Wondering if anyone is currently installing off air solutions.

If so what:

1. Are you using to determine signal strength er channel?
2. What antenna preferences?
3. What pre-amps?

I have some additional questions:

How do you handle wildly different signal strengths and keep the big ones from overloading the amplifier while still dealing with the weaker stations?

Single antenna? Multiple antennae?

How many channels do you support? (More channels stress the amplifiers)

Does your system support both UHF and VHF channels?

It has been taught over & over again, the answer to most of those questions have to do with the market you live in and/or service.
What works for someone in one area of the country, may NOT work for someone else in another location.

I my area:
All the local station's transmitters, are located in 1 spot. With the exception of PBS, which is down the road from the others. All are UHF except for 2 high VHF channels.
The area is flat, no mountains or large hills. If you go up over 100 feet in the air, you can see the curve of the Earth in all directions.

A directional antenna to help with side & rear reflections (multi-path), pointed between the main cluster & PBS. Works 90% of the time here. Only time we need an amp, is when splitting the signal to multiple rooms.

Essential for today's installations (because of so many cell towers everywhere now), is to install an LTE filter on your antenna connection. Especially if you need to use an amplifier - and make sure the filter goes before the input of the amp. And make sure the coax is grounded!!! Not only is this NEC code, but essential for the LTE filter to work correctly. And surge protection!

From what I've been told by ChannelMaster, there is a good chance that when using more than one antenna, stations may end up blocking out each other, so you end up with nothing, although I know someone that is using two antennas and it is actually working.


I get something like 32 channels at the beach but the towers are almost in line. I don't need a amp on that antenna (CM quad bay).

I get about 24 at the main house with the CM Omni+-50, but do need an amplifier since the antenna has very little gain even with the towers being no more than 15 or so miles away.


The Quad bay is UHF only, the Omni+ 50 is both (barely).


I used to have a great analog meter where I could dial in the antenna for each channel. Can't find anything like that for the digital channels.

I use this meter for sat and antenna troubleshooting and installation.

It isn't cheap by the time you get the different modules but it has more than paid for itself.

[Link: techtoolsupply.com]

I'm nowhere near trying to answer all the questions... but here are some things.

My last OTA installation was two years ago. An oddball occurrence was that we got audio, no video, with static on TV channel 5 from Lake Arrowhead!


First, you need a signal level meter. Then you need to decide what portion of the signal you're going to call "the signal" for the purposes of comparing channel levels. I say that because the signal meters I'm familiar with are analog and TV signals don't have one particular carrier like AM did.

As for multiple directions and antennas, it's been guesswork for decades.

A surprise in my history was realizing that sometimes you have to carefully aim AWAY from a strong station in order to improve reception on a weak station. That's because the null of an antenna reception pattern is MUCH deeper than the peak. In Los Angeles, I was able to null out a very strong FM station 1/2 mile from my client so she could receive a low-power station up and over a hill, then 25 miles away.

Back in analog days there were actual splitters made, tuned to the local market channels, that allowed you to get all channels within 1 dB of one another in level.... but only for VHF.

Before you put any energy into VHF, check your area with tvfool, antennaweb.org, or nocable.org (just found this one, haven't tried it). Your area might not use any VHF frequencies.

Get familiar with the channel frequencies (for instance, Ch2 is roughly 54 MHz) while our local CBS is called 2 but it's actually at 36 MHz. Channel frequencies and channel names are not the same. nocable.org does away with the challenge of naming a TV station after the number it used to be or the frequency number it now is. They just name the frequency in MHz, giving you no clue where to tune to get it.


You have to experiment. One client got all channels by pointing east up the adjacent hill toward the transmitters... except for PBS. Its transmitter is on the same mountain as the other channels, but to get it I had to aim due north, 90 degrees from the other stations.


Does it have to? As I mentioned above.

That's similar to the old analog meter I used to have. It allows for individual channel checking, which makes all the difference in the world.

Pretty cool that it will also do satellite. I wouldn't need it often but have been asked to set up a DTV dish a few times last year.


I do get asked to set up off air solutions pretty often so I might just spring for this.

Add these to the lore about TV antennas.

An ex-boss of mine had a job in his twenties as the kid who did minor technical things for a major TV station in Salt Lake City. One customer had antenna problems. The kid rolled the van to check signal strength. Long story short, the customer was some fifty miles from the transmitter and had horrible signal strength. Van had a fifty foot mast and could not get the station. After giving up, he and the customer were chatting while he cranked down the van's antenna tower. At about twelve feet off the ground, the signal was really strong!

Higher antenna does not guarantee better signal. You can't see the signal so you'll never know.


I got horrible ghosting on several channels from an antenna mounted on the single story roof of a retail building. There were many taller buildings between me and the stations, as well as many taller buildings beyond my location. I moved the antenna so it backed up against a 20' high section of wall and the picture cleared right up. The interference was coming from behind the antenna.

Check your antenna specs: directional antennas pick up signals off the back almost as well as signals off the front.


I also solved a similar problem by moving the antenna about ten feet sideways from the expected signal path.


All of this was VHF. On the negative side, UHF is even crazier. On the positive side, digital transmissions are less susecptible to multipath, which is to say ghosting.


With a DirecTV signal, receiver said client wasn't getting enough "signal strength," He insisted on my adding an amplifier to the dish signal. I did. Signal showed lower than before. See, the satellite receiver's "signal strength meter" was a "quality" indicator and the amp delivered a distorted signal.

That same client was getting some TV signals from between two buildings and the antenna worked better not parallel to the ground but at right angles to the ground. I was kinda glad I missed out on that science project.*


*See Post 7 at [Link: remotecentral.com]

In a hilly rural area I was driving on a road where everyone, and I mean everyone, on the upper side of the road had 30’+ antennas and on the downward side everyone had 6’ antennas. All of the antennas were within about 50’ from the road. I didn’t stop to explore the details.

Frank White used to teach a great class on RF, back in the day.

Sadly, I have forgotten much of what I learned, since the demand for solid off air wasn't there for so long.

Kind of fun delving back into sort of old tech. :-)

It is! I have always had an antenna for multiple reasons. One is I still like to listen to the radio (I know) especially when I am working around the house. Two its free. Three emergency situations if cable or internet becomes unavailable.

Last time I lived in CA I lived dead in the middle between Mt Wilson in La and wtf ever the towers were in the inland empire and liked stations from both areas. Had the channel master big ass antenna and a rotor and loved my TV watching and radio listening channels and stations. Same antenna in KY got me Louisville and Lexington stations, live dead in the middle of the two.

Whats old is new again.

In my case what's old IS old..... :-)

Impossible to have a TV station at 36MHz.

True. Good catch. I meant to write that the channel is actually at UHF channel frequency 36. (This happens to be 603.25 MHz.)