New member here, hopefully posting enough and not too much background for this application.
Here's the TV Fool signal analysis result for 15 ft AGL
The local stations, about 5-1/2 miles out, come in strong on a $2 clip-on bowtie I've had for decades, with about 2 ft of twin lead into a cheap balun right at the TV. Ch 8.1 (45) registers 100% most of the time, and the other close UHF channels are at or above 90%. 10 and 13 on high-VHF are typically in the 80's, without dropouts most of the time, though some days are better than others. That's with the bowtie laying flat near the floor on a stack of DVDs, on the far east end of the house. The signals are passing through and/or around a LOT of walls and even kitchen appliances like the ovens and refrigerator. Not much to complain about there as far as signal strength goes. That bowtie seems to work better than a cheap set-top rabbit ears and loop unit I recently gave away, even on VHF. Go figure.
What I'm trying to do though is get ch 51.1 (23), which is over 30 miles away. For that I need a better antenna.
The only place I can put one is in my garage attic. If I mounted it on the gable end, it would point right into an evergreen, and I don't want to mount to the shingled hip roof. So in the attic it will go, along with my FM6. The only place I can put it so that it's not looking into my neighbor's house, AND so it's not looking into a tree for channel 51.1, is where I've shown on the photo. The roof it would be looking through faces 283 magnetic, so the local stations are only 5 degrees south of that.
But channel 51.1 would result in the antenna pointing into the sea of trusses with their metal joints, and I don't what to make of that. I originally thought an inexpensive 2-bay or 4-bay would be ok, like the U2000 or U4000, given the strong signal on 10 and 13 with just that little 1-bay I'm experimenting with (I know - they're not UHF, but neither is my single bowtie), so I started researching the ANT751 or HBU-11, which come with a mounting bracket for convenience. Or do I need something with higher gain to get 51.1?
The roof is plywood with asphalt shingles, with no metal foil or other signal blocking materials that I'm aware of. It will take about 100 ft of RG-6 with no splitters and hopefully no amplifier to get from the antenna to the TV.
My in-laws down the street have some trouble getting 51.1 with an HBU-22 and amplifier, but that's probably due to the antenna pointing straight into a wall of evergreen hedges only 20 ft away that you can't see daylight through, and which are a good 5-10 ft taller than the 15 ft antenna elevation. So there's nothing I can learn from their installation, I guess.
What would you folks do? I'm trying to keep the cost down, as this is more experimental than practical at this point, though every time I see that cable bill, I get closer to cutting the damn cord.
And the two football games plus the World Series games yesterday were in higher definition OTA than Time-Warner Cable delivered, using a $2 bowtie.
Pics below show what I'm up against, though it looks worse because they're taken from only 6 ft AGL
View from antenna installation for most stations
View from antenna installation for channel 51.1
Mounted to this diagonal, antenna will look into the trusses for 250 magnetic, almost straight out the side for all the others.
Thanks in advance for any and all suggestions.