Ahh, Marketing! The people selling these antennas kind of reminds me of the ads marketing "Digital Headphones," as if any of us were born with digital ears.
It's a good article, but could have more correctly been titled "
Installing a UHF TV antenna."
While there are some actual digitally tuned antennas in the nose cones of aircraft, and in the satellite uplink seen on the roof rack of Commissioner Reagan's suburban in Blue Bloods, the antennas for broadcast TV are designed to pick up the
frequency of the channels. The antennas do not differentiate whether the picture and sound are encoded onto the radio waves in analog or digital mode.
These small "digital" antennas, and the traditional RV disc antenna, get their performance in a small package by having a preamp boost the weak signals to push it down the cable to the tuner. A regular antenna without a preamp would need to be larger to pick up weak signals that might get lost in a long cable.
A word of warning - during the analog to digital transition, stations for a time actually had two channels, one analog, and one digital. Since the VHF channels were pretty much full, almost all of the digital simulcasts were on UHF.
So most of these "digital antennas" were designed to tune UHF only, and ignore the "old" VHF frequencies. After analog was turned off, the stations could pick the original channel or the temporary channel as their permanent home. Many stayed, and some went back.
So a UHF-only design like the one in this project will not get VHF "air" channels 2 through 13 as well, if at all.
It is hard to tell what "air" channel (frequency) a station is on now, since they all still ID as the "used-to-be" channel numbers.
For example, in the upstate NY Capital market:
6.1 reverted back to channel 6 on VHF after the switch
10.1 kept its digital channel 26 UHF
13.1 now transmits on channel 12, with boosters on channels 18 and 38, while digital 51.1 is now on the actual channel 13
17.1 kept its digital channel 34
23.1 which had been UHF, kept its digital channel 7, staying on a new VHF channel
45.1 kept its digital channel 43
55.1 kept its digital channel 50
ABC and PBS are on UHF only, NBC is on both. But CBS and Fox are
only on VHF. The antenna in the article would not be good for NASCAR or football fans here. And Channel 6.1 here is the only major station actually on the channel it claims to be . The other 'channel' numbers do not match tuner settings at all. Who thinks up these things?
Helpful link - to find out what over-the-air stations might be in range of where you happen to be, enter your address at http://www.antennaweb.org to generate a list.