[mtownsend]

Since you are in between Sacramento and San Francisco, you have access to either market or both.

Going after both markets will make things more difficult.

Can you live with just SF channels or just Sacramento channels?



If we ignore KTVJ-LP (ch 4), then you can go with either the Antennacraft HBU family of antennas or the Winegard HD769xP family of antennas. Your choice of small, medium, or large versions of these antennas depend on how far down into the "red" channels you want to go.

The biggest versions of these antennas will probably give you reliable reception on stations with NM numbers down to about -5 dB if you have a pre-amp, and maybe 0 dB without. These are very rough estimates, of course, and your actual performance will depend on a lot of things like length of cable run, number of splits, trees/buildings/other obstacles in the environment, weather conditions, etc. If you choose a smaller antenna, you risk losing more of the channels toward the bottom of the list or at least more frequent breakups/dropouts on some of the channels.

There's no sure-fire way to tell how good/bad things will be until you try it. In the interest of minimizing the number of trial-and-error iterations, most people choose to go with the larger/safer option first (if they can get away with it). No setup will ever be completely 100% perfect (no pixellation, no dropouts) all of the time. Big antennas help you avoid viewing disruptions as much as possible.



Again, you can only get the channels from one metro or the other depending on which way you point the antenna. If you really want both metros, you're either looking at installing a rotator or an A-B switch. Combining two antennas (each pointed at a different metro) into one feed will probably not work very well. This would reduce the effective gain you get from each antenna, and will probably result in you losing most of the weaker channels.