Terk Passive HDTV/UHF/VHF Indoor Antenna 3.8 5 15 16
need to know For indoors at tv site, you dont need an amplifier. amplifiers are for when you split the antenna signal to several tvs, which weakens the signal strength. Signal to noise ratio has the noise in the tv receiver, not outside noise. an untuned antenna amplifier may have more noise than the tuned tv reciever, and can worsen the signal to noise ratio.An antenna has gain, or amplification from its directionality. The more directional, the more gain it has. TheTerk log periodic antenna type has a wide bandwidth, that is it receives signals at all frequencies in its frequency range with about the same gain. I was looking for these features when I was deciding which antenna to get. plus it has the dipole for the vhf channels. One thing you have to realize is that since this is a somewhat directional antenna, when you go into the tv setup mode, if you are pointing the antenna in a direction where there are no stations, you wont receive any, or may receive just a few. If you are in the middle of a city, and the tv antennas of the stations are surrounding you say some distance away, you may just receive a few of the many signals in the setup mode. and your receiver would skip the rest. You would have to manually set up the channels you want to receive, and when you are tuned to that channel, you may have no signal, you may then have to point the antenna at the station (rotate it until you do get a good signal). If you are say twenty miles from a city, you may just be able to point the antenna in the direction of the city, and on setup the tv will pick up most of the tv channels in the city, because they will all be roughly in the same direction.The person who had a problem with the TERK antenna may have experienced two things. The radio stations werent all in the same direction as noted above, and the setup ignored the stations that werent in the direction the antenna was pointed. a second problem is in installing the antenna element into the stand. Theres a sticker on it that says if you can see the red line, the element isnt forced in far enough. I pushed the element in fairly hard, was a little afraid to push harder. and could see the red line. Then I did push harder, and the element snapped into place, the red line wasnt visible, and the antenna performance improved considerably.I live about 20 miles from Cleveland. We can refer to channels. say channel 3, 5, 8, 19, 25 etc. and to subchannels for example chanel 25 has several subchannels, 25-1, 25-2, 25-2, etc. I make the distinction because the digital tv adapter during setup refers to the total number of subchannels received. Usually if you can receive one of the subchannels of a station, you can receive them all, so another issue of interest is how many different channels you can receive.With the Terk antenna, I received channels (and their subchannels) 3, 5, 8, 17, 19, 23, 25, 43, 49, 55, 61. with their subchannels, the setup info noted that i was receiving 27 channels (with the subchannels). Before I had pushed the antenna element into the base properly, I was receiving 17 channels with the subchannels). These 27 channels were with the antenna pointed in one direction, I didnt have to rotate it, it wasnt set up high, it was sitting on top of the television. I could have done a custom setup, located every station in the area, set the digital adapter to all of those stations, and at each station rotated the antenna to try to pick up the station. Didnt do that, I was recieving all of the stations I wanted to and then some.With the old style loop/dipole antenna, instead of the 11 channels listed above (27 with the subchannels), which were all received strongly with the Terk I received 6 channels, one with considerable breaking up of the picture and sound, so 5, and two with occasional breaup of picture and sound, so perhaps effectively 4 channels, so about 1/3 of the channels I was getting with the Terk. And the pictures with the loop/dipole were hazy, washed out, didnt have much contrast, probably because of a low signal to noise ratio.At first I was a bit disappointed, with the TERK it was better than the dipole/loop, but not as good as I'd expected. But when I pushed the antenna element all the way into the base, I thought the performance was very good, and the construction is good. Terk is apparently a division of Audiovox, which produces quality items.The only reason I didnt give 5 stars on features is because the base is a bit narrow, and so its a bit tippy, but as noted, in my use of it, I have it pointed in one direction, dont have to move it, and that may not be a problem, and if it is, it would be easy to make a wider plywood base that isnt tippy.Apologize for the length ,but none of the 4-5 sales people I spoke to had a knowledge of antenna basics. All of them were pushing amplified antennas, which have no advantage as noted above for a tv top antenna. 06/30/2009
It's really great. When I reviewed the rates of this product, I got really confused because some rated 5 and some rated 1 or 2. When I purchased and installed (took only 10 secs) it to my HD TV, wow it's just perfect.I live in a suburb of Cleveland, OH. My son told me that Cleveland suburb is fine, but big city such as Philly where my daughter actually uses this product might encounter some interference.Anyhow Cleveland suburb doesn't have any problem at all. It's great! My son told me that even wire works, but I never tried it. I strongly recommend this product. 07/28/2009
A little step up from old rabbit ears. After the switch because a couple channels changed frequency I was unable to get them when I was getting their digital signal before. With this I was able to get them but still not as good as before. It is pulling in UHF channels from 40 miles away fairly good but has some trouble with a VHF channel from 23 miles away because of the poor way digital signals travel. 07/04/2009
Horrible This antenna is horrible!! I only recieved 4 channels and two of them were the same channel. its huge and ugly. it doesnt fit anywhere. i wouldnt recogmend this to anyone and i returned it. 06/16/2009
