By Martin Jansen, Owner of Jansen-PCINFO
As a companion article to my writing about the Landscape of Streaming Services, those truly interested in ‘cutting the cord’ need a great antenna to allow viewing of digital TV stations. Without an antenna, modern over the air TV watching often involves pixelation and outright signal loss.
Don’t Waste Money
There are plenty of cheap antennas available through online and big box stores. RCA is still a big name in various types of antennas, but only their modern outdoor antennas are any good. Don’t buy the many brands of flat antennas designed for indoor use. Here are a few images of what not to buy:
These antennas are not directional and likely will not pull in all available stations in the area.
But even directional antennas from China are often click bait and will not perform as needed:
Some of these claim ridiculous range reception like 150 to 320 miles. Any antenna can pull in some channels when close enough to the transmitting towers, but the real test of an antenna is how it performs in bad weather, blowing wind and through waving tree branches.
Here in Northeast Wisconsin our primary stations originate in the Green Bay area.
Commercials
In order to economize streaming services viewers have to accept that commercials are the new normal (commercial free viewing costs much more). Therefore, it makes little difference if watching over the air tv or streaming tv as far as commercial content is concerned. Although it seems some stations specialize in presenting commercials rather than the shows people actually want to see.
Old Antenna
Back in 2016, I purchased a GE Attic Mount Digital TV Antenna, which was OK for many years. A link to a new version is on Amazon. As indicated, this is mounted in the attic with a quality RG-6 Coaxial Cable leading to a Channel Master amplifier before being distributed to all our TVs. But honestly, the build quality on the GE antennas is terrible – a six foot drop to the floor would break the antenna.
A few weeks ago we had awful air quality in the Fox Valley from the Canadian tree fires. This persisted for several weeks. The old GE antenna was having trouble pulling in the subchannels from the TV Towers in the Green Bay area. My wife wanted to watch MeTV and Hogan’s Heroes before going to bed, but the pixelation and signal loss made it impossible to watch. This started me on a search for better options.
From a streaming standpoint Frndly TV offers about 50 channels, duplicating many of the channels you could get with a decent over the air antenna.
But what if I could get a better antenna to pull in all stations reliably?
Perfect Antenna
I finally found the perfect antenna made by an American company. Antennas Direct makes the best antennas for this area. I purchased the ClearStream MAX-V as an open box on eBay paying roughly half the cost.
If you want to buy new, here are links on Amazon and Walmart.
With the new antenna in place, we scanned for all available stations on each TV and
I was able to pull in 45 channels. Here is a link to all the stations I was able to pull in: Available TV Stations in the Fox Valley and Green Bay Area
HDHomeRun
Also connected to the new antenna is a SiliconDust HDHomeRun Flex 4K ATSC 3.0 NextGen TV: 2/4 Tuners HDFX-4K which allows us to view television on all my devices. And, along with Plex TV, we can record shows. In the advanced settings of the recordings we can ask the system to skip commercials. It does take a while to process these skipped commercials using my computer’s CPU which is also the plex server.
Conclusion
Now we are able to watch over the air television without fear of pixelation and signal loss. We have more channels and can record the shows we want, watching them when convenient.