[N9ZQA]

My coupons arrived yesterday, and before picking up dinner, I scurried down to the local Wal-Mall to pick up a Magnavox. I figured I'd start off with a cheap box, as previous attempts at DTV reception here (USB HDTV tuner stick) were less than dismal. According to coverage maps, this area is supposed to be 'in a hole' as it were for DTV reception.

Got it home and set it up on the 1965 Admiral in the living room, and plugged a set of VHF/UHF rabbit ears into it. Setup was pretty simple - there is a choice for output type, daylight savings time, and aspect ratio. Once setup is finshed, the autoscan feature can be used to populate the channel list.

I was able to receive the local Fox station (WFLD 32) solidly with about a 25/100 signal strength as registered by the internal signal meter. Other stations were pixelated or non-existent until I moved the antenna off of the top of the box. It's currently on top of a radio in front of the living room window pointed in the general direction of the Sears Tower and Hancock Building.

I can now receive NBC (WMAQ 5), WGN 9, WTTW 11, WYCC 20, WCIU 26 (and their 2 subchannels, ME-TV and Me Too), and WPWR 50 with this setup. One thing that struck me was the picture clarity. I've lived in the Chicagoland area all of my life and have had many TVs with indoor antennas. I've never been able to get a picture that I would classify as 'great' - even the satellite receiver which normally feeds this set produces a picture that I would call average (compression artifacts, etc). But the digital OTA signal is razor-sharp, without any compression artifacts.

I'll probably wait a while on the second box, as I see what models and features are out there, but this one seems to work pretty well for the $10 price tag.