[acat]

Rabbit73:
Thank you for the wonderful analysis and point-by point reply. I will spend quite some time looking into these and absorbing the information.

Today the weather has been such that the Symbol Quality has been quite good and both the VHF and UHF antennas work. It's cloudy. The VHF antenna has a good 10 dB gain over the UHF for channels 7 & 9, but that does not seem to matter of course because of the multipath effects.

At one point during the day CH7 had a 100% Symbol Quality at the same time, adjacent CH9 was zero. I did a spectral scan. I've attached the figure. I may be going overboard here but it looks as if the "hash" for Channel 9 is really a band while CH7 seems to be narrower in the width of the hash. Perhaps I'm reading too much into the difference.

Anyway I had been thinking along the line you suggested by putting the antenna in a trash can. I was thinking of getting some fairly open wire mesh and wrapping it around either the VHF or UHF antennas to see if that helps.

BTW I get a measurable signal with a simple dipole and was thinking of putting an amp on it and shielding it to reduce signals coming in from the side.

Thanks again for the great information!