Best Terrestrial/OTA HDTV Setup For an Apartment?

thesandbender writes "I don't watch TV but keep an HTPC for watching movies. One of my relatives is very ill and I'll have a lot of family rotating through my apartment and I'd like to have a few more options for entertainment. I'm running Vista MCE and bought a Hauppauge HVR-1800 with a DB8 HDTV antenna and I've used AntennaWeb to point the DB8 in the best direction. The results have been terrible and I'm looking for recommendations / suggestions for hardware and setup. I am on the first floor of a three-story apartment building and I can't mount any external antennas (I know this is a major issue). Thankfully almost all the transmitters are located in the same place so a good, compact directional antenna might be effective. And please... no platform bashing. They all have their issues (I have a lot of h.264 encoded files... hardware/GPU acceleration on Linux is very, very limited at the moment)."

Not enough gain?

[ColaMan]

Try a masthead antenna amplifier. Get a good quality one and (hopefully) it will help compensate for the god-awful frontend in your TV tuner.

(Yes, I know masthead amps are really to compensate for long cable runs, but a low noise amp at the front upping things by 10-12dB is sometimes all it takes.)

Another antenna with good results (for me) ...

[HP-UX'er]

... is the WINEGARD SS-2000 16" Square Shooter HDTV Antenna [newegg.com]. It looks a lot better, and comes with its own mounting equipment. Can also be mounted on existing satellite antennas.

This Works For Me

[shotfire]

I made a modified version of this with some wire, cardboard, and tin foil. Works great. I have a house and this is used on the first floor, mounted right beside a window:
http://members.shaw.ca/hdtvantenna/ [members.shaw.ca]

I am in the process of making this, but the first one works so well, I've kind of put it off...(at least until after the Olympics):
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/762088/coat_hanger_hdtv_antenna_better_than_store_bought_amazing/ [metacafe.com]

The key is that they are directional, to be fair, I do have to turn it around a lot for certain stations, but where I'm at they are all more or less due south.

May be too much signal strength

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a similar problem, but the issue was not too little signal gain, but too much. How close are you to the network towers? I live in the Pittsburgh area and because I'm so close to the towers, I actually point my antenna towards the center of the state and pick up the broadcasters out of central PA. Reception is 1000% better now.

Also, reception is going to be better at night as a general rule.

Build GPL Gray-Hoverman antenna

[SEWilco]

Build the Gray-Hoverman antenna [slashdot.org] which we discussed recently. It's a grid plane with a few bent wires in front.

Re:amplified antenna

[elrous0]

Why does Radio Shack always seem to discontinue everything they have that ISN'T complete crap? I was looking for a omnidirectional mic the other day there only to find they had discontinued their best model.

It's like they're DETERMINED to suck.

Watch out for digital channels moving to VHF band

[dpbsmith]

I haven't been able to get a completely straight answer to this, but... I believe the following three facts to be true:

a) Most "HDTV" antennas sold today are UHF-only.

b) All digital TV being broadcast today is being broadcast on UHF.

c) Come February 2009, when analog stations stop broadcasting on VHF, SOME stations that are currently broadcasting a digital signal in the UHF band will CHANGE THEIR FREQUENCY ALLOCATION TO VHF.

According to AntennaWeb, one example of this is WHDH-TV, "Channel 7", the Boston NBC affiliate and a major, popular station.

So, if I'm correct, some people who think they're up and running and all ready for February will be very surprised to see some DIGITAL stations they're CURRENTLY receiving go black in 2009, when the station shifts to a frequency their antenna isn't built for.

if I'm correct, this is going to be a major headache for the few who have bothered to prepare for digital, and one for which there is no publicity at all.

The reason I keep saying if I'm correct is that the salesman at You-Do-It, a great Boston-area electronics store that has a huge selection of antennas and antenna-related paraphernalia says I'm wrong, wrong, wrong. I hope he's right and I'm wrong.

Re:Not enough gain?

[punterjoe]

I'll second that. A 5th gen ATSC chipset is much better than earlier models, but from my experience it really comes down to gain. I live in an RF hell-hole: near the bottom of the tallest hill in town, across the street from a huge 19th century cathedral (with cellphone nodes in the steeple btw) in a groudfloor apt almost 50 miles from the Boston area antenna farms. That I can get ANY ATSC reception is pretty amazing. I do it all with lots (>60db) of RF amplification. BTW - this makes NTSC unwatchable since it ups the noise & multipath, but it seems to get over the "cliff" for my ATSC tuner, and I get hardly any blockiness or bluescreens (muting). My advice, from what worked for me would be get the biggest antenna (best gain) you can tolerate & amp it up. Since all your stations are in the same direction, at least you can skip a low-gain omni. fwiw - I briefly considered placing a huge outdoor antenna above my dropped ceiling, but managed to avoid that extreme method. :)

Re:Stay away from Best Buy

[sampas]

Signal strength is NOT the only issue. The US digital TV standard, 8VSB, is particularly sensitive to multipath interference. On plain old TV, multipath (radio signals bouncing off everything) led to ghosting in your tv image. In 8VSB, it means you don't get a successful decode. To quote from the FCC field test of 8VSB:

"The field test data also indicate that indoor reception of DTV signals is more challenging. Indoor service availability ranged from 75-100 percent in cities with a small to moderate percentage of obstructed sites and from 31-40 percent in markets with a large percentage of obstructed sites."

( http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology/Documents/reports/dtvreprt.pdf [fcc.gov] ") New technology was supposed to improve indoor reception, but it hasn't, and there's going to be a whole lot of people that can't get DTV over the air next February. Just a minor technical detail from your government.