Indoor TV antenna quality vs outdoor

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There is not one indoor antenna that's even remotely close to the quality of a good outdoor one. I've tried several.

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I think there are a few things worth clearing up:

1) The picture quality if they have good reception isn't going to be really any different between the two
2) An outdoor will always have more range and be able to have less interference
3) If you live very close to stations you want and can pick them up with an indoor antenna without much interference consistently, you are not going to really see any gain there by adding an outdoor antenna


Now, if you have spotty CBS reception and want to improve it, maybe a bigger, better placed indoor antenna or an outdoor antenna may fix this. You may just live on the edge of the range and have a difficult time picking it up.


Check out Antenna Web to see what you could expect to see and what quality antenna you may need to gain it.



Personally, I have rabbit ears that the previous homeowner left above a cabinet above a tv. Out of curiosity, I lodged it in a pretty horrible place in the attic (on a ridge against the roof resting on a rafter because it was near my master splitter for the house). I get all my locals. I can see and intermittently catch the next big town over's locals. It runs into an HDHomerun Quatro tuner and into several TVs. Some tuners like the signal a little better than others. I can get better/worse reception based on where in the attic I put it. But I just leave it crummily lodged up in that little spot because it works, and I don't care about news in the town over. I do plan on eventually building an antenna in a high spot in my attic, but without any clear benefit, I'll probably wait until this one dies (it is powered) before I do that.

I second the AntennaWeb suggestion... I'm just outside of BR, but still in EBR parish, and I have to use an outdoor antenna to pick up all of the available networks.

When the initial HDTV broadcasts started back in the late 90s I had just bought a house that happened to have a big outdoor antenna. WRAL in Raleigh was the first in the nation to broadcast HD and I was able to get that by around 2000.

As more stations came online I learned that distance and direction to the transmitter, vs the shape and directionality of your antenna, matter. Mine was fairly directional and even though it was a bigass outdoor rig, it couldn't pick up the 1 station that was in a different direction than all the others. Fortunately I didn't care much about that particular network at the time. I'd have needed to swap to an omnidirectional to get them all. I did try a powered indoor omni antenna and it did pick up the 1 station better but overall was not as good.

So, as suggested use AntennaWeb to check out your location vs transmitters, determine if you need omnidirectional or directional and go from there. There are some better powered designs in the 20 years since I played with it, of course.

I put a $30 amazon antenna in 2nd floor attic with pretty dang good results. I piped it into the already existing, amplified cox coax and have the signal in every room of my house and poolhouse for next to no cost with a very easy install.

There is no picture quality reduction with digital signals.
Either you get the signal or you don't.
It's not like old TV signal were you could improve the picture by moving the antenna