Hi all, I'm looking for some sage advice. With the Comcast digital changeover I planned on ditching them because of the converter boxes taking the previous basic HD channels I received and downgrading them to SD - way to inform your customers on that one!
In my previous residence near Minneapolis I had a Monoprice antenna that worked really well (
this one). I was 14 miles from the broadcast stations and picked up 20+ channels.
I've moved further southwest of the broadcast towers for Minneapolis and am now 20 miles from their location.
My signal analysis report:
http://www.tvfool.com/?option=com_wr...e1c655da9321ac
I tried the Monoprice antenna in my new location and was able to pick up some stations, but it was spotty even with the power inserter. So I did some searching for good HD outdoor antennas and purchased a RCA Ant751 based on reviews (prior to finding this wonderful site/forum). Now I get most of the stations on one TV and only a few on the MCE machine with an Avermedia Duet (
here). I've tried the power inserter and it seems to help a bit.
Here is the setup I have. The Ant751 is on the peak of my garage mounted on the Jpole and base roughly 13' from the ground. I have a 100' of coax (used previously with the monoprice antenna and worked superbly) running into my basement, then into the Monoprice power inserter and directly into one 2-way splitter (supplied by Comcast previously), then 6' of RG6 (also Comcast cable) to my MCE and the tuner card and the other end on 50' of RG6 (already present then I purchased the house) up through to a bedroom with a Vizio LCD (5 years old).
I want which is just the major networks - CBS, ABC, Fox, NBC and our local PBS (Real channels 11, 32, 35, 9, & 34). These are the only channels I care about.
The Vizio gets everything direct or on the splitter, only PBS shows less that 100% strength and that's still at 84%. The MCE machine and tuner gets Fox and NBC (9 and 11), but everything else is blocky/broken up and audio cuts in & out.
I've tried the antenna feed direct to the MCE tuner card with and without the power inserter and still can't the channels I want. The odd thing is before I actually mounted the antenna on the roof I screwed the base into two 2x4s and had it in the same spot and got everything on both the TV and MCE machine - full signal strengths on both. Screwed the base into the roof and rechecked and that's where I'm at now.
To compound issues I need to aim the antenna through some mature trees and a hill across my culdesac which also has a water tower on it, almost directly in the path from what can discern from a smartphone compass app (yes I know I'll be buying a real magnetic compass for this just to be accurate).
Question being is the RCA the right antenna for me for the channels I want. I really don't care about the rest on the signal analysis list, just the major networks (and their sub channels if possible).
Any help or recommendations are greatly appreciated!