a lot of it depends on your location relative to the transmitters and the orientation of the antenna.
Folks should check out antennaweb.org. It will tell you how many channels to expect and how to orient your antenna to pick up the most channels. You want the antenna to be perpendicular to the signal source to maximize surface area.
@fuzzmanmatt@katbyter I used some ancient rabbit ears with my HDTV for a long time and the UHF loop was able to pick up a ton of channels just fine one I got it positioned right.
@fuzzmanmatt@katbyter True. I live in an area with almost too much signal. Every digital antenna I’ve tried pulled in too much noise because the local towers are actually too close. I built a simple DB4 rig (nice shiny copper & brass, stained wood, kinda steampunk look) and it’s done better than anything else
I can’t say for these specifically, but I have a similar antenna from Channel Master. I get about fifty channels with it, and most of them come in crystal clear. The big local channels (ABC, CBS, Fox, and the CW, with the exception of NBC, because the local transmitter is weirdly much further away than every other broadcaster) all look much better than when I got them through cable.
That being said, I think a lot of it depends on your location relative to the transmitters and the orientation of the antenna.
@AJ13_91
The similar antenna from channel master is made much better assuming this is built like the average noname flat antenna that clutters up Amazon. The internal metal elements are thicker, and the cable is much better quality. These have really thin cables and even though they’re short, it’s enough to cause significant signal loss. I think the CM flat antennas might also have built in a small VHF element to get in some of the hi-V stations but I’m not 100% certain on that.
Hot tip out there. You probably have a corner of your house that gets better reception than most of your home. What I did was find that corner and plug it into my coax jack. Then instead of using the cord from the outside as the “in” on my whole home splitter I found the cable with the antenna plugged in and used that as my “in” signal. Now all 5 TVs in my home have the best possible signal. Even the ones in the deep, spider infested recesses of my basement.
@gwrankin Thank you! It’s going around a lot lately. It seems like people are having a hard time breathing. Whenever I see this I can’t take a breath. Just BREATHE, EVERYONE, BREATHE.
If you had a coax cable splitter and hooked both of these as a single input to a tv…would you have a better chance of getting a picture?? Call it a “combiner”…
And any splitter/combiner really halves the signal. It doesn’t make it “stronger”. It splits your antenna in half and then combines the two signals minus some signal loss.
You’d most likely get what’s called multipath interference from two slightly out of sync signals coming in.
In the analog days it’d cause ghosting.
Nowadays it either gets error corrected out, or it causes complete signal loss.
Some people do take risks with this if they can’t get in all the stations with one antenna in one spot. Put one antenna where one set of channels come in but not the other, and vice versa. That’s usually done with directional antennas though, which these aren’t
But again, the most probable result is that any overlapping signal will result in no picture as opposed to a clearer one.
RIP Locast. Also, all of these digital antennas depend on the ability to get a line of sight signal and the location of the tower. If you have no obstructions you have a good chance of getting some channels. I live in a canyon with a hillside behind me. Ive tried a ton of these and I only get local foreign language stations and lectures about Jesus.
@AndyChase I don’t understand why broadcasters want to shut down Locast. They put up an antenna and let anyone close enough watch for free, but someone extends the signal a bit for people like you and me and suddenly it’s bad? Why?
@mikesmells I have one that looks like the antenna pictured. I get most but not all the channels in my area. Picture quality is good if it comes in. I mostly just watch Netflix and Hulu, so too cheap to pay for cableTV. On the rare occasions when I want to watch network television, it works fine.
@mikesmells there’s usually a website you can go to and lookup your zip code to get an idea of what channels you can get. unfortunately I’m in a dead zone so I can only get like 4 or 5 oddball channels. no major networks come in where I am, and I’m not even out in the middle of nowhere.
I’d be surprised if there’s any pro team left that doesn’t have a contract with a cable provider. As it is, I have a similar antenna hooked up to the tv in my kitchen and it pulls in plenty of OTA stations to keep me amused.
I think I may have found it online with image search of the box. While the box isn’t identical in a couple of places, the red square stuff is the same in the upper right and the image of the antenna is the same with the wires placed the same way in the photo. The bottom of the box is different and there is no AnntennaDigital written on the top left. But if this is intended to be a “generic”, rebrand it antenna then this might be it. Of course in the video they don’t say how far they are from the stations for the 20 something channels they got.
Actually just noticed a difference in the photo of the actual product. The cord coming off the antenna is slightly different. Meh’s has no stick out thingy on the cord and this one does. The video one has a signal booster but the meh one does not. Oops. Too late to delete. Sorry about that folks. I’d guess the manufacturer is the same though. No more time right now to track it down further.
My shipment seems to be stuck in one place (Bloomington CA). It hasn’t moved for 6 days and Meh doesn’t seem to have ANY customer service or help. Seems that Meh is more like FEH!
Meh doesn’t seem to have ANY customer service or help.
Support will usually reply within a business day or two, keep an eye on your tickets page for updates in case email replies are being filtered to a spam folder.
I have never had any luck with these. Of course, it may have been operator error. I WOULD LOVE TO CUT THE CABLE CORD…I Love the ads where there is no contract. And they don’t mention that they increase your price as soon as the Promo goes away. Even better, get you hooked into using their Cell Phone. It’s great! After two years your service fee drops like a rock after phone is paid off. Only problem is, you have to stay with them… HEHE, What a rip! And you better be mindful of not dropping your phone. Even with a case, they are not always protected. So, Now I have a nice Samsung G21+ 5 G and 2 more years stuck with the company… Sorry I got off track. Can anyone say Spectrum? Hmmm, reminds me of Rectum… OMG!
The timing on this is amazing and I bet even meh didn’t plan this. If anyone followed the Locast saga then they would know it died at the end of last week. It was a great rebroadcasting service for local channel. Awesome for someone like me that lives more than forty miles, and really sixty, from the main towers. So I’d use their website for $5 a month and get access to my channels.
Now I do have Youtube.tv but it didn’t have all of the ones that Locast had oddly like metv (I need my Svengoolie!). So now it’s gone because it lost the lawsuit put up by all the networks.
I have no luck with these either. The best I was able to get was some foreign language station, never a major local channel. The old rabbit ear can pick up more channels than this thing.
It’s a complicated legal issue that has to due with carriage fees paid to program providers. Locast attempted to side step the issues by claiming to be non-profit and exempt but were challenged in Court by the Broadcast lobby.
@AndyChase I get the second part, that’s the “what.”
I don’t get the “why.” If you’re just a bit out of range they’d rather you switch to cable. But then we’re going to watch other programming instead of the local broadcast. It just doesn’t make sense to me. We are trying to watch their local broadcast with their commercials, and instead they push us to cable where we’re going to watch Discovery Channel or something. I guess they must get the subscription cable fee whether we actually watch them or not.
Your assuming that any of these deals are done to benefit the consumer, none are. It was done to protect the special interests of the various players in the Broadcast business. The whole issue of over the air digital signals was nothing more than the Federal Gov/FCC appearing to provide some alternative for Free TV during the fregency switch. Also, your local station doesn’t give a shit if you watch, they want the consistent revenue stream. Digital over the air households are almost considered hobbyists. I dumped my cable, went to streaming on line, picked one network steamer CBS that let’s me watch local news. It costs about 5 Dollars a month.
@AndyChase I too use CBS AllAccess (now Paramount+). Between that and the free Hulu I get with my cell service and Amazon Prime I’ve got plenty to watch.
I think you have to get lucky for these to work in terms of what kind of TVs you have. The only thing that works with my very old Sony Bravia (ten plus years) are the old style rabbit ears you get in Goodwill (twenty local channels crystal clear).
Meanwhile, an even more ancient samsung hotel tv picked up at hotel liquidators works like a charm with the style of antenna Meh! is selling today.
For the price, it is certainly worth giving them a try if you are still experimenting.
Most of the time, though, I rely on hdmi out cables linking my windows laptops to my TVs.
There hasn’t been a single show I’ve wanted to watch that I’ve ever had to pay for … They’re easy enough to find using foreign search engines that aren’t as quick as Google to remove content based on rights complaints.
(of course, the content isn’t always available in the best HD resolutions, but 1080 looks fine on my old sets).
Just hooked one of these up to a ~10-15 year old Vizio. Would’ve been happy if it got the basics, but I’m pretty sure it’s picked up a few more from the one that was there previously.
Still no PBS tho (but they finally joined the world of livestreams, so eh).
Disappointed. Couldn’t get one channel. Sucks bc I bought two of these things for two different tvs. Also, these large black squares are unsightly. Ugly and don’t work? No bueno.
“There’s television floating around in the air we breath”
BREATHE!!
@joeywolf you beat me to the punch, left me “breatheless”
@AJ13_91 said
Folks should check out antennaweb.org. It will tell you how many channels to expect and how to orient your antenna to pick up the most channels. You want the antenna to be perpendicular to the signal source to maximize surface area.
Also the FCC DTV reception maps
https://www.fcc.gov/media/engineering/dtvmaps
And for the real nerds, there’s http://rabbitears.info
That’s great and all, but I like mine better.
@fuzzmanmatt nice lightning rod
@fuzzmanmatt are we compensating for something? I am sure that’s the biggest one in the neighborhood…
@rustyh3 Nope, my neighbor’s have a log-periodic on a rotator. I don’t know if it works, but it’s a honker!
@fuzzmanmatt @rustyh3 Yeah your partner spends a lot of time over there helping them “adjust” it.
Will these unscramble cinimax? Sometimes when I watch it scrambled late at night I can make out a boob or two.
Where are the rabbit ears?
/giphy rabbit ears
@katbyter honestly, depending on where you live rabbit ears might work better.
@fuzzmanmatt @katbyter I used some ancient rabbit ears with my HDTV for a long time and the UHF loop was able to pick up a ton of channels just fine one I got it positioned right.
@fuzzmanmatt @katbyter True. I live in an area with almost too much signal. Every digital antenna I’ve tried pulled in too much noise because the local towers are actually too close. I built a simple DB4 rig (nice shiny copper & brass, stained wood, kinda steampunk look) and it’s done better than anything else
I can’t say for these specifically, but I have a similar antenna from Channel Master. I get about fifty channels with it, and most of them come in crystal clear. The big local channels (ABC, CBS, Fox, and the CW, with the exception of NBC, because the local transmitter is weirdly much further away than every other broadcaster) all look much better than when I got them through cable.
That being said, I think a lot of it depends on your location relative to the transmitters and the orientation of the antenna.
@AJ13_91
The similar antenna from channel master is made much better assuming this is built like the average noname flat antenna that clutters up Amazon. The internal metal elements are thicker, and the cable is much better quality. These have really thin cables and even though they’re short, it’s enough to cause significant signal loss. I think the CM flat antennas might also have built in a small VHF element to get in some of the hi-V stations but I’m not 100% certain on that.
Ultra-thin is great and all, but I’m gonna hold off on a purchase until you offer a ribbed version.
/giphy Sometimes, All I need is the air that I breathe…
@rcgrams and to love you
OH MY GOD THEY TUNED IN GLEN!!!
@shahnm Why am I getting flashbacks of The Ring?
@macromeh Seven Irks…
Hot tip out there. You probably have a corner of your house that gets better reception than most of your home. What I did was find that corner and plug it into my coax jack. Then instead of using the cord from the outside as the “in” on my whole home splitter I found the cable with the antenna plugged in and used that as my “in” signal. Now all 5 TVs in my home have the best possible signal. Even the ones in the deep, spider infested recesses of my basement.
Ordered before and threw them out. Complete meh
It should say “the air we breathe”
Come on guys…
@gwrankin Thank you! It’s going around a lot lately. It seems like people are having a hard time breathing. Whenever I see this I can’t take a breath. Just BREATHE, EVERYONE, BREATHE.
If you had a coax cable splitter and hooked both of these as a single input to a tv…would you have a better chance of getting a picture?? Call it a “combiner”…
@eeterrific Cat6 cable sucks as an OTA antenna.
And any splitter/combiner really halves the signal. It doesn’t make it “stronger”. It splits your antenna in half and then combines the two signals minus some signal loss.
You’d most likely get what’s called multipath interference from two slightly out of sync signals coming in.
In the analog days it’d cause ghosting.
Nowadays it either gets error corrected out, or it causes complete signal loss.
Some people do take risks with this if they can’t get in all the stations with one antenna in one spot. Put one antenna where one set of channels come in but not the other, and vice versa. That’s usually done with directional antennas though, which these aren’t
But again, the most probable result is that any overlapping signal will result in no picture as opposed to a clearer one.
I should have known “cutting the cable” required another cable.
There’s no such thing as a digital antenna. https://www.channelmaster.com/blogs/free-tv/theres-no-such-thing-as-an-hd-antenna
RIP Locast. Also, all of these digital antennas depend on the ability to get a line of sight signal and the location of the tower. If you have no obstructions you have a good chance of getting some channels. I live in a canyon with a hillside behind me. Ive tried a ton of these and I only get local foreign language stations and lectures about Jesus.
@AndyChase I don’t understand why broadcasters want to shut down Locast. They put up an antenna and let anyone close enough watch for free, but someone extends the signal a bit for people like you and me and suddenly it’s bad? Why?
@plymouthdave
@plymouthdave
Hey Glen, TV birds—- NOT FOOD!
Can this improve FM or SW radio reception ?
@jmbunkin Probably not. The wavelengths for FM and SW are way bigger than this antenna. Also, it is 75Ω and you might need 300Ω for FM or SW.
So do they work okay?
I have a Roku box and was just curious what the comparison would be like.
@mikesmells These probably work OK in an suburban/city environment. Better than nothing, though.
@mikesmells I have one that looks like the antenna pictured. I get most but not all the channels in my area. Picture quality is good if it comes in. I mostly just watch Netflix and Hulu, so too cheap to pay for cableTV. On the rare occasions when I want to watch network television, it works fine.
@mikesmells Like @alose, I too have a similar one in use in an urban area. It does okay for most but not all channels.
It’s no replacement for a rooftop antenna.
@mikesmells there’s usually a website you can go to and lookup your zip code to get an idea of what channels you can get. unfortunately I’m in a dead zone so I can only get like 4 or 5 oddball channels. no major networks come in where I am, and I’m not even out in the middle of nowhere.
Specs
What’s Included?
Price Comparison
$24.56 (Similar) for 2 at Amazon
Warranty
90 days
Estimated Delivery
Tuesday, Sep 21 - Monday, Sep 27
/buy
@relm256 It worked! Your order number is: packed-workable-liver
/image packed workable liver
I’d be surprised if there’s any pro team left that doesn’t have a contract with a cable provider. As it is, I have a similar antenna hooked up to the tv in my kitchen and it pulls in plenty of OTA stations to keep me amused.
I think I may have found it online with image search of the box. While the box isn’t identical in a couple of places, the red square stuff is the same in the upper right and the image of the antenna is the same with the wires placed the same way in the photo. The bottom of the box is different and there is no AnntennaDigital written on the top left. But if this is intended to be a “generic”, rebrand it antenna then this might be it. Of course in the video they don’t say how far they are from the stations for the 20 something channels they got.
Actually just noticed a difference in the photo of the actual product. The cord coming off the antenna is slightly different. Meh’s has no stick out thingy on the cord and this one does. The video one has a signal booster but the meh one does not. Oops. Too late to delete. Sorry about that folks. I’d guess the manufacturer is the same though. No more time right now to track it down further.
My shipment seems to be stuck in one place (Bloomington CA). It hasn’t moved for 6 days and Meh doesn’t seem to have ANY customer service or help. Seems that Meh is more like FEH!
@Not2amazon
Ditto probably. Supposed to be delivered by 16th, yet no shipping info.
@Not2amazon
Support will usually reply within a business day or two, keep an eye on your tickets page for updates in case email replies are being filtered to a spam folder.
I have never had any luck with these. Of course, it may have been operator error. I WOULD LOVE TO CUT THE CABLE CORD…I Love the ads where there is no contract. And they don’t mention that they increase your price as soon as the Promo goes away. Even better, get you hooked into using their Cell Phone. It’s great! After two years your service fee drops like a rock after phone is paid off. Only problem is, you have to stay with them… HEHE, What a rip! And you better be mindful of not dropping your phone. Even with a case, they are not always protected. So, Now I have a nice Samsung G21+ 5 G and 2 more years stuck with the company… Sorry I got off track. Can anyone say Spectrum? Hmmm, reminds me of Rectum… OMG!
S21+5G…
The timing on this is amazing and I bet even meh didn’t plan this. If anyone followed the Locast saga then they would know it died at the end of last week. It was a great rebroadcasting service for local channel. Awesome for someone like me that lives more than forty miles, and really sixty, from the main towers. So I’d use their website for $5 a month and get access to my channels.
Now I do have Youtube.tv but it didn’t have all of the ones that Locast had oddly like metv (I need my Svengoolie!). So now it’s gone because it lost the lawsuit put up by all the networks.
/giphy svengoolie
POPSOCKETS! ROAD ROCKETS! SONNY CROCKETT! AWESOME!
Any recommendations on a cheap, but reliable coax to USB adapter?
@wood8176 ditto. looking to set mine up now
If I get braces and slap these two against my head can I open my mouth and broadcast emergencies?
@triplebud You mean you haven’t done that yet?! Get moving!
@Felyne Future me here: can confirm, 10/10, would try again #traveltothefuture
I have no luck with these either. The best I was able to get was some foreign language station, never a major local channel. The old rabbit ear can pick up more channels than this thing.
It’s a complicated legal issue that has to due with carriage fees paid to program providers. Locast attempted to side step the issues by claiming to be non-profit and exempt but were challenged in Court by the Broadcast lobby.
@AndyChase I get the second part, that’s the “what.”
I don’t get the “why.” If you’re just a bit out of range they’d rather you switch to cable. But then we’re going to watch other programming instead of the local broadcast. It just doesn’t make sense to me. We are trying to watch their local broadcast with their commercials, and instead they push us to cable where we’re going to watch Discovery Channel or something. I guess they must get the subscription cable fee whether we actually watch them or not.
Your assuming that any of these deals are done to benefit the consumer, none are. It was done to protect the special interests of the various players in the Broadcast business. The whole issue of over the air digital signals was nothing more than the Federal Gov/FCC appearing to provide some alternative for Free TV during the fregency switch. Also, your local station doesn’t give a shit if you watch, they want the consistent revenue stream. Digital over the air households are almost considered hobbyists. I dumped my cable, went to streaming on line, picked one network steamer CBS that let’s me watch local news. It costs about 5 Dollars a month.
@AndyChase I too use CBS AllAccess (now Paramount+). Between that and the free Hulu I get with my cell service and Amazon Prime I’ve got plenty to watch.
I think you have to get lucky for these to work in terms of what kind of TVs you have. The only thing that works with my very old Sony Bravia (ten plus years) are the old style rabbit ears you get in Goodwill (twenty local channels crystal clear).
Meanwhile, an even more ancient samsung hotel tv picked up at hotel liquidators works like a charm with the style of antenna Meh! is selling today.
For the price, it is certainly worth giving them a try if you are still experimenting.
Most of the time, though, I rely on hdmi out cables linking my windows laptops to my TVs.
There hasn’t been a single show I’ve wanted to watch that I’ve ever had to pay for … They’re easy enough to find using foreign search engines that aren’t as quick as Google to remove content based on rights complaints.
(of course, the content isn’t always available in the best HD resolutions, but 1080 looks fine on my old sets).
Junk. Not worth $12.
Just hooked one of these up to a ~10-15 year old Vizio. Would’ve been happy if it got the basics, but I’m pretty sure it’s picked up a few more from the one that was there previously.
Still no PBS tho (but they finally joined the world of livestreams, so eh).
Disappointed. Couldn’t get one channel. Sucks bc I bought two of these things for two different tvs. Also, these large black squares are unsightly. Ugly and don’t work? No bueno.