TV Over the Air Channels

Highly dependant on the quality of the signal you present to the TV. Your paperclip antenna may not be enough.

Oh, and Tech Board

put your antenna in the attic and use a compass to aim it at the nearest transmitter site, you can find their location with a google search

also some dtv channel still annoyingly broadcast on VHF (channels 2 and 9 in BR are like this) while most broadcast on UHF so you need a combined VHF/UHF antenna or two separate ones connected together with a coax splitter. Again you can find this information on google

To isolate any problems between the antenna or TV, I keep an old 15" HDTV around (Westinghouse W1603, $40 on eBay). Works on the little TV? Investigate your new TV.

Check your antenna pointing.

Also check your wires, some times rodents like the taste of coax cable and will chew it all up. If you have a distribution amp, make sure it is plugged in and powered. Those can go bad unexpectedly.

If you have another TV, see if same issue appears on the other TV.

Also, the weather can cause tropospheric ducting which will allow distant stations to over power local ones. A few times in the past, I was able to pick up stations in Little Rock and Corpus Christi in Southeastern Louisiana. Of course now, the FCC has the TV bands so packed those days could be fewer and father between. With the TV band so packed, tropospheric ducting can increase the cochannel interference and will not allow your tuner to decode the signal. Back in the analog days of TV, competing signals could ghost over each other with the local station staying in a watchable state. With digital there is a cliff effect, if not enough signal is able to be decoded the signal will just drop and then come back. Here is a website you can go to get the forecast of ducting potential. This time of year and the warm weather can make ripe ducting conditions.

Back to your coax cable if all is kosher, it could be the TV station doing maintenance on their tower. Weekends and nights are usually times that local stations will do their maintenance since it is not prime time. Fun fact, some corporately owned TV stations are direct fed to some local cable and satellite providers so they sometimes don’t have to worry as much for their over the air viewers since cable and satellite providers their primary means of distribution and are paying to catch their signal.

It’s a shame I never asked my uncle Bill why the FCC fricked around with over the air television signals. My uncle Bill was the chief engineer for WKRG-TV5 in Mobile, Alabama for 45 years.