Need help finding the right antenna

[Heiseigodzilla425]

Hello,

I live in an apartment, and I do not have cable or satellite. Since I'm in an apartment, an outdoor antenna is pretty much out of the question - I wouldn't be able to mount it on the roof, or put it on a pole outside my window.

I'll start off by saying that all of the transmitters for all of the stations I should be receiving are on the same mountain. They are within 3 degrees of each other, and they are all within 14.3 and 14.7 miles of my apartment (according to antennaweb). According to antennaweb, we should be receiving these channels (ordered by strongest to weakest signal): PBS, CBS, FOX, ION, NBC. PBS is the only station using VHF, all the others use UHF. My zip code is 24060, I live in southwestern Virginia in the Appalachian mountains. If anyone really wants to look it up, all of the transmitters for these stations are on the northern end of Poor Mountain near Roanoke.

I live in a fairly rural area as far as TV stations go. I have an HDTV with an NTSC tuner, so I just recently got a converter box. When I first hooked up the converter box, we didn't get any channels at all. After trial-and-error placing of my antenna (its a rabbit ear antenna), I managed to finally get CBS and NBC. I decided to upgrade my antenna to an amplified antenna (still rabbit ears). I can now get CBS, NBC, and ION. We still cant get PBS and FOX. My converter box has a signal meter (red - bad, green - medium, blue - great). PBS and FOX are both showing a signal that is just under the green (it wont show any picture or sound at all unless the signal is in the green area). After I upgraded my antenna, the strength of CBS and NBC went from lowish green to lowish blue (even ION went to a high green), but the signal on FOX and PBS is still just under the green area.

I was thinking that the next step would be to upgrade to an indoor directional amplified antenna, but I just wanted to make sure that this would be worth the effort. I am currently looking at the TERK HDTVa antenna, I'll post some links about it at the end of the post.

Newegg

Amazon

[hdtvlabs]

First of all, Terk HDTVa is still a rabbit ears antenna in the VHF band (see the pic below). And the PBS channel you are looking for is in the low VHF. In fact, all indoor antennas are some variation of bunny ears in the VHF, as any other antenna design in this frequency range would be impractically large for indoor placement.

Terk HDTVa

terk-hdtvi.png (9.35 KB) Viewed 400 times

As for the UHF reception (FOX channel) you can do much better than the amplified bunny ears, but I would go for Winegard SS-3000. This antenna is very well made and even on VHF it is likely to provide you with more signal strength than you have now.