Customer Reviews

RCA ANT751R Outdoor Antenna Optimized for Digital Reception

5 star:		(226)
4 star:		(38)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

This antenna is great. I wanted to add the local HD ATSC channels to my TIVO HD. I purchased a DIGIAIR antenna meter to find the spot in my attic with the strongest signal and optimized its position. This antenna did a fantastic job on both hi-VHF and UHF bands. I am guessing it has about 4-6 dB gain on both bands. It is truely designed to reduce multipath interference for digital signal reception. For example, the rear VHF reflector is fed into the antenna feed after going through a 180 degree phase reversal to enhance rear lobe rejection of unwanted signals.

The antenna DOES come with the J mount pole which makes it an even better value.

I live 42 miles from the transmission towers and this antenna is connected to a 60 ft run of RG6 quad shield to my TV. I get a S/N ratio of 23-28 db on most all the channels with a signal strength on the TV of 80-100. The DIGIAIR meter shows strong pull on the VHF channels.

From my knowledge of antenna design and looking at photos on the internet, this antenna appears to be the same one sold for twice the price called the EZ HD Antenna.

It is just large enough to get good signal, but small enough not to be too cumbersome. It was the only combination VHF/UHF antenna in this size that I could find that had multiple VHF elements for increased gain.

Now I receive all the local channels in HD PLUS I receive analog basic cable. My TIVO HD combines both channel sets into a seamless viewing experience. HD channels viewed off this antenna will always look BETTER than if you viewed them off cable because the cable company recompresses the HD signal downgrading it slightly to save bandwidth on the cable system. You just can't get this clarity without an antenna.

YOU DO NEED A SEPARATE RUN OF RG6 QUADSHIELD COAX TO YOUR TIVO BOX. YOU CAN'T COMBINE ANTENNA SIGNALS AND CABLE SIGNALS ON THE SAME CABLE. IT TAKES 2 CABLES TO DO THIS. Running this second cable down to my TIVO was the hardest part of the installation. After you do this, simply REMOVE the cable card from your TIVO to get the Comcast basic cable channels in analog and let the antenna handle your HD digital local channels. Saves cable bill money.

For connectors, I purchased the DataShark compression tool and compression RG6 connectors at Home Depot. I ordered additional connectors (better ones for quad shield) from Amazon. DataShark stuff is made by Paladin Tools.

I purchased the RG6Q (quad shield cable) as RCA brand quad shield at Lowes. Avoid the GE cable as it is of lower quality. Home Depot had some inexpensive QuadShield cable also, but if you look closely the center 18AWG conductor was only copper coated steel, not solid copper like the RCA cable.

For coax face plates, I made my own double gang wall plate. Using one of the "unbreakable nylon" face plates at Home Depot, I was able to drill two holes in it the perfect size to place two coax couplers. The modular data/coax/phone face plate systems from Leviton, and others are nice, but very over priced for what are custom pieces of plastic.

Most homes will be wired with RG59 coax which has a much higher loss of signal than RG6. If you installing an antenna you really need the RG6 to minimize loss of weak signals which come from an antenna. Since all the stations are now digital and digital reception is sensitive to EMI or interference, you need the quad shielded RG6 over the double shielded RG6 to reduce interference. When receiving digital signals it takes BOTH a strong signal and a CLEAN signal free of interference to get a beautiful and clean picture.

My reception is rock solid on all channels. I couldn't be happier.

We just moved to Santa Fe and wanted to get broadcast TV (I hate cable!) but most stations are near Albuquerque. According to [...], all of our stations are around 35-40 miles away. This antenna was very quick to install - it took my husband less than 15 minutes to install it on the roof, we then re-scanned our channels and picked up 26 digital channels. This includes all of the major broadcast channels including two PBS stations that are all crystal clear - a perfect picture. There are no trees or tall buildings around us, but there is a mountain range between us and Albuquerque so we were worried we wouldn't be able to pick up the channels. This was a great price, the antenna is not too large and obtrusive, and it works great for both UHF and VHF channels.

My wife and I were with Comcast for 10 years and they recently decided to make some major changes (triple the cost or only 20-30 channels almost ALL of which are local or shopping). Minor changes did take place during the time we were with them such as Price and Services (I would go into details but I would rather not bore you). We had always decided that Comcast was pretty much the only other option then Direct TV and such.

Amazingly we noticed (because Comcast wanted to make these recent major changes) that we didn't really watch that much TV, and when we did, it was the Local Stations that we were mostly watching. We then decided to cut Comcast completely out of the picture (no pun intended), and we started to shop for an antenna. Needless to say, we found this one. Reading the reviews on both Amazon and one other web-site (apparently I can't say which web-site that is, because "Amazon's" people will end up deleting it from this review "[...]") I was very excited to test this out, especially where Wal-Mart was selling this exact one for $30 more than what Amazon was selling it for at the time I purchased it.

The installation of this antenna was simple. It is very light and perfect to work with, just make sure that you have coax cable to go with it. The HD Quality is unbelievable. There are some stations that we receive in HD that we are now getting better reception with then what Comcast was providing at the time we had them. With this antenna, we get between 24 to 30 English stations and roughly 10 to 15 Spanish stations (I would only assume it is different in each State/County).

I viewed some of the reviews on Wal-Mart's web-site on this antenna and noticed that one reviewer had pictures where he placed this antenna in their attic. I recently finished our basement and did not want to drill more holes. I have my main connection to our Cable/TV runing next to my breaker box in our Cold Room (food Storage), and I placed the Antenna in their, a simple connection. I installed the antenna on the Ceiling of the room. I live in Utah County and we have Mountains that can easily block the signal. The closest tower for reception where I live is about 50 miles, it is also beyond the corner of one of the Mountains. Even with that and being in our basement the picture is great!

This Antenna is a must have!!! Very Simple to put together, very light and you really can stick it anywhere. I figured by putting it indoors, it will not get weather damage and should last us a very long time. Hurray for FREE TV! Also note that I do not have an Amplifier with this as other reviews do have and still getting great reception. It does make me curious though if I would get more channels or even better reception on those channels that don't have a 100% reception on.

Right out of the box, the coaxial connector on the coaxial transformer that connects your cable to the antenna was loose and would spin around when I screwed on the cable. After not getting any signal to my tv, I figured this piece was the problem. On disassembling, I found that the little wires inside were severed by the twisting action. This element seems cheaply made for outdoor use. Note that I was hand tightening this, not going crazy with a wrench. Be very careful when installing!

After picking up a much more durable replacement part from the local electronics store, I was able to get decent reception out of this antenna.

I am so impressed with this small antenna. In Modesto, Ca the nearest towers are 47 miles away and located in Sacramento. I did not want a large antenna and all the antennas in the area seem to be very large antennas placed very high on the roofs. I was told by an antenna specialist that because the location is far from the towers, the antennas needed to be placed high and to be a larger type antenna if we were to get good reception. WRONG! This antenna is very small in size, but incredible in reception. We installed it ourselves and basically just put it about 12 ft off the ground exactly where the Dish Satellite was hooked up. We took the cabling from the Dish and plugged it into the antenna. We put a splitter in place of the diplexer that the Dish installer had put in originally allowing the signal to go to all tvs in the house and then took a Magnavox digital converter and hooked up to the TV.All the channels came in crystal clear. We mainly wanted ABC, CBS, ION, CW, NBC, PBS, FOX and all of those came in beautifully. We now have free tv all for about $45.00 dollars for the antenna and the digital converter box was $23.00. We were paying about $69.00 month for Satellite and shortly after hooking this up, called and canceled the satellite service.Even though this antenna states it is for a 40 mile radius, we are getting the Sacramento stations just fine.Those towers are over 47 miles away. We did not need to hook up a pre amp or anything.Its small design blends in nicely with the home as we did not want the house to look like a radio station with a large boom antenna sticking out.We were almost going to buy this antenna at Walmart where it sales for about $20.00 more. We wanted to buy locally for the ease of returning it if it did not work. We called Amazon and asked about their return policy before ordering and they stated we could return it for a full refund if it did not work. We bought it from Amazon instead, saving $20.00 in the process, and I am so glad we did. This is one of the best consumer buys we have made recently and not only great reception, but it is saving us about $800.00 a year in Satellite bills.

I had to cut cable TV earlier this year due to money issues, and from about May till September I was operating with good old rabbit ears in the house. When they worked, it worked great. But I was getting fed up of the constant moving of the rabbit ears, or the twiddling of the dial to get this channel or the other. There was some sort of interference inside my house preventing them from working well enough. Once in a blue moon, I'd get lucky, find a sweet spot and get everything, but it didn't last long. I was unwilling to go on the roof for an antenna, so I was thinking about the attic.

I've been around TV for a long time, and my "head" tells me that to get better reception, you need to get a bigger antenna. I figured with a large tree in my neighbor's house, as well as it being an attic, I was looking at something large up there. Specifically this (Antennas Direct DB8 Multidirectional HDTV Antenna). I was looking at getting the DB8, when a friend of mine who was going to help me by mounting it in the attic suggested I might get by with something smaller. He recommended the antenna I'm writing about now. I was initially skeptical (again, the bigger is better attitude). But I read through a ton of reviews, and there were a lot of happy people. At the time I bought it, there were 220 reviews on Amazon with an average star rating of 4.5 out of 5. That's actually a higher review than the DB8 I was looking at. So I started reading, and was thinking perhaps I'd go with this.

Then while we were thinking about how to run cable, I remembered when my wife and I got the house 9.5 years ago (as of Sep 2011, when I'm writing) it was wired for Cable TV. I dropped the Cable TV, but the wires were all still there. Which meant that there was a cable run there already. So I decided to run a test. I took the same stupid $6 rabbit ears I was at the time using (RCA ANT111R Basic Indoor Antenna), and took 'em into the attic. I found the cable that went to the jack by my TV, and plugged the rabbit ears into it. Rescanned, and wow. Not only was my interference gone, it was picking up a lot more channels than I knew about. The most I got with the rabbit ears inside the house was about 35-40. It was more here. So I figured with the rabbit ears doing that much better, perhaps I didn't need the overkill DB8, and opted for this antenna, the ANT751R.

Did my research beforehand. Hit up antennaweb as well as tvfool for compass directions. Personally I think tvfool has way better antenna resources than antennaweb, but that's a side story. I got it installed in the attic (you can see a picture of my installation in the photo gallery here on Amazon). The mounting was fairly painless, although I will say what others have said. It's quite a value that the antenna comes with the mounting brackets and the pole in the box. Not all antennas do. The one thing that was missing was the wood screws needed to actually bolt the bracket to whatever you're attaching it to. The instruction manual even says to use a couple of wood screws (not included). Given they gave you the more expensive pole in the box gratis, you'd think they'd throw in a few wood screws, but that's a minor quibble.

Once I got it up there and hooked up, I reran a scan on the TiVo. I was bloody well amazed at what it found! The total number of channels it found was 79. Granted, several of those are inactive, or are otherwise things I don't care about. There were also a couple of channels it found which were on neither antennaweb's or tvfool's reports. Since I live right outside of Dallas, the majority of these kinds of channels are spanish speaking something or other. Given that's not my language, they're of little interest to me. What WAS of interest to me are the major networks (PBS, ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, & one local "old UHF" channel that broadcasts Texas Rangers games).

All of these channels are quite strong. Even with the large tree outside and being in an attic, the average signal strength of these channels (according to the signal strength meter on the TiVo) is around 80-85 or so. PBS is a bit low (mid 60's), but the same friend who lives about 3 miles away from me says that PBS is his weakest signal too, but it's not an issue unless there's some epic storms out, but we're probably not watching much TV at that time anyway. At least one or two of the channels that are of lesser concern to me are quite strong - I had a couple of them as high as 98 on the meter : Oh, before I forget, in the Dallas area, the majority of the antennas (especially the major networks) are in the same general area, as it's the highest point in the general D/FW metroplex. According to tvfool, I'm anywhere from 28.2 to 30.7 miles from the transmitters (except for a few rogue close ones that are about 8 or 14 miles), and they all are 80-85 or so in an attic mounted, non powered antenna.

There is no signal booster on here. It's just the antenna that was in the box hooked up through a cable run that used to be used for Cable TV into my TiVo box, and then on into my HDTV, which is this, BTW. The quality is astounding. The signals are rock solid, and I have to say, I'm quite happy with my purchase of this antenna.

While the old rabbit ears worked "OK" enough (especially for $6), it wasn't quite a universal solution. I'd have to fiddle with the antenna depending on what I wanted to record. Given I TiVo everything, having to worry about where the antenna was pointed meant I was back to the pre-TiVo days of caring what the broadcaster's schedules were. Didn't like that, so I looked into what became this choice of antenna. I'm quite happy with it. I suppose the only negative I could say is that the antenna is sold as an outdoor antenna. When I was putting it together, I felt like it wouldn't hold up to extreme winds, and things of that nature outside. It works great, but if left outside to the elements, I'm not sure how well it would hold up. But as an attic antenna, it won't have to deal with any of that, so it should last a good long time up there.

I was inititally concerned that this being a "cheaper" antenna wouldn't function well enough as one that was into the $100 range or so. I was wrong. This works really quite well for me.

I recently became angry over the high, (and ever-increasing) cost of cable and Satellite TV service. Finally realizing that most of what I was interested in watching consisted of local channels - I decided to break my long-term relationship with the Satellite providers, and save $60+ per month by taking advantage of FREE, over-the-air television signals. After all - twenty to twenty-five minutes of every prim time hour are filled with commercials anyway.

However, This presented a new problem for me. See - I live in Jacksonville NC (home of Camp Lejeune USMC base). I live within a couple miles of the base which means that any broadcast signals are subjected to the plethera of radio frequencies and satelite signals generated daily by the base's standard operations.

Combine that with the fact that "local" TV channels are EXTREMLY limited in this area.

At first - I ran out to a local retail super discount store and picked up a couple models which they were selling in their limited inventory. This did not work well because their offerings were substandard in quality.

Then I began browsing the web for advice, (this should have been my first choice). I returned the under-performing antennas to the super center, and ordered a model which I found to be pretty highly recomended on Amazon.

Upon receiving that RCA ANT751 - I opened the box and began the very SIMPLE assembly required on this un-assuming antenna.

When most of us think outdoor tv antennas, we likely think of the huge, ugly, monstrocities which once dotted the landscape of rural America. This model, however; breaks that stereotype with it's rather compact size, and ease of installation.

Once installed and positioned, I connected the coaxial cable to the TV, and scanned for channels. I was shocked to find that I could receive 23 channels. This even exceeded the results given by the well-known antenna advisory website. They predicted I could get about eight locals with a "large" outdoor antenna.

With some fine-tuning - I was in business. I was now getting free, over-the-air, un-compressed digital television without an overly-intrusive antenna messing up the landscape.

Let me say at this point that results WILL vary depending upon landscape, weather conditions, direction, location, and aiming. But for my area - this antenna is VERY impressive. It is deffinately worth your consideration.

It should also be noted that I have a clear area in my yard that is not obstructed by trees or tall buildings.

I first purchased an RCA ANT111 based on decent reviews, at least relative to indoor antennas. When it worked, the HD quality on my 42" 1080p LCD TV was breath-taking after watching SD programming on Dish. However reception was marginal with frequent video pixelation and audio drop-outs even on the strongest station. My house is in Raleigh 27613 only 18 miles from all the towers, but it sits down below a hill. When I looked at signal strength I found it to fluctuate from 85%+ to below 50% for no obvious reason.

After some web research, I bought the ANT751 and found it to be a very well made and complete product with a high quality mounting mast. Instructions were well written by someone with a command of English. The hardware packet was complete. Installation in my attic was a snap, and I now have 26 digital stations. That's several more than [...] indicated would be received with a large directional antenna. The signal strength is a very steady high-80's to low-90's and I've experienced none of the problems I had with the ANT111. I expect this is because it is a larger and directional antenna that is mounted higher. Almost all the stations in this area have transmitter antennas in the same area SE of Garner, NC, so directional is the way to go. Go ahead and buy the $10 antenna first to see the potential of OTA digital HD TV, but don't hesitate to step up to this terrific product and eliminate the frustration of marginal reception.

For those in 27613 I receive: WRDC 28.1, WRAZ 50.1,2,3, WLFL 22.1, WNCN 17.1,2,3, WTVD 11.1,2,3, WRAL 5.1,2,3, WRAY 30.1,2, WRPX 47.1,2,3, WNCT 9.1, Univision 40.1,2, Telemundo 44.1, WUNC 4.1,2,3

Before the change to digital signal i was using rabbit ears.I was receiving an ok signal,but always adjusting them.My signal was at 36% for only one tv.I installed this new antenna and now have a signal of 57% in the living room and 100% in the bed room.Do not have to adjust the the rabbit ears anymore and can feed up to three rooms with no problem and with out a power booster.Installation was not to hard but worth it.Now i receive twice as many channels.

I live in Poulsbo WA 98370. According to antenna web all digital channels were red to mostly violet. All I wanted was ABC,NBC,CBS and Fox. Got all but ABC plus more clear as day. Will miss ABC, but everyone in my area can't get it. Thought I would need a 9 foot antenna to get any channel. Easy to assemble and mount.