The VHF DTV station serving my area has added THREE! UHF channel translators in an attempt to eliminate dead spots in its designated market area (DMA). The other much weaker but local VHF channel shows as green (per tvfool.com/call sign lookup tab) at my location yet requires a large, outdoor VHF antenna for reliable reception without an amp.
The "local" UHF DTV stations have had relatively little trouble in comaprison.
My extensive experimentation with new, vintage and homemade antennas bear out these findings:
Rabbit ears worked OK for analog VHF, but not at all for digital VHF (mutipath kills DTV)
Loops, bowties, etc for UHF still work fine except in locations of extreme multipath
Most rooftop UHF antennas will usually pick up channels in its former analog range.
Small VHF roof antennas that received suburban-range or near-fringe analog NO LONGER do so, yet they seem to work fine on local UHF
.
For VHF, size does matter
, making installations in apartments impossible and attics very difficult. Even my largest VHF antennas(similar to the CM3671 or Winegard HD8200 in range) need a booster to receive the two VHF channels each from Baltimore and Philadelphia, something that just a medium sized VHF antenna received fairly good in analog.
I guess I am saying here that while politicians and telecom businesses try to obfuscate the facts, TV coverage will be directed to VHF, a band that is more troublesome for DTV and away from UHF for reasons unknown.
One place digital VHF seems to be better is in heavily wooded areas upstate. As it always was for analog. UHF is impossible to get in low-lying, wooded and hilly terrain.
VHF has the advantage of penetrating heavy vegetation and bending (knife-edge effect) over hilltops, yet actually seems worse in more densely populated areas closer to the transmitter. One explanation is the susceptibility to harmonic interference from some newer fluorescent lamp ballasts and other electronic gagetry.
There is a low-band VHF holdout, WPVI-TV 6 (formerly WFIL), to maintain its "branding" like WRGB in Albany. Due to the lack of adequate input bandpass filtering on Digital TV and set top boxes tuners and effects of very strong adjacent FM stations, WPVI had to apply for some power increases to overcome this. This has been documented in FCC reports after the conversion.