12 HD Days of Christmas: Day 4
"On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me...." an antenna for my HDTV. Actually, that works if you sing it; I'll let you do it. My family is sitting nearby and the cats still haven't come home since the last time I sang.
You know I'm big on over-the-air high definition; you can probably tell from my prior posts. Guess what: you can't get any OTA programming without a gi-moungous wire coat-hanger or better yet: a decent amplified antenna. There are plenty of choices out there and we pointed you in the right direction earlier in the year, but I want to share my great experiences with the Terk TV5 antenna.
I did a bunch of research before I settled on the TV5, and I couldn't be happier with it. I'm about 25 miles away from my local DTV towers as the crow flies, and the miniscule TV5 picks up every single channel possible. Terk designed this antenna to be simple, effective and almost elegant.
I keep the TV5 on top of my entertainment center, so it's at the highest possible point on the first floor of my home. The unit plugs in to an electrical outlet for amplification and there's a coax cable built in to attach to an ATSC tuner. You can adjust the gain with a slider bar on the side of the TV5, but I generally leave it at the highest possible gain due to my distance from the signal towers.
The TV has a futuristic "figure-8" design to pick up the signal and you can manually rotate the metal element roughly 540-degrees to help pull in distant signals if required. One the best features is the low profile. This unobtrusive antenna stands less than five-inches high and about two-feet wide!
How can something so small be so powerful? Honestly, we just don't care because it works; I even use it to capture HDTV on my Windows Media Center PC for recording and viewing programs later. You can pick up the amplified Terk TV5 for around $50 at most electronics retailers. If you have an OTA tuner that's lonely, this antenna is just the gift for it!
Previous HD Days of Christmas: