Is this any good?

Do you know if this gadget works indoors? I don't have an external
aerial so I need an indoor one to receive FreeView without any extensive
cables.

https://www.freeseetv.com/tvfix/en/



--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: ---

HW wrote:
Do you know if this gadget works indoors? I don't have an
external aerial so I need an indoor one to receive FreeView
without any extensive cables.

https://www.freeseetv.com/tvfix/en/

idk, but I would rather make my own.
Google: fractal tv antenna design

On 1/14/2019 5:49 PM, KenW wrote:
On Mon, 14 Jan 2019 18:30:03 -0400, HW wrote:

Do you know if this gadget works indoors? I don't have an external
aerial so I need an indoor one to receive FreeView without any extensive
cables.

https://www.freeseetv.com/tvfix/en/



--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: ---

Use this site to find information about stations near your zip code.

https://www.airtv.net/local-channels/

I live in Colorado about 16 miles from Denver. There are stations to
the North and towards Denver (South). **How I receive stations depends
how far away they are, my elevation and weather conditions**. Most UHF
stations transmit above 470 mhz reception depends on many things like
walls ,trees, rain, snow. I get strong and weak stations from the same
towers.
The advertisements for antennas you see never post the problems.

** very important


KenW

We have never had cable. I have an amplified RCA antenna that I bought
for about $35, I believe at Walmart. We have about 8 stations that are
with in about 40 miles from us. Most of those station have what I call
point stations. ie X 5.1, 5.2 etc. Each point station has its own
program schedule.

To supplement the broadcast stations, I also have a Smart TV (Samsung)
that is connected to my local LAN and can find just about any program
type that I want; documentary, music, etc. The ISP provides 12 Mbps
download, which is more that sufficient to get most of the programs that
I watch.

One of the things I don't understand is when I check the internet speed
from the TV Browse, I get 3 or 4 Mbps from speedtest.net. When I check
it through the ISP website I get 12 Mbps.

Interestingly on the same LAN, I get the same 12 Mbpd whether I got
through speedtest.net or the ISP.

If you decide to buy an antenna, make sure that it is sufficient for the
distance of the station.

You can also determine what stations you should recieve and the strength
at your location.

https://www.fcc.gov/media/engineering/dtvmaps

By postal address, my location is about 16 miles north of me. To get an
accurate representation of the stations I recieve, I must use a
different address.


--
2018: The year we learn to play the great game of Euchre

On Mon, 14 Jan 2019 18:30:03 -0400, HW wrote:

Do you know if this gadget works indoors? I don't have an external
aerial so I need an indoor one to receive FreeView without any extensive
cables.

https://www.freeseetv.com/tvfix/en/



Maybe. Whether a TV antenna will work indoors (that one or any other
one) depends on where your house is located, where in your house you
put it, how far the TV station's antennae are, and whether you have a
clear view of those antennae, without mountains, skyscrapers, etc.
getting in the way.

A year or so I bought an indoor antenna and tried it. It generally
worked well, but I had no reception for the station my wife most
wanted, so it was never used.

And by the way, your question is *way* off-topic for
alt.comp.os.windows-10. I answered anyway, but for the future, please
avoid such posts here.

HW wrote:
Do you know if this gadget works indoors? I don't have an external
aerial so I need an indoor one to receive FreeView without any extensive
cables.

https://www.freeseetv.com/tvfix/en/

Digital TV varies around the world, in terms of standards.
It probably doesn't affect the range, although the "practices"
of the industry, and the "support" by governments makes a
difference.

Strong Current Enterprises Limited,
Postbus 202, 6670AE Zetten,The Netherlands,
CoC Number - 7245331

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVB-T2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVB-T
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digita...o_Broadcasting

So that appears to be a European offering of OTA TV (no encryption).
OTA stands for over the air.

To give an example of what happened in Canada, one province had
a 250-350kW transmitter in the middle of the province, and a
huge concentric circle of coverage. It covered virtually
all the main population centers. That was in the NTSC era.

With the switch to ATSC and digital TV, the massive transmitter
was removed. Half the province as a result, has almost no (OTA) TV
channels at all! When you look at the coverage, the coverage
is horrible. The guy that runs cable TV there, is laughing at this.

In my own city, one of the TV stations put a shabby *3kW* transmitter
downtown. My Zinwell STB couldn't "see" that one.

One thing I noticed, is the Hauppauge tuner card I got a
year and a half ago, it picks up double the stations that
the Zinwell did. And I don't think it's an "amp" doing that.
Not every evil in TV is fixed with "amps". You amplify both
signal and noise, until the RF front end is overloaded. On its
own, the receiver uses AGC (automatic gain control) and has
a range of around 1 million, between lowest gain setting and
highest gain setting (10^6). The Hauppauge card I suspect, is
using an extra feature of signal decoding to do error correction
and this is giving extra sensitivity or something (it's a DSP
technique that gives better equivalent noise performance). I can
feed the Zinwell and the Hauppauge with a 1:2 splitter (equal signal
to both) and the Hauppauge does much better. It can even
"see" the 3kW transmitter (when it isn't raining).

There is nothing magical about antennas. If you had an old
YAGI from 1950 and hooked it to a DVB-T dongle, it would be
just as effective as it was in 1950. The frequency ranges
are similar. Modern channel allocations use fewer frequencies
than in the past, which is why they're doing this (to rip
spectrum away from TV and give it to cellphones or the like).

The mistake they made in Canada, is continuing to have OTA TV
on both VHF (2-13) and UHF (14-83). They should have dumped VHF
and this would simplify antenna design. When both VHF and UHF
must be received (for best channel selection), the antenna ends
up being "three dimensional" and quite large. If the antenna
only needed to receive UHF, you could use a dual bow-tie.
This one being my favorite. That has 300 ohm flat cable on
the end, and you connect a 300 ohm to 75 ohm coax (Balun)
to that, to make the 75 ohms the DVB dongle might use.

https://www.summitsource.com/Assets/...ges/AN4149.jpg

It's possible that dual bowtie is driving my internal
house distribution right now. I have more than one antenna,
and plug in one of them as curiosity dictates.

I also made my own antenna, which has 15dBi gain and is
directional. And the problem is, you need to rotate that
and point it at the stations you want. If all the stations
in town, have their antennas on a single hill, then a
high gain antenna is a plus. If TV stations are on several
different hills, on different compass points, then you really
need a rotator on the roof or something.

If you mount your bowtie in the attic and carefully point it,
it will lose around 6dB due to shingles and rain. An antenna
still works inside a house, but there is still loss.

As a test, you can continue to use regular rabbit ears (with
a balun to convert the flat 300ohm to 75ohm coax) for a test,
and the strongest station in town should be available for
scan/test.

VLC can play video directly from a tuner, but the feature
only works properly in Linux. It's unclear whether there's
even a good API for it to work in Windows VLC. And Linux has
a scanning utility (W-scan???) that can give a dump of
channels, and give some idea what channel IDs are coming in.

If you use Windows Media Center (W7/W8), be aware that sometimes
it continues to "listen" for NTSC, and doesn't even try to scan
for ATSC, and there's a hack to get it to look for digital signals.
This was part of the irritation when I first got the Hauppauge
tuner card, is *no way* to test the damn thing out of the box.
There wasn't sufficient software in the box. The firmware file
for the card was *not* in Linux on the DVD. You had to download
the file from a private persons server! Once the firmware was
loaded, then W-scan and VLC made it possible to prove the
card worked, and I wouldn't need to send it back for a refund.

I hope there are some "warnings" in that description, as to
what you face in terms of barriers to having fun. Once you
are positive that signal reception is possible (via a Linux
test run), then you're better able to face the Guide Data experience
on the Windows side. Guide Data is what any recording application
needs, to know that Flintstones comes on Wednesday at 5:30PM
and that the recorder should start recording then.

*******

The antenna is practically the last thing you have to worry about.

Have you got the right TV receiving dongle yet ? Or a PCIe card ?

With the normal "span" of signal levels, with perhaps one station
close enough to receive indoors with a corn flakes box, it's the
DVB/ATSC dongle or set top box and software issues that cause
most of the hair loss.

In North America, you can use TVFool to evaluate the transmitter
layout, and whether a high gain directional antenna or
an isotropic antenna give the best solution.

http://www.tvfool.com/?option=com_wr...edf2a217378 e

In that example, Channel 10 is touching the "green" circle
and would be what you use those old rabbit ears to receive.
You connect the rabbit ears to your DVB dongle (with a balun),
and point the center of the V towards 304 degrees true. Then enter
a number between 192000 and 198000 in VLC.

http://www.csgnetwork.com/tvfreqtable.html

See, easy :-/ This was the way we were meant to watch TV.
From our bomb shelter. It'll take you no time at all
to get this working :-/ Hahaha.

Paul

On 1/14/2019 6:39 PM, Ken Blake wrote:

And by the way, your question is *way* off-topic for
alt.comp.os.windows-10. I answered anyway, but for the future, please
avoid such posts here.

Considering how many good responses were given, I see no problem with
his prefacing the post with the usual "OT:"

--
best regards,

Neil

HW wrote:

Do you know if this gadget works indoors? I don't have an external
aerial so I need an indoor one to receive FreeView without any extensive
cables.

https://www.freeseetv.com/tvfix/en/

Depends on how many OTA (over the air) digital broadcasters are in your
area. I think the FCC requires all to broadcast and not just sell their
content to the cable providers.

I'm guessing you already are paying for cable TV and want to know if
these antennae will give you the same channel line-up. Hardly. Look at
what local stations are carried NOW by your cable TV provider and that's
the most you will get with your own antenna; however, the cable provider
might be injecting "local" OTA broadcasters from 50 miles away versus
the max of 18 miles to the horizon for an antenna -- and that's only if
you mount the antenna on a tower high enough to gets past groud-level
obstructions. Also, the OAT broadcasters can have a weak signal so you
can't get them, anyway.

https://www.antennasdirect.com/transmitter-locator.html
https://nocable.org/hd-antenna-coverage-map
https://www.fcc.gov/media/engineering/dtvmaps

You could try that site to see what OTA channels are available in your
area. The farther the transmitter, the less likely you'll tune in any
channels from that transmit tower.

Remember back when you had an analog TV antenna (probably just a couple
of rabbit ears on the TV) and the few local channels you had back then?
Well, that's what you'll get today with a digital antenna capturing the
OTA broadcast stations.

You can shop your local Best Buy and other retailers to get a "digital"
OTA antenna, or shop at Amazon.com or ebay.com for them (search on "HDTV
antenna") where you'll find equivalents for cheaper.

https://otadtv.com/
http://www.gomohu.com/blog/cutting-t...-over-the-air/
https://www.lifewire.com/over-the-air-antenna-3276138

You'll be disappointed in the low number and quality (of content) of
your local OTAs compared to what you are used to getting via cable TV.
Since you have Internet access, you might want to instead check into
streaming TV, like Sling TV or Yahoo TV, to cut the cord from your ISP's
cable TV service.

In fact, you might want to check if your ISP will offer a basic cable TV
service tier that mostly just offers the local channels (the same ones
you get with an OTA antenna). When I looked at getting just Internet
service, it was more almost the same price as basic TV plus Internet.
That is, as I recall, the price was within about $2 to $4 to get basic
TV + Internet as to get just Internet alone. The quality was a hell of
a lot better than using an indoor antenna (even with me mounting a pole
on the balcony railing to get the antenna above the roof).

Comcast Internet only: $40/month for 1st year, $60/month thereafter
Comcast Internet+basicTV: $35/month for 1st year, $79/month thereafter
(of course, Comcast adds a slew of "fees" to raise the base price)

https://www.xfinity.com/support/arti...ed-basic-cable

For the $19 difference, I'd get basic TV with Internet instead of
wasting money and time on the very limited number of local OTA
broadcasters in your area, or look at going to streaming TV provided you
have a fast enough Internet connection; see:

https://clark.com/technology/tvsatel...wnload-speeds/

Note: I am in the USA, so my response was biased on OTA broadcasting in
that country. Usenet is worldwide and you didn't say where you are.

--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: ---

That is not a valid signature delimiter line (which is "-- \n", or dash
dash space newline, not 3 dashes, space, and a spam string). Please
stop spamming your choice of Usenet provider.

In article , VanguardLH
wrote:

Remember back when you had an analog TV antenna (probably just a couple
of rabbit ears on the TV) and the few local channels you had back then?
Well, that's what you'll get today with a digital antenna capturing the
OTA broadcast stations.

actually, there's a lot more than that in most places, certainly in
major cities.

On 14/01/2019 22:30, HW wrote:
Do you know if this gadget works indoors? I don't have an external
aerial so I need an indoor one to receive FreeView without any
extensive cables.

https://www.freeseetv.com/tvfix/en/




The simple answer to your question is NO. Indoor aerials don't work
with modern digital transmission. These TV companies want everybody to
use cable channels or satellite TVs so that they can keep track of who
is watching what .

I was using internal aerial in the bad old days when we had analogue
transmissions and when UK changed to digital, I had to replace my old TV
and also get an external digital TV aerial. Now I've got FreeSat dish
and Humax box because freesat has some channels that I like to watch
such as CNN, Quest, First48Hours and other forensic channels. We have
got Freeview channels but they are all boring and the news channels on
BBC, ITV, channel4 and Channel5 is all about Brexit and Donald Trump.
That is your evening schedule before you go to bed!!.

Frankly, you don't need a TV these days because computers can give you
everything. I don't have the time to watch any TV these days. There are
very few live football matches and the highlights on Saturday and Sunday
is very boring and opinionated by the TV pundits!!. They don't know
that I can see what is happening on my screen!!

So in short either get an external aerial or get freesat dish. It's a
one off charge for the box and nothing more to pay. You do need a TV
license whatever you use. Even using a computer to watch BBC you need
to buy a license or some say you need to pay a BBC tax!.


--
With over 950 million devices now running Windows 10, customer
satisfaction is higher than any previous version of windows.

In article , ? Good Guy ?
wrote:

Do you know if this gadget works indoors? I don't have an external
aerial so I need an indoor one to receive FreeView without any
extensive cables.



The simple answer to your question is NO. Indoor aerials don't work
with modern digital transmission.

they work fine

These TV companies want everybody to
use cable channels or satellite TVs so that they can keep track of who
is watching what .

separate issue

VanguardLH wrote in :

HW wrote:

Do you know if this gadget works indoors? I don't have an external
aerial so I need an indoor one to receive FreeView without any
extensive cables.

https://www.freeseetv.com/tvfix/en/

Depends on how many OTA (over the air) digital broadcasters are in
your area. I think the FCC requires all to broadcast and not just
sell their content to the cable providers.

I'm guessing you already are paying for cable TV and want to know if
these antennae will give you the same channel line-up. Hardly. Look
at what local stations are carried NOW by your cable TV provider and
that's the most you will get with your own antenna; however, the cable
provider might be injecting "local" OTA broadcasters from 50 miles
away versus the max of 18 miles to the horizon for an antenna -- and
that's only if you mount the antenna on a tower high enough to gets
past groud-level obstructions. Also, the OAT broadcasters can have a
weak signal so you can't get them, anyway.

https://www.antennasdirect.com/transmitter-locator.html
https://nocable.org/hd-antenna-coverage-map
https://www.fcc.gov/media/engineering/dtvmaps

You could try that site to see what OTA channels are available in your
area. The farther the transmitter, the less likely you'll tune in any
channels from that transmit tower.

Remember back when you had an analog TV antenna (probably just a
couple of rabbit ears on the TV) and the few local channels you had
back then? Well, that's what you'll get today with a digital antenna
capturing the OTA broadcast stations.

You can shop your local Best Buy and other retailers to get a
"digital" OTA antenna, or shop at Amazon.com or ebay.com for them
(search on "HDTV antenna") where you'll find equivalents for cheaper.

https://otadtv.com/
http://www.gomohu.com/blog/cutting-t...-over-the-air/
https://www.lifewire.com/over-the-air-antenna-3276138

You'll be disappointed in the low number and quality (of content) of
your local OTAs compared to what you are used to getting via cable TV.
Since you have Internet access, you might want to instead check into
streaming TV, like Sling TV or Yahoo TV, to cut the cord from your
ISP's cable TV service.

In fact, you might want to check if your ISP will offer a basic cable
TV service tier that mostly just offers the local channels (the same
ones you get with an OTA antenna). When I looked at getting just
Internet service, it was more almost the same price as basic TV plus
Internet. That is, as I recall, the price was within about $2 to $4 to
get basic TV + Internet as to get just Internet alone. The quality
was a hell of a lot better than using an indoor antenna (even with me
mounting a pole on the balcony railing to get the antenna above the
roof).

Comcast Internet only: $40/month for 1st year, $60/month thereafter
Comcast Internet+basicTV: $35/month for 1st year, $79/month thereafter
(of course, Comcast adds a slew of "fees" to raise the base price)

https://www.xfinity.com/support/arti...en-limited-bas
ic-and-expanded-basic-cable

For the $19 difference, I'd get basic TV with Internet instead of
wasting money and time on the very limited number of local OTA
broadcasters in your area, or look at going to streaming TV provided
you have a fast enough Internet connection; see:

https://clark.com/technology/tvsatel...reaming-speedt
est-internet-download-speeds/

Note: I am in the USA, so my response was biased on OTA broadcasting
in that country. Usenet is worldwide and you didn't say where you
are.

A lot depends on the topography between you and the OTA broadcaster. I
live 50 or so miles away from my local station's tower, and was able to
use a simple bow tie deep fringe antenna (~$50 or so) along with a signal
amp to get all the local stations. And that was with the antenna looking
out my picture window in the direction of the tower. If you have the
wherewithall and the abilitly, a YAGI antenna raised on a tower should
easily pick up stations 40 or so miles away, again depending on
topography and any large buildings in the way.

In article , lid says...

HW wrote:
Do you know if this gadget works indoors? I don't have an external
aerial so I need an indoor one to receive FreeView without any extensive
cables.

https://www.freeseetv.com/tvfix/en/

Digital TV varies around the world, in terms of standards.
It probably doesn't affect the range, although the "practices"
of the industry, and the "support" by governments makes a
difference.

Strong Current Enterprises Limited,
Postbus 202, 6670AE Zetten,The Netherlands,
CoC Number - 7245331

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVB-T2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVB-T
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digita...o_Broadcasting

So that appears to be a European offering of OTA TV (no encryption).
OTA stands for over the air.

To give an example of what happened in Canada, one province had
a 250-350kW transmitter in the middle of the province, and a
huge concentric circle of coverage. It covered virtually
all the main population centers. That was in the NTSC era.

With the switch to ATSC and digital TV, the massive transmitter
was removed. Half the province as a result, has almost no (OTA) TV
channels at all! When you look at the coverage, the coverage
is horrible. The guy that runs cable TV there, is laughing at this.

In my own city, one of the TV stations put a shabby *3kW* transmitter
downtown. My Zinwell STB couldn't "see" that one.

One thing I noticed, is the Hauppauge tuner card I got a
year and a half ago, it picks up double the stations that
the Zinwell did. And I don't think it's an "amp" doing that.
Not every evil in TV is fixed with "amps". You amplify both
signal and noise, until the RF front end is overloaded. On its
own, the receiver uses AGC (automatic gain control) and has
a range of around 1 million, between lowest gain setting and
highest gain setting (10^6). The Hauppauge card I suspect, is
using an extra feature of signal decoding to do error correction
and this is giving extra sensitivity or something (it's a DSP
technique that gives better equivalent noise performance). I can
feed the Zinwell and the Hauppauge with a 1:2 splitter (equal signal
to both) and the Hauppauge does much better. It can even

I have 3 tv's, an ATSC tuner with PVR capabilities and a Hauppage USB
tuner. I live approc 100Km from transmitting tower in Halifax, NS,
Canada. I also have a couple old RCA NTSC tuner to composite out when
used to have old analog tvs so could continue watching when Canada went
digital.

I have all the tv's and the tuner usually using an outdoor attenna I
purchased. It came with it's own 20DB booster built-in. The signal then
passes thru a 30Db booster before being split into four outputs using a
standard splitter. Although attenna certainly looks like it's
directional, in practice wind has moved it around considerably with no
loss in signal guality.

Every one of them acts almost identical. Sometimes a channel(s) become
blocky, unwatchable or simply can't even be tuned in. When this happens
all the tuners act the same. Most times all channels are crystal clear.
I suspoect inteference is something going on at International Airport
that's more or less directly in my line of sight to attenna. Helps I'm
over 500' elevation so it's also "downhill" to transmitter.

In summer I use an old tv and one of the old NTSC to composite tuners
outside on the back deck. I setup an old rabbit ears attenna on a short
pole. It brings in the channels almost as well as the larger outdoor
attenna.

Daughter got a new tv for Xmas so I took in one of the attennas I use
outside in summer time. I couldn't pick up any channels and she's isn't
5Km from tranitter.I assume it's the hill between her and transitter she
lives on so it has to go higher than just sitting in living room.

Tim wrote:

VanguardLH wrote in :

HW wrote:

Do you know if this gadget works indoors? I don't have an external
aerial so I need an indoor one to receive FreeView without any
extensive cables.

https://www.freeseetv.com/tvfix/en/

Depends on how many OTA (over the air) digital broadcasters are in
your area. I think the FCC requires all to broadcast and not just
sell their content to the cable providers.

I'm guessing you already are paying for cable TV and want to know if
these antennae will give you the same channel line-up. Hardly. Look
at what local stations are carried NOW by your cable TV provider and
that's the most you will get with your own antenna; however, the cable
provider might be injecting "local" OTA broadcasters from 50 miles
away versus the max of 18 miles to the horizon for an antenna -- and
that's only if you mount the antenna on a tower high enough to gets
past groud-level obstructions. Also, the OAT broadcasters can have a
weak signal so you can't get them, anyway.

https://www.antennasdirect.com/transmitter-locator.html
https://nocable.org/hd-antenna-coverage-map
https://www.fcc.gov/media/engineering/dtvmaps

You could try that site to see what OTA channels are available in your
area. The farther the transmitter, the less likely you'll tune in any
channels from that transmit tower.

Remember back when you had an analog TV antenna (probably just a
couple of rabbit ears on the TV) and the few local channels you had
back then? Well, that's what you'll get today with a digital antenna
capturing the OTA broadcast stations.

You can shop your local Best Buy and other retailers to get a
"digital" OTA antenna, or shop at Amazon.com or ebay.com for them
(search on "HDTV antenna") where you'll find equivalents for cheaper.

https://otadtv.com/
http://www.gomohu.com/blog/cutting-t...-over-the-air/
https://www.lifewire.com/over-the-air-antenna-3276138

You'll be disappointed in the low number and quality (of content) of
your local OTAs compared to what you are used to getting via cable TV.
Since you have Internet access, you might want to instead check into
streaming TV, like Sling TV or Yahoo TV, to cut the cord from your
ISP's cable TV service.

In fact, you might want to check if your ISP will offer a basic cable
TV service tier that mostly just offers the local channels (the same
ones you get with an OTA antenna). When I looked at getting just
Internet service, it was more almost the same price as basic TV plus
Internet. That is, as I recall, the price was within about $2 to $4 to
get basic TV + Internet as to get just Internet alone. The quality
was a hell of a lot better than using an indoor antenna (even with me
mounting a pole on the balcony railing to get the antenna above the
roof).

Comcast Internet only: $40/month for 1st year, $60/month thereafter
Comcast Internet+basicTV: $35/month for 1st year, $79/month thereafter
(of course, Comcast adds a slew of "fees" to raise the base price)

https://www.xfinity.com/support/arti...en-limited-bas
ic-and-expanded-basic-cable

For the $19 difference, I'd get basic TV with Internet instead of
wasting money and time on the very limited number of local OTA
broadcasters in your area, or look at going to streaming TV provided
you have a fast enough Internet connection; see:

https://clark.com/technology/tvsatel...reaming-speedt
est-internet-download-speeds/

Note: I am in the USA, so my response was biased on OTA broadcasting
in that country. Usenet is worldwide and you didn't say where you
are.

A lot depends on the topography between you and the OTA broadcaster. I
live 50 or so miles away from my local station's tower, and was able to
use a simple bow tie deep fringe antenna (~$50 or so) along with a signal
amp to get all the local stations. And that was with the antenna looking
out my picture window in the direction of the tower. If you have the
wherewithall and the abilitly, a YAGI antenna raised on a tower should
easily pick up stations 40 or so miles away, again depending on
topography and any large buildings in the way.

My understanding is the station itself doesn't operate the tower. Like
a company jet, rare few are owned by just one company but instead a
leasing company has several companies pay for the jet. The same for the
towers. If you look at the links I gave showing where are the tower
locations you get the OTA signals, there are several stations using a
tower. So the station could be way over the horizon* (the farthest
you're going to get with an antenna in or on a house) but they pipe
their signal to the tower that is within reach of you.

* At ground level, the horizon is only 2.9 miles away; however, the
tower is above the horizon. If the tower were 100 feet high, the
Earth's curvature would limit the line-of-sight to 12.2 miles. A tower
200 feet high would have a line-of-sight range of 18 miles.

With a tower on a hill or mountain and with the tower's own height, the
pinnacle height could be, say, much more but a 50-mile UHF line-of-sight
transmission isn't likely. Your inside antenna pointed out your picture
window at the tower means you can see the tower and that means it is not
over the horizon and not the 50-mile distance you claim. To get a range
of 50 miles with line-of-sight transmission (for VHF and UHF), the the
OTA tower and your antenna would have to both be 500 feet high (500 feet
gets to a 27 mile horizon, so double the distance if both towers were
each 500 feet high). 500 feet for a tower is the height of a 40-story
building. I doubt your antenna is anywhere that high. Since you said
your antenna is at ground level, the tower would have to be 2000 feet
high (166 stories high).

Most "digital" (OTA) broadcasters are in the UHF range: 470 - 806 MHz.
That's too high to make use of skywave propagation (bouncing off the
ionosphere). Shortwave (at 30 MHz) will bounce. VHF and UHF don't
bounce.

Use the tower finder sites that I mentioned. You're very likely using
one a lot closer than that 50-mile away tower.

http://www.ringbell.co.uk/info/hdist.htm

Keep putting in heights to see when you get to a line-of-sight distance
before the horizon get in the way. For 50 miles, that would be a tower
that is 1666 feet high. Your antenna is at zero height. That's a damn
tall tower, or it's on a mountain side and you're in the flats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_high_frequency
"Radio waves in the UHF band travel almost entirely by line-of-sight
propagation (LOS) and ground reflection; unlike in the HF band there is
little to no reflection from the ionosphere (skywave propagation), or
ground wave."

Despite what the ads show about all those wonderful mega-count of
channels that you'll get for free using an antenna tuned to the OTA
stations in the UHF range, the reality is the station count is dismal,
especially after grouping the side channels for one station into a count
of just one station. You'll see claims like:

Over-The-Air signals are free and anyone with an antenna and a good
signal can watch their favorite network TV shows and live sports.

Uh huh. You're only going to see what the local stations are
transmitting -- the same stuff the cable TV company injects into their
channel line-up to include those same local channels.

You'll also have to re-orient your antenna to get other stations within
reach. For example, in my area, most of the stations are at 106-108
degrees heading but half a dozen are at 315 degrees (the ones for
shopping and infomercials, so I wouldn't bother). Ah, the good old days
of having to wiggle the antenna around.

Paul wrote:

So that appears to be a European offering of OTA TV

A bit wider scope than that, here's a map of the competing digital TV
standards, they each have their outliers

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ee/Digital_terrestrial_television_standards.svg/900px-Digital_terrestrial_television_standards.svg.png

On 1/14/19 5:30 PM, HW wrote:
Do you know if this gadget works indoors?Â* I don't have an external
aerial so I need an indoor one to receive FreeView without any extensive
cables.

https://www.freeseetv.com/tvfix/en/



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Digital TV Reception Maps.
https://www.fcc.gov/media/engineering/dtvmaps