I hooked up a length of zip cord today to a rebent coat hanger and poked the end of the wire into the center pin of my TV's antenna socket, just to see if I could get any OTA DTV signals here. My flat screen found five digital channels during a channel scan using this makeshift DTV antenna, and to my surprise, the reception on those five channels is excellent.
As has been noted with DTV, antenna position plays a large part in getting a good signal; I found that as I moved the antenna around my apartment, the picture on my TV would change, in every case becoming perfectly watchable with the antenna in one particular spot. I even picked up one subchannel of Cleveland's MyTV affiliate that I hadn't seen before, as my cable doesn't carry it -- yet.
To my surprise, I was not able to receive the DTV signal of WOIO-CBS 19 in Cleveland with my makeshift test antenna, although I was getting the city's NBC and ABC stations, and the Univision affiliate, just fine. I don't know if it is because the CBS station's DTV signal is on a VHF channel while the others are on UHF channels, or just what the problem was. My flat TV has only one antenna input for all signals, so I would think any antenna I'd hook up would pick up signals in both bands, with lowered sensitivity, of course, on the frequency range for which the antenna is not designed. I'll have to keep that in mind when my Clear Cast DTV indoor antenna arrives, as it seems to have been designed for UHF reception only (the picture of the antenna in the newspaper ads shows the outline of a UHF bowtie antenna plainly visible on the front of the plastic casing).
While the Clear Cast antenna will undoubtedly work somewhat better than my makeshift DTV one did, however, it will be no match for a roof-mounted Winegard or other standard television antenna. Since I live in an apartment building, I cannot erect outdoor TV antennas, although two of my neighbors have satellite dishes -- one on the roof of the building, the other in back of the building on a railing.
As I mentioned in my initial post that started this thread, I am not expecting miracles with the Clear Cast DTV indoor antenna; I am simply curious to see what I can expect, using an indoor antenna in a first-floor apartment. My first experiments with the rebent coat hanger gave me a very rough idea, but I am sure the new antenna will work much better and will probably bring in channel 19 -- as well as the PBS station in Cleveland and its subchannels, not to mention every other major network station in town.
BTW, one very good feature of digital TV, IMHO, is that if you get a picture, it will be perfect; however, if there is no signal or your antenna is in a dead zone, your screen will be blank. There is no in-between where the image is fuzzy or snowy; no ghosts, either. The DTV equivalent of snow in an analog TV picture is when a DTV image pixelates, breaking up into squares; the sound will also be affected.
However, with a good clear signal, a DTV picture looks great, like a good photograph. An ad on Zenith's website (
www.zenith.com) for their DTV converter boxes, in fact, states that "your old TV has never looked better" than when it receives a DTV signal.
I am looking forward to continuing my DTV experiments and will continue to post the results here. As of now, using the makeshift DTV antenna, I can get the following stations:
Channel 3.1 -- WKYC-HD (NBC) Cleveland
Channel 3.2 -- WKYC Weather Radar
Channel 5.1 -- WEWS-HD (ABC) Cleveland
Channel 5.2 -- LiveWell Network
Channel 43.1 -- WUAB-HD (MyTV)
Channel 43.2 -- THIS TV
Channel 43.3 -- Bounce (new subchannel)
Channel 61.1 -- WQHS-HD (Univision) Cleveland
There are at least two local stations my makeshift antenna doesn't get, regardless of where I put it: CBS 19 WOIO, WVIZ PBS 25.1. Again, I'm thinking it is just the haywired nature of the antenna that's keeping me from receiving these channels; the new Clear Cast antenna should bring in every station in Cleveland, including the subchannels. The new antenna will be mountable on a window or wall by means of suction cups, not to mention having a much longer lead-in cable, so I will be able to try it in more locations in my apartment than I could with the makeshift antenna. I should then be able to find out where my channel 19 and 25 signals are hiding.