OTA (Over the Air) Attic Antenna for local channels - What do you use?

pb4uski said:
That one of the things that I like about my set up. Attic antenna to signal booster to Fire TV Recast... all in the attic... very short run.

And then the live TV or recorded shows are "broadcast" to tvs via WiFi so no long runs of coax for the signal to decay.
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I've never heard of the recast. Thanks. I will read up on them.
JP
 
JP.mpls said:
I've never heard of the recast. Thanks. I will read up on them.
JP
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Yes. Recast had been discontinued. Support remains for another few years. It is only for Firesticks. For the Roku, and other streaming devices look at Tablo. It does that same WIFI broadcasting. There are likely other devces. I believe that these are the most recognized brands.
 
Post #23 is good info on why you should test an antenna on a single tv with no splitters.
Once you get a good signal to that single tv you can then add an amplified splitter with the required number of additional ports for other tvs.

Sent from my moto g power using Early Retirement Forum mobile app
 
Will solar panels on roof be a major impact on an antenna in the attic?
 
I live in a Phoenix suburb, so stations are 25-45 miles away. I have tile roof. I have antenna in attic, with an in-line booster. I get good signals, and I am anticipating better signals when all the transmitters are upgraded to the new digital signal.
 
statsman said:
At those distances from the towers, all sorts of issues can appear. Honestly, I would try an antenna outside the house first (don't mount it) just to see if even that would work before considering an attic antenna. I figure an attic antenna wouldn't work for us because of the radiant barrier on the roof here in Central Texas.
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I too am in Central Texas and have 2 antennas in our second story attic with radiant barrier and have no problem with reception at all.
 
Majorgym said:
I too am in Central Texas and have 2 antennas in our second story attic with radiant barrier and have no problem with reception at all.
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I think a lot depends on where you are in relation to the towers.

Sometimes you can be too close and a little attenuation actually helps.

And there's an element of FM to this. "FM" you say? Yeah, in electrical engineering school, we called field theory "Freaking Magic", although we might have substituted for the first word. I hated every minute of my fields class and really have no idea how I survived. I found it instructive that the class was named "Electromagnetic Field Theory", as if this is still a work in progress to be proved.
 
I use an Amazon Recast OTA DVR. I live < 10 miles from our community’s antenna farm. However, antennas are a bit spread apart and so antenna aiming is crucial. First I bought an antenna rated for 30 miles located in my attic aimed directly at the transmitters. Not great. The signal attenuation through common framed wall and shake roof was unacceptable pulling in ~30 channels with network channels suffering from low signal strength. Next moved to dual element 50 mile antenna. Improved but not great, picked up a few more channels. Next mounted the antenna to the outside of the wall aimed carefully and get 50+ channels. The problem is the Antenna is mounted about 35’ above grade clearing my roof line and is a pain to aim. I also added an in line powered amplifier and that helped signal strength further. I went with an incremental approach over several months till I constructed a system that worked for my situation.
Trees, rain and snow all degrade the signal strength so keep that in mind. Try and get more signal than you think you need. Btw, the Recast box offers streaming of your local channels anywhere you have access to the internet.

Another thought. Might be easier to just stream Pluto or other free commercial supported apps to access your TV watching.
 
How does reception of OTA signals compare nowadays with how it was with analog TV signals years ago? Yes, I know the difference in reception with digital and analog--digital is either all in or you can't receive it, whereas analog signals could have varying degrees of reception.

I'm also taking into consideration that the old analog signals were mostly VHF signals (with some UHF) and digital signals are UHF signals.

Specifically, suppose you had an antenna in your attic in 2000 which got great reception of analog OTA signals, both VHF and UHF. Nowadays, you install a UHF antenna for digital OTA signals in that same attic and point it at the required coordinates. I know there are a lot of variables, but could you expect to have similar reception?

I ask in the context of the construction of the roof and the building materials blocking the signal.
 
ShokWaveRider said:
Indoor Antennas simply do not work for us.

I would like to hear from folks that have successfully installed an Attic antenna (Not on the Roof) with success to get local TV channels. Especially those with personal experience.

Specifically, those who are about 35 - 50 miles from their local Transmitting towers and have a concrete or clay tile roof (Not Asphalt).
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Have you considered installing an outdoor antenna on a simple pole mount attached to the side of the house? I think this would probably be the only way to get good results with an OTA antenna at your house, with its tile/stone roof. I did this many years ago, with the pole attached to the side of my chimney, and it's working extremely well for me. I had tried an attic mount first, but the signal levels were terrible. Simply moving the antenna outside—just sitting haphazardly on the roof at first, as a test—dramatically improved the reception quality. IMHO, just figure out the easiest, cheapest way to get an antenna outside the house. The higher the better, but "outside" is the key.
 
Qs Laptop said:
I'm also taking into consideration that the old analog signals were mostly VHF signals (with some UHF) and digital signals are UHF signals.
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Actually, the latter is not true. Most TV stations today do broadcast in the UHF band, which is generally easier to pick up at distance and with a smaller antenna. But some TV stations got stuck in the High-VHF (channels 7-13) and Low-VHF (channels 2-6) bands. Low-VHF is brutal for OTA reception, requiring very large antenna elements, but even then they are still difficult to pick up. Read about 6abc in Philadelphia for some real horror stories. High-VHF is workable, far better than Low-VHF, but nowhere near as good as UHF.

The Fox affiliate out of Austin TX, KTBC, is broadcast on High-VHF channel 7. It's on the same antenna farm as the other major networks (all on UHF), but from our distance, Fox is the weakest signal but solid enough.

Part of the reason some TV stations are stuck in the VHF bands is those stations (and companies that own them) have been selling off their UHF bands to the cellular companies. Some of it has been under government direction reserving bands for the cellular companies ("direction" being a kind word here). What used to span channels 14-83 for UHF now has been trimmed down to channels 14-36 for digital TV broadcast.
 
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Sojourner said:
Have you considered installing an outdoor antenna on a simple pole mount attached to the side of the house? I think this would probably be the only way to get good results with an OTA antenna at your house, with its tile/stone roof. I did this many years ago, with the pole attached to the side of my chimney, and it's working extremely well for me. I had tried an attic mount first, but the signal levels were terrible. Simply moving the antenna outside—just sitting haphazardly on the roof at first, as a test—dramatically improved the reception quality. IMHO, just figure out the easiest, cheapest way to get an antenna outside the house. The higher the better, but "outside" is the key.
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I am thinking I will wait till ATSC 3.0 is available at my location. I personally do not want to install an external antenna. I would have to watch it carefully in Hurricane season. Sadly all the decent channels in my area are on VHF. All the UHF channels work OK, but not VHF Low or high.
 
The biggest difference between reception with old signals versus new digital is the experience when things go bad.

In the old days, it meant snow, ghosting, and static in the audio.

Today, it manifests as blocky artifacts, and drop outs in audio. The audio drop outs are extremely annoying. I'd rather have a little static.
 
I didn't see one thing mentioned yet, so I'll volunteer it, since it was the way I solved weak OTA: put your tuner in the attic and tune via WiFi. My watching was already on a media computer connected to a big monitor (really a TV, but I don't use its tuner). And since I had cat5 already, I use that instead of WiFi.

The second TV, which I didn't even want, but was an inheritance, needed connection, so I rigged a raspberry pi with Kodi. Not the best user experience, but you can get used to it.

Of course, putting the tuner in the attic means a very short run of coax and accompanying low signal loss. I use HDHomerun, but there are lots of options.
 
What do you mean by "tune via WiFi"?

Sounds like you mean "broadcasting" audio and video from the tuner in the attic to the TV's via WiFi. If so, that is exactly what the Fire TV Recast does and part of why I like it.
 
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JoeWras said:
The biggest difference between reception with old signals versus new digital is the experience when things go bad.

In the old days, it meant snow, ghosting, and static in the audio.

Today, it manifests as blocky artifacts, and drop outs in audio. The audio drop outs are extremely annoying. I'd rather have a little static.
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We'd experience this sometimes at our old place. We were NW of the Chicago towers, and storms here tend to come from the West or NW. So a storm could spend an hour between us and the towers. Our attic antenna got all the stations, but we didn't have a lot of margin, so sometimes those storms would make it near impossible to watch/listen to weather notices on TV. Yes, the sound breaking up was the worst. The brain can deal with a *lot* of noise/static/snow and still manage to get most of it, but those digital breakups just lose everything for a while.

It would have been nice if they had provided some sort of very low-fidelity voice information, or maybe even a closed caption type signal that was broadcast at a low data rate and with lots of redundancy, so it could be recovered under those conditions. At least you'd have something. Maybe the newer system includes some of this approach (I think it is technically feasible)?

-ERD50
 
pb4uski said:
What do you mean by "tune via WiFi"?

Sounds like you mean "broadcasting" audio and video from the tuner in the attic to the TV's via WiFi. If so, that is exactly what the Fire TV Recast does and part of why I like it.
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Yep, but the Recast is no longer being produced and sold as new. Once again, another useful consumer product disappearing.
 
Yeah, I'm hoping that mine doesn't fail, but if it does I have a friend who bought a brand new one a couple years ago and never used it.
 
What type of compass do you use to set your antenna direction?

I do not find my Cell Phone is accurate enough. I have 4 Apps.; 2 compass and 2 Antenna direction finders. At any given time, they can read different True or Magnetic north Degrees.

I cannot see any reasonably prices commercially available standalone digital compass' being any better. Analog compass' are too hard to pinpoint to a specific direction. I am trying to find 338* Magnetic North for my location. I can get close, but never perfect and it changes every time I check it.

Any ideas would be appreciated.
 
ShokWaveRider said:
What type of compass do you use to set your antenna direction?

I do not find my Cell Phone is accurate enough. I have 4 Apps.; 2 compass and 2 Antenna direction finders. At any given time, they can read different True or Magnetic north Degrees.

I cannot see any reasonably prices commercially available standalone digital compass' being any better. Analog compass' are too hard to pinpoint to a specific direction. I am trying to find 338* Magnetic North for my location. I can get close, but never perfect and it changes every time I check it.

Any ideas would be appreciated.
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I don't. I use Google Maps 'satellite view' to determine the angle of the house to the towers.

From there, fine tune by turning the antenna and checking the signal quality on the TV (usually in some sub menu of the tuner).

-ERD50
 
^ That's what I did too. Printed a page with house alignment and arrows to the different tower farms.
 
I don't mean to hijack the thread, but is there a hardware option that would allow an app to control access to your antenna (Like on a roku) and DVR type functions, or are you basically committing to using your TV tuner when you go with an antenna?
 
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