Just my two cents,
First off, the proper way to receive UHF is by putting your antenna outdoors.
Who ever and for what ever reason - decided to put their antenna in their attic is just kidding themselves when they think that they can do it and not pay a price.
The price of using a indoors antenna is that even with a stick built home with 2x4 studding and 1/2 inch drywall and 5/8th plywood on the outside and plastic siding, you are going to loose no less then 6 db of signal.
The proper way to receive a signal is to put the antenna as high up in the air as possible, as far away as possible from a noise source - electric wires, electric switches, electric motor brush noise, ignition noise etc.
Did any of you ever hear of height gain? The normal difference in gain between a fringe signal at 25 ft vs 35 feet is about 6 Db. So by mounting your antenna high up above the roof and outside, you just got 6 Db of gain.
Amplifiers - no matter what you call them, amplifiers, pre amplifiers etc is just that, a amplifier. It cannot in a digital world replace lost data. All it can do is take a good signal and boost it to over come loss, such as long runs of wire and splitter loss. I have had heated discussions as to the loss of barrel connectors and F terminals. The reason for loss in a barrel connector is due to the fact that you are removing the shield from around the wire when you splice it onto a F connector. The loss of the shield is what causes the loss - as much as the loss in the terminal due to the fact that it is not a direction connection.
To understand how the RG 6 works, you first have to understand something called a Faraday Cage.
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Basically what it explains is that with a good wire, you will have less loss and less noise left into the wire then with a poor conductor. So it is very important to use as good of wire as possible. The Walmart junk they sell in stores just doesn't cut it.
If a person does not have any problems with reception, they are not on the internet asking for advice. PERIOD!
Wood and plastic by themselves do not block reception. But the moisture in the wood will block reception. A piece of aluminum flashing 6 inches wide can block a signal. Asphalt shingles on the roof will not block your signal, but the moisture under or on top of the shingles will. Some building materials such as stone or concrete makes a building opaque to reception, as does aluminum foil on the building insulation both on the walls or on top of the ceiling below the attic where you are trying to get reception.
It is best to take the best signal you can get, amplifiy it with a amplifier that can make enough gain to overcome the long runs of wire and the splitter loss and still produce the best signal with the lowest amount of loss from noise.
Once you hit the signal noise floor, the signal is lost forever and that is it. No amount of amplification will over come it.
The problem with places like Washington and Oregon is that when you have a transmitter on one side of the mountain and a house on the other side or deep down into a valley where the signal passes over their heads and does not hit the ground,, the UHF signal refuses to travel through the mountain or down into the valley, and you are left with a high signal but with no place for it to go.
UHF is line of sight, you can compare UHF to a flashlight analogy.
If you shine a light up into the sky, the light does not come back down and shine on the ground unless it has something that can reflect it back to you.
If you shine a light to the north, you will not have any light to the south and vice verse. If you shine a light at the side of a hill, it will not travel through the hill and it will not travel up over one side and down over the next. If you shine it up over a mountain, it will not shine down into the valley below.
VHF is like sound. If you shout, a person inside of a building can hear you. Sound will travel up over one hill and down over the next. Sound will go around corners while light will not.
People have all kinds of experience with VHF - because television stations have used VHF for over 60 years. It's when you try to take VHF technology and apply it to UHF that you get yourself into trouble.
Here is a very good point. There is a station in Altoona PA - WTAJ (1000 Kw), on the other side of the mountain 10 miles away is a transmitter for WJAC (5000 Kw). The people in Johnstown cannot watch WTAJ on UHF due to the fact that the mountain is taller then the transmitter antenna. At the same time the people in Altoona cannot watch WJAC from their main transmitter on UHF - even though there is only 10 miles of separation between the two.
The stations are forced to put up translators to cover the lost area or loose that portion of the audience. The cable companies and Sat TV providers all loves this situation - due to the fact that when reception is lost, they are all more then happy to come out and for $50 a month restore your service. But the television broadcasters are reluctant to put up translators to serve a couple more viewers in a down economy.
The second example is WWCP - Fox TV 8 out of Johnstown and WATM out of Altoona. Neither station could afford translators - both station is owned by the same person, even though one station lists Palm Communications as it's owner and the other I think is Primemedia. To conserve money, they petitioned the FCC and got approval to use each others transmitters to broadcast their signal into the adjacent market. WWCP uses its high def channel to broadcast their signal and uses it's sub channel to broadcast WATM's signal. WATM uses it's channel - 23 ( Actual channel 24) to broadcast in High Def and uses it's sub channel to broadcast WWCP's signal into the Altoona market. Without this permission, both stations ran the risk of the lights being turned off and transmitters being shut off.
The next step is the connector it's self.
Anything that is easy to push on is also easy to fall off. If I had a $1 for every connector that I threw away in the last year, I wouldn't need to look for a job next week. I gave away my compression terminal tool and I would not have another one for the simple reason that when you push on the terminal - it is as tight as it will ever get. After a couple of heat cycles, the insulation on the outer jacket of the coax shrinks and the terminal falls off.
The same is true with a crimp on connector. Unless you follow good crimping practices and use some sort of weather proof, you are going to have nothing but problems. Electrical tape and anti seize is the best medicine for a crimp on terminal.
The other thing is using the right antenna for the job. You would not use a 1/2 ton pick up truck to haul 20 tons of coal. You would get a 20 ton truck and haul it all in one load. The same is true when it comes to a antenna. There is a certain size of antenna that must be used to receive a signal properly. Unless you use a antenna that is large enough to receive that signal, plus a extra little something for when the weather try's to block your signal, or when tropo floods in your signal in the summer and then falls off in the winter and you are left with no signal at all.
You do not use a small antenna and then amplify it to get the best reception, you use the proper sized antenna and even a antenna rotor - when you have signals from more then one direction to properly aim the antenna for best results.
Even in my situation, channel 6 - WJAC which is a 5000 KW station has sparkles in the picture when I have the antenna pointed a little off center of the signal, and I am only 40 miles from the transmitter. With a Winegard 8200U antenna and a Channel Master CM 7777 pre amp!
Just like with the flashlight, if you point it north, you will not have light to the south. Yes you can receive some signals off the side and back of a antenna, but that is not the proper way to receive a signal.
When ever a signal - market is all UHF, I usually recommend a XG 91 or a Channel Master 4228 HD antenna.
When you have a mixed bag of signals, I usually recommend a 769_P Winegard or a Channel Master or a HBU 22 Antennacraft antenna.
You can throw good money away after bad on trying to get reception in a fringe area or you can use the best - cheapest antenna and do it all at once.
That's my opinion and I am sticking to it.
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