop the signal by half, using splitters will also drop the signal by more than half.

An amplifier is not a solution to boost the receiving signal. Amplifying crap input, will still result in crap output. But if your input signal is good, and your splitting the signal too many times in the house, then the amp will do it's job.

OTA analog was phased out a while back ago. This made room for OTA digital, as now it is being broadcasted at full power.
 
I've just gone through all this so here's my experience. I'm getting (amazingly) about 28 channels/sub-channels with a Mohu Leaf indoor antenna straight to TV. The bad news is half of 'em seem to be religious lol. There's a few getcha's.

You've got to find the sweet spot ... it's worth the time as moving it just a few inches can make the difference between getting stations or not, even when it's pointing in the same direction.

If the TV towers are in different directions then don't plan on getting them all.

If the broadcast frequency is Hi-V (vs UHF) then reception is going to be tougher.

Adding a booster did not help me.

If you add anything like a splitter then signal will degrade or will be undetectable. I discovered this when I added a HDHomerun tuner which has a built-in splitter. A number of channels which I easily pulled straight to TV disappeared with this addition, others exhibited flaky reception. Now I'm limited in what I can record to only those stations with the strongest signals as the HDHomerun is piped to my HTPC and Windows Media Center.

I'm giving some serious thought to installing a roof or antic mounted exterior antenna. The guys over at highdefforum.com are helpful.

TVfool.com is real helpful for showing reception probabilities.
 
arcturus,

you can get two separate antenna's, one for VHF one for UHF and combine them. originally, i was going to mount both a clear stream 4 (UHF) and clear stream 5 (VHF), but after installing the clear stream 4, my signal was perfect on all major network channels. In my area, the VHF was only useful for the non-english and religious broadcasts, so i didn't even bother with it.

Check http://www.antennaweb.org/ to see what you need.
 
arcturus said:
I've just gone through all this so here's my experience. I'm getting (amazingly) about 28 channels/sub-channels with a Mohu Leaf indoor antenna straight to TV. The bad news is half of 'em seem to be religious lol. There's a few getcha's.
Click to expand...

I just purchased one of these antennas, just the plain one without the amplifier. Towers are about 15 miles away as the crow flies, and the wall it's on is not in the right direction. None of the windows are either.

I just set it on the speaker next to the TV and got all of the major channels broadcast in UHF without a problem. Unfortunately, all the PBS stations and NBC broadcast in Hi-V in this area. Took the antenna, used painters tape to tape it to the wall directly behind the TV, and I seem to get good signal on the Hi-V stations now too.

As soon as The Newsroom and Suits are over, gonna be calling Comcast to drop the cable and selling my Ceton =)
 
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