# Do the 150 mile antennas really work?



## grunes

This forum runs a lot of ads for 150 mile TV antennas.

Various Internet sources claim that most of the time digital TV signals won't carry usably over 75 miles. Presumably that is supposed to be due to limitations of atmospheric transmission, and/or multi-path conflicts, which produce a signal with confused timing. (Satellite dishes are different, because the atmosphere thins at high altitudes.)

What is actually reliably achievable most places, most of the time?


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## KyL416

There's too much variables to say it's the antenna alone, what works in one area may not work in another, and in many cases it's the other variables and not the antenna itself that allows reception from that far.


If you have a clear shot between your location and the tower of a station, no adjacent or co-channel interference affecting the channel, no sources of multipath, potential sources of boost like a large body of water, you can get distant stations on a regular basis regardless of how many miles the antenna is marketed for.


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## BNUMM

Just a warning. The ones that advertise 150 miles will pick up at those distances across Lake Michigan. The bad part is that they don't last very long.


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## SolidSignal

I've spent a lot of time researching this. First of all, absent other factors, you will simply not get reception 150 miles away. You just won't. If the attentuation doesn't get you (meaning that the signal is simply too weak for your antenna to pull in, or your tuner to lock onto, the distance is so great that the curvature of the earth becomes an issue.

In most cases, VHF and UHF signals don't bounce off the upper atmosphere like shortwave signals do. Shortwave signals, and even AM radio signals, can travel incredible distance because they bounce off the upper atmosphere and then off the land, over and over. Usually you don't see that behavior from VHF or UHF.

In the case of a large calm body of water, two things can come into play. First of all transmitters may be operating at higher power, meaning that the signals go further. Also the extreme stillness of the water and lack of anything in between you and the tower can sometimes mean you get TV signals from further away.

If you are using a small indoor antenna, it's very rare to get signals from more than 30 miles away, and even with the largest outdoor antenna on a tall mast it's rare to see more than 85 mile range and even that's pushing it. Some areas like Los Angeles have "the perfect storm" where the towers are up on a mountain in the middle of a basin and as you get further away, your elevation increases... and that gives them really good signal where others will not get it. But even there you won't get 150 miles. We have one customer who barely gets 2 channels from 90 miles out and that's pushing it.

In some cases the use of amplifiers will help you get a little more range or a little more stable signal but an amplifier is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Digital TV signals are much more sensitive to signal-to-noise ratio than they are to pure signal strength so if you have a noisy weak signal, amplifying it to be a noisy strong signal isn't going to do much for you.


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## SayWhat?

I'm on a hill overlooking much of my surrounding area and I've got a Winegard HD7697P mounted on a 50' tall mast and I can get VHF-HI station about 70-75 miles away. Most of the time the signal strength meter is in the 90s, but it can drop into the 70s or less even in clear weather. I don't lose picture until it gets lower than that though.


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## prozone1

I'm in nothwest Montana I use a Channel Master 4228HD antenna on my upper deck. Tv Fool says I'm 89.7 miles from tv towers by Missoula. I have no problems getting a strong signal from all 4 broadcast networks.
Signal passes over Flathead Lake approx 30-35 miles in length


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## kenglish

The only place I know of where UHF TV signals carry 150 miles with any reliability is, between two large mountain peaks in Utah. The receive end is a medium sized UHF yagi antenna, mounted at the focal point of a 10-foot microwave dish.

Those little toy antennas are a gimmick. Use a real antenna instead.
Most reception is limited to about 30 miles, since that's about the radio line-of-sight between a near-ground receive antenna and a tall transmitting tower.
You still will often need the gain/directionality of a true antenna, to minimize multipath.


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## CCarncross

kenglish said:


> The only place I know of where UHF TV signals carry 150 miles with any reliability is, between two large mountain peaks in Utah. The receive end is a medium sized UHF yagi antenna, mounted at the focal point of a 10-foot microwave dish.
> 
> Those little toy antennas are a gimmick. Use a real antenna instead.
> Most reception is limited to about 30 miles, since that's about the radio line-of-sight between a near-ground receive antenna and a tall transmitting tower.
> You still will often need the gain/directionality of a true antenna, to minimize multipath.


What Ken said......LOS is only about 3 miles or so at human height....going from a transmission tower to your house, depending on how high your antenna was mounted, 30-50 miles is about it...and there is lots of multipath out there.


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## Gloria_Chavez

Line of sight calculator....

http://www.calculatoredge.com/electronics/lineofsight.htm


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## grunes

BNUMM said:


> Just a warning. The ones that advertise 150 miles will pick up at those distances across Lake Michigan. The bad part is that they don't last very long.


I assume you mean that the antennas die quickly. Why? Or do you only mean that the times you can receive that far are few and far between?



SayWhat? said:


> I'm on a hill overlooking much of my surrounding area and I've got a Winegard HD7697P mounted on a 50' tall mast


What a great experiment station for studying atmospheric electricity! :sure:

How often is your antenna hit by lightning? What do you do to protect your equipment?

If I understand right, my electrician says that the main NEC requirement is that the outer wire of the coax cable, or the mast it is connected to. be grounded by a straight line path. I'm not sure if that would protect solid state electronics, like TVs. He says the NEC development is basically sponsored by the insurance companies, whose main interest is preventing houses from burning down - that protecting solid state electronics is very much a secondary concern. But I'm curious to know what would be needed to do it reasonably well. (Obviously I'm worried about the most likely lightning strikes, not the really big ones with power comparable to a small nuclear weapon, which would be too expensive and too infrequent to worry about. And this page, for ham radio towers, describes techniques that would cost more than the TV.)


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## Jim5506

Most of the Albuquerque New Mexico TV stations broadcast from atop Sandia Peak, elevation 10,664 ft. and theoretically if you are on one of the mountain peaks south of Albuquerque you can get line of sight to these stations.

I ran a TVFool report from the top of Sunset Peak (33 deg. 35 min. 07.35 sec. N/ 105 deg. 14 min. 06.98sec. W) shows LOS to KASA-TV RF 27 (2.1) effective power 380kw with the NM (db) at 29.6, so if you can find a place where you can get LOSat 150 miles or even 200 miles you should get 24/7 reception with a decent antenna, but such occurrences are very rare.

For "normal" situations, of course the major factor in reception is terrain (if a hill blocks your reception the signal drops precipitously), second factor is probably local blockages such as trees (especially conifers) and structures. Third is distance where your signal level is inversely proportional to the distance from the source (double the distance=1/4 the signal).

The biggest impediment to reception a 150 miles is you are so far over the horizon that the tower and your antenna must both be very high with much lower terrain between to get reception as in the case of the Albuquerque area. I am not aware of transmitters anywhere else in the US that are located so high.


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## sregener

Antenna ratings in miles are worthless. The only number that matters is net gain. Higher is better for long-distance, but more directional.

Atmospheric conditions can temporarily produce long-distance reception. Antenna height (both transmitting and receiving) has a huge impact on reliable reception over distance.


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## ziggy29

Jim5506 said:


> The biggest impediment to reception a 150 miles is you are so far over the horizon that the tower and your antenna must both be very high with much lower terrain between to get reception as in the case of the Albuquerque area. I am not aware of transmitters anywhere else in the US that are located so high.


There are places in the Sierra Nevada mountain range that get very strong signals (in the green on TVFool) from the San Francisco market, well over 100 miles away. I don't remember the specific locations, as many of them are blocked by mountains from any signal, but I've seen addresses in the High Sierra not too many miles west of the Reno/Tahoe area that listed very strong reception from the SF market.


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## P Smith

concluding posts above, we could say - yes, the antenna do really work, but for _very_ rare locations.


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## Jim5506

But, the rest of the story is that those "150 mile" antennas are not as good as antennas made by the major manufacturers, which would give you more signal for the same distance from the transmission towers - cheap Chinese junk.

All their gain is in the cheap little amplifier, not in the actual signal capturing part of the antenna.


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## Nick

At 150 miles distance, assuming no significant natural elevation
or the antenna riding atop a 100' tower to overcome the Earth's
curvature, any signal pulled in will be crap. Toss an amp into the
mix and you get amplified crap. Digital, you get nothing, nada, zilch.


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## n3ntj

In most cases, you will not reliably receive a TV signal over 150 miles away from its source. The curvature of the earth, antenna height (tx and rx), attenuation, etc. all come into play... but the biggest one will be curvature of the earth at that distance. Commercial TV stations typically have their signal 'fine tuned' to reach approx. 50~80 miles from the tx site (essentially what they call their 'viewing audience').


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## jerry downing

BNUMM said:


> Just a warning. The ones that advertise 150 miles will pick up at those distances across Lake Michigan. The bad part is that they don't last very long.


That would only work if you can see the Chicago skyline from your location across the lake, if not the curvature of the earth would make it impossible.


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## P Smith

jerry downing said:


> That would only work if you can see the Chicago skyline from your location across the lake, if not *the curvature of the earth would make it impossible*.


not that simple, VHF is follow the *curvature *better, and UHF too in less proximity
perhaps you are talking about laser or GHz RF connection types


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## AntAltMike

grunes said:


> This forum runs a lot of ads for 150 mile TV antennas.
> 
> Various Internet sources claim that most of the time digital TV signals won't carry usably over 75 miles. Presumably that is supposed to be due to limitations of atmospheric transmission, and/or multi-path conflicts, which produce a signal with confused timing. (Satellite dishes are different, because the atmosphere thins at high altitudes.)
> 
> What is actually reliably achievable most places, most of the time?


Sorry I'm late coming to the party. If you are concerned with your own reception in College Park, the furthest station you will be able to get with any antenna is in Manassas, probably less than 40 miles away. I service antennas on highrise buildings, and from the rooftop on a 20 story building in Arlington. I can sometimes get the Richmond stations. I once got a channel 4 from New Jersey that is 135 miles away, but even then, that might have been a "tropo ducting" fluke. And since it was just a home shopping channel, I never bothered to try for it again.

The reception problem you encounter when trying to get distant stations is that their anemic signals are overwhelmed by nearer channels that are either on the same frequency or on the adjacent channel. There is no way to remedy that problem


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## Jim5506

Truly, the answer is a big fat NO!!

They hype their antennas as the next best thing to sliced bread, but they are really cheap trash that is over amplified and under engineered.

Buy an antenna from a reputable manufacturer - ignore their faked endorsements and in the long run save yourself a lot of money and time.


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## thelucky1

Jim5506 said:


> Truly, the answer is a big fat NO!!
> 
> They hype their antennas as the next best thing to sliced bread, but they are really cheap trash that is over amplified and under engineered.
> 
> Buy an antenna from a reputable manufacturer - ignore their faked endorsements and in the long run save yourself a lot of money and time.


What manufacturers do you consider reputable?

Sent from my iPhone using DBSTalk


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## Jim5506

AntennaCraft, AntennasDirect, Winegard, Channel Master, RCA.

If you haven't heard of them be cautious.

Claims of 150 mile reception is a quick tip off that either the manufacturer or the distributor or both are less than straightforward.


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## sp818a

Who would I call if I want an antenna put on my roof professionally?


Sent from my iPad using DBSTalk


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## SeaBeagle

I purchased a 200 mile aerial. Will I not scan TV stations that are no more than 20 miles away.

The catch is one has to have this aerial like verrrrrrry high up. 


Sent from my iPad 4 128GB using DBSTalk mobile application.


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## jimmie57

thelucky1 said:


> What manufacturers do you consider reputable?
> 
> Sent from my iPhone using DBSTalk


There are a few of them. I recently bought an antenna from Channel Master and it does exactly what it says. It said it has a 45 mile range. I live 33 miles from most of the broadcasting towers and it gets them all with no problem.
The thing to be careful of is the fact that some stations are VHF and some antennas only do UHF. Channel Master shows the DB rating for the various frequencies.
Look at one of the places that shows which strength antenna you need and then select an antenna.


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## seasoned_geek

thelucky1 said:


> What manufacturers do you consider reputable?
> 
> Sent from my iPhone using DBSTalk


Sorry to necropost but wished to weigh in.

I purchased a Lava HD2605 (I believe) from here: http://antennadeals.com/HD2605.html?gclid=CIDej7Wkhc8CFQkNaQodgf0GVQ
Possibly some place else on line but the site looks familiar and it was for about that price. I have it erected on 2 sections of our old TV tower, roughly 18 feet in the air give or take. Tall enough to be over the peak of single story house so it could point north for Chicago service.

Sadly, TVFool doesn't list the channel I was interested in researching, but TitanTV does. According to TVFool most of the stations I watch are in the 67-68 mile range. I haven't tried pointing it south for the stations TVFool says are about 146 miles away. I was really hoping to find the distance of 66.2 GetTV because I was watching it last night. We had some mild rain going on. Much of the time it would be crystal clear, then it would occasionally sputter.

In my area we have to content with these ugly windmills. Whenever they are sending control signals to them they walk all over AM 580 WILL http://will.illinois.edu/amand once the windmills stop changing direction it comes in crystal clear again. I suspect the same thing is happening with some of my television signals, especially the weaker ones.

One point I would like to make with the 100+ mile antenna which I haven't seen mentioned here. They are directional meaning you only get a subset of what you could get because of the pointing direction. I would be interested in hearing about any of the omni directional 100+ mile antenna. In particular this one: http://antennadeals.com/HD8000.html?gclid=CPb9zJ-ohc8CFYY0aQodoo8Gog

Given what I see on TVFool, my location seems to have a lot of co-channel and adjacent channel problems. I wonder if

1) the co-channel problems would drown out more stations with an omni since I seem to have quite a few co-channels listed at the same distance
2) the hassle of trying to filter out the unwanted co-channels would be worth any increase in the number of channels.


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## Jim5506

If the TVFool dB NM is below zero, the likelihood of receiving the channel is extremely low, and the lower the number goes, the lower the liklihood of it being received also goes.

The small "150" mile antennas do not have the electrolytic capacity to receive signals so weak as those from even 100 miles away.

These antennas purportedly receive signal from so far away because of their amplifier, which is supposed to attone for the lack of the necessary physical characteristics (too small and with too few elements).

IMHO, that Lave HD8000 antenna might be good for 15-20 miles, but is at least 4X overpriced when compared with most other antennas that can provide the same reception.

There is NO 125 mile antenna that can provide omnidirectional reception, similar omnidirectional anrennas can receive signals from possibly up to 25 miles.

The Antennas Direct 91-XG is widely agreed to be one of the best UHF antennas around. It has many elements that enhance its reception ability, but comparing its exceptional performance with these cheap (quality only - the price is usually expensive) "150" mile antennas, the 91-XG always wins.

Please don't waste your money on miraculous little antennas even with built in rotors that promise the moon and work unimpressively for a short time (until the cheap pre-amp fails).

Buy an antenna from Channel Master, Winegard, Antennas Direct or another manufacturer that builds real antennas with proven design.

If it looks quirky, it is quirky, avoid it.

If it makes claims that outstrip reason like 150 mile reception, avoid it.

If it slices, dices and chops, buy it but don't pay more than $19.95! ;^)

The only proven way to get deep fringe reception is by having your antenna as high as possible to overcome the curvature of the earth (which blocks signals) and to have the largest antenna possible tuned to the frequencies you need to receive.

P.S - I note that these antennas claim to receive 1080p and 4K signals - BUT OTA 1080p and 4K signals DO NOT EXIST, if they lie about one or two things, it reduces their credability about more.


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## trh

And for $19.95, you should get a second one free (with S&H only).


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## cherie1960

I live in Erie, PA and use a Mohu Leaf 60 indoor antenna and it picks up Toronto (City TV, Yes TV, OMNI, and several others) which is 194 miles away, however far less if measured across Lake Erie. Also picks up London, Hamilton and Kitchener Ontario. However, the signal sometimes is not picked up. It varies with the clarity of the weather. I want to get an outdoor antenna to get them consistently. I have also picked up (very clearly) Detroit channels on occasion 271 miles. But those times are few and far between.


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## scooper

Don't count road miles as your reception distance - RF goes in LOS (Line of sight).. To receive 150 miles LOS - you're probably talking an antenna height of 150 feet+ (and that's assuming the transmitter is at 2000 feet above ground).

There are atmospherics which can bend the RF waves, but it's not something you can rely on.


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## KyL416

cherie1960 said:


> I live in Erie, PA and use a Mohu Leaf 60 indoor antenna and it picks up Toronto (City TV, Yes TV, OMNI, and several others) which is 194 miles away, however far less if measured *across Lake Erie.* Also picks up London, Hamilton and Kitchener Ontario. However, the signal sometimes is not picked up. It varies with the clarity of the weather. I want to get an outdoor antenna to get them consistently. I have also picked up (very clearly) Detroit channels on occasion 271 miles. But those times are few and far between.


That's the key part of your equation, you're across a great lake. It's the lake letting you get signals from that far, not the specific antenna. The further inland you go those signals quickly become harder to get.

As for those others like Detroit, that's from tropo boost. When conditions are really extreme a paper clip would let you get distant reception.


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