HDTv Antenna LabsAll About HD Antennas
HDTv Antenna LabsDigital TV Antenna is used to receive digital TV signals and is no different from a conventional off-air TV antenna. This is just an ordinary TV antenna that constitutes the front-end of digital TV transmisison system.
The main advantage of digital over analog TV is an inherent noise immunity of digital data communications. This is the reason why digital data transmission techniques have replaced analog schemes virtually in every possible application. First, it happened in cellular telephony with the advent of GSM and CDMA (anyone remembers the analog AMPS cellular systems?), and now NTSC is being put aside in favor of digital formats - SDTV, EDTV and the best of all, HDTV.
Top digital TV antenna reviews:
| Antenna | Average Rating | |
|---|---|---|
| Winegard PR-9014 | 5 | Read reviews |
| Winegard PR-9032 | 5 | Read reviews |
| Winegard YA-1713 | 5 | Read reviews |
| Winegard YA-6713 | 5 | Read reviews |
| Winegard PR-5646 | 5 | Read reviews |
With the analog NTSC television you will typically see a noisy picture when the signal is weak. On the other hand, if digital signal is weak you will not see any picture at all, and if the signal is within the required limit you will see the best one. This threshold is known as "digital cliff" and usually ranges from 35-40 DBµV.
The digital system uses discrete numbers such as 0s and 1s or non-numeric symbols for input, output, transmission, processing, recording and display of information. The real world information such as video and audio is converted to binary format and broadcasted. These signals are then processed by the receiver and the binary information is again converted into the real world information. The use of digital system is that the picture and audio quality is crystal clear and have high resolution. Alll that, however, has no impact whatsoever on the antenna that is used for off air reception of the digital TV broadcasts.
The role of antenna in a TV system is to resonate in the required frequency band, i.e. VHF or UHF, and to transfer the signal to a digital TV receiver with the minimal possible loss. Digital TV antenna is a fiction in a sense that it absolutely does not matter whether the signal is digital or analog. It is a role of a DTV receiver to "look" at the actual signal content and to decode it correctly for a television set. Hence, any regular antenna may work as a digital TV antenna. Give it a try.
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