Reception without an antenna?
 

I had an interesting situation - wanted to see if anyone has experienced this.

Most of the towers are around 25 miles away - I was using rabbit ears, which worked okay for the main channels, but it was not consistent.. So I decided to get a bigger antenna and put it in the attic.

I cut and stripped the cable in the attic, running down to the outlet in the living room - I also hung the antenna in the attic. However, I did not connect the cable to the antenna as I needed to get an f-connector to install on the stripped cable.

I was just curious, so I hooked a cable up to my tv.. and much to my surprise I picked up quite a few channels, actually better than the rabbit ears in the house.. How?? Simply stripping the cable and leaving it in the attic allowed it to pick up OTA?? I was shocked..

Without a TV Fool report I can only presume your situation is average with many of the stations operating in the UHF frequency range. The wave lengths in the UHF band are short enough that a few inches of wire can act as an antenna element. At 25 miles, the amount of power available is still substantial, enough to overcome the inefficiency of a poorly tuned antenna element. So, no shock or surprise. I've use an unbent paper clip as a UHF antenna... just to demonstrate the idea.

One other possible explanation to consider though, a bad connection between the coax shield and connector shell can cause the entire length of coax to behave like a long wire antenna. If you're having a hard time with reception, give close scrutiny to the connectors, they need to be secure physically and electrically.