[Jeffhs]

These antennas may have worked well enough in strong signal areas for analog TV, but I have a feeling they would probably be next to useless today for DTV. Given the all-or-nothing nature of digital television, I would be surprised if it works at all. These antennas, as another person mentioned here, sold so well not necessarily or in fact because of how they worked (or not), but because of their cute plastic casings. I remember reading in an electronics magazine (the now defunct Electronics Illustrated) years ago, in a review of the small analog TV antennas in plastic cases available in those days (late '60s-early seventies), that it was actually the plastic cases with their pretty designs that brought in the money (many times over $10) these antennas sold for. "Too bad the guts cannot bring in the signal," the article stated. Some of these antennas were worse than useless anyway because, again according to the article, several turns of antenna wire in the bases of the things were dead shorted, meaning that in many cases these gutless wonders were little more than short circuits directly across the TV's antenna terminals.

I never had a TV antenna that plugs into a wall outlet, and I wouldn't have wanted one. These were supposed to turn your home's entire AC wiring system into a giant television antenna; in very strong signal areas they may have worked for analog (I would not dream of using one of these for DTV), but anywhere else they probably worked poorly or not at all. Another problem that could have occurred was that the small capacitor(s) that isolated the antenna twin lead to the TV from the power line could short, thereby putting the entire line voltage across the TV's antenna terminals and causing a fire -- to say nothing of seriously damaging or destroying the set's antenna input circuits or even the tuner itself.