Quote:
Originally Posted by Jec047
The antenna will be located in my attic. I was thinking about the DB2 or DB4, based solely on how they would fit in my attic. Are these good choices?
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Personal experience with the DB4e in my attic, with a TVFool report very similar to yours as far as LOS, distance to towers, and NM go (but with a 30 degree arc between towers), I've found the antenna to be excellent with UHF and real channel 10, and only pretty good with real 13, which sometimes gets dropouts even though signal strength shows 90-92% almost always.
I added an indoor dipole from a portable TV, with length adjusted to real 13, hanging under the DB4e by its short twin-lead, and connected with a standard 2-way splitter as a combiner, and real 13 now comes in at 100% as well as 10. A real UHF/VHF combiner would be better as far as avoiding signal degradation or loss from the two antennas interacting with each other, but I think I'm going to wait until AD has the dipole kit available for retrofit, as recently discussed in another thread.
I also want to move it outdoors, and an indoor rabbit ears dipole isn't going to last out there, so the real thing would make more sense.
I'm having trouble getting all the stations I want, mostly because it's in the attic, but also because there's a neighbor's house in the way of a group of stations I didn't know I could get until the scan picked them up (weak, but as I said, there's a house in the way). Moving it to the gable end of the garage would clear the neighbor's house, but it would be pointed into a stand of trees. Given the 100% signal strength I get on the one UHF station on the other side of those trees (all the others would be in the clear), even inside the attic, I'm betting moving it outside but pointed into those trees would still give me good reception on that one channel, which comes in at 100% now even though it's 30 miles away and the antenna's in the attic, and allow an unobstructed view of all the other towers.
This is only one data point, of course, but you've gotten good advice above, which is consistent with my experience so far. Though the DB4e can receive some high VHF, the addition of a dipole and combiner would complete the package. Or use separate antennas for high-VHF and UHF and a combiner, or something like the ANT751, which already has all the required bits in one unit.
Even though I have a fair bit of room in my attic, I chose the DB4e because of it's size, allowing me to move it around up there more readily, looking for a sweet spot. My FM antenna really takes up a lot of space, and it's small as antennas go, relatively speaking - I didn't want to deal with the horizontal format of a Yagi type TV antenna, too.
Just some personal observations. Take them for what they're worth.