HDTV Antenna-Reviews

HDTV Antenna Reviews

COMPARISON TEST OF HD ANTENNAS BY ANTENNA EXPERT

I conducted a test, much as a user would, of the iTenna, the Terk Flat antenna and the Terk HDtvi. It was done at my home at 546 Canyon Rd, Solana Beach, CA. It’s located about º mile from the ocean and at an elevation of about 500 feet. We are 24 miles from San Diego and 120 miles from LA, so not an ideal location for a small antenna.

We attached each antenna to an HD Vizio TV using a coaxial cable. The Terks, with their non removable shorter cables, had a slight advantage with less signal loss than the iTenna , which used a longer cable.

For each antenna we set the signal on the TV’s menu to “Antenna”, and had it do an autoscan to identify all of the digital stations it could find. While scanning we adjusted the position of the antenna to try to maximize the speed of the scan (the strongest signal). That took about 5 minutes for each antenna.

We were able to set 23 digital stations on the iTenna, 20 with the Terk HD, and 16 with the Terk flat. We then tried viewing each of the channels after the scan was completed to see the quality of each station.

All of the iTenna channels were crystal clear with no digital interference. We picked up 3 stations each of all the major networks (such as 16-1, 16-2, 16-3 for NBC) and many Spanish-speaking channels. Note that the station numbers are different than they would appear on cable TV.

The Terk flat found 16, but when we tuned to those stations many of the pictures (1/3 to Ω) were broken up and unwatchable as shown in this image:

terk fuzzy reception

The conclusion is the iTenna performed the best of the 3. The Terk flat was really poor. The Terk HD worked almost as well as the iTenna, but it was so with the rabbit ears extended. Many would reject it because of the size - big and awkward that it needed a footprint of about 2 x feet.