Outdoor HD Tv Antenna

Sam Spade wrote:

Gdetrailer wrote:

haste maker wrote:
We have a Winegard antenna...amplifier is turned on

You are out of luck, it WILL take a much bigger and better antenna to overcome the blockies and freezes.

Not much jumping to unwarranted conclusions here......is there ??
Answer: yes there IS.

You don't have enough information to make that sweeping statement.

For instance: WHICH Winegard antenna do they have ? And do they know that they probably need to turn it to get good reception from EACH channel that they switch to......and each different channel might require rotating it a bit ???

With most of them you can't just stick it up in the air and forget about it.

No, not jumping to conclusions.

The fact is, ATSC signals are not robust at all and is very easy to swamp with noise. It takes a considerable amount of GOOD CLEAN STRONG signal to get a blocky free pix.

The ONLY way to get a good clean strong signal is to INCREASE your antenna size.. THEN apply a good low noise amplifier.

The truth of the matter is a Wingard batwing (or even the fabled "Jack") is a DIPOLE antenna, it gives NO signal gain. Adding a amplifier to a batwing only gives a marginal increase of signal and at the same time the amplifier ADDS NOISE to the very signal it is supposed to be increasing. The result is almost no usable gain in signal.

The larger the antenna is the more signal it has that can be fed into a low noise amplifier.. The result is enough signal to overcome the blockies..

What you used to get away with using for NTSC does not always translate well with ATSC.

For example, I am about 50 air miles from most of the TV stations in my area. I USED to be able to get a dozen stations using nothing more than "rabbit ears".. Those rabbit ears only get me 1 solid station and several blocky stations.

Even my big outdoor 10 ft long antenna that I used for NTSC, I discovered that ATSC does not work well with passive splitters.. Just not enough signal left after going through a 8 way passive.. I ended up buying a amplified coupler which has a low gain, low noise amp on each port for $170..

I also discovered that TREEs block ATSC, I lose stations in the summer when the trees have leaves..

I also discovered that RAIN AND SNOW affects ATSC..

Height above ground also affects ATSC more than NTSC, an antenna placed 20ft in the air tends to work better than one at 10ft in the air.

RFI noise affects ATSC, so converters, inverters, DC brush motors, LEDs with poorly designed switching regulators and even TVs themselves can easily swamp the extremely fragile ATSC signal..

And YES, the FCC knew about these short comings before they approved the final rules.

If you are camping in the woods and more than 20 miles from a transmitter you WILL have blocky stations on a dipole and that includes a amplified dipole.

In a nutshell, there is nothing the OP can do which is going to help the current Winegard. If they want OTA where they camp, they will need to use a bigger antenna OR consider paying for Dish or Direct or rent a bunch of movies..

But, hey, what is the point going camping if your life revolves around the glowing "screen".. Plenty of other ways to use your time camping.