Terk Technology HDTVi VHF/UHF HDTV Indoor Antenna
After 1 year of trying different antenna configurations, I finally found a product which solved my TV antenna reception. About 1 year ago I wanted to reduce my cable bill, cancel TV and phone and only retain internet. The idea was that I would receive HDTV for free over the air waves. I bought a RCA indoor antenna 1450 package which included a amplifier. There was nothing wrong with this product, it was just the wrong product for my TV setup. The RCA 1450, essentially is a fractal antenna (I assume), omni-directional and one had better be within 10 miles LOS (line of sight) from the TV transmitter. I live in the Phoenix metroplex area and my house is about 20 to 25 miles LOS from where all the TV transmitters are located at, which is at South Mountain. The reception I was getting with the RCA 1450 combined with the TV preamplifier, which comes with the unit, gave me a patchy reception of some of the TV channels, they would fade in and out at different times of the day and if someone walked into the kitchen/den it would disrupt the TV. What I tried then was to buy a "better" TV preamplifier, one with more gain and less noise, another 50bucks down the drain for a new TV preamplifier and again this didn't work, still the same patch reception. After all this failure, I then went back to cable but only got basic TV. Everything was fine for 6 months, but my wife complained recently she wasn't getting some of the channels she liked when we were receiving over the air channels, PBS stations. By this time I knew the ONLY chance I had of getting over the air TV was with a directional antenna rather than a omni-directional antenna, either this or install a antenna in the attic and pay for someone to run the cable in the house.
The nice thing about directional antennas is NOT ONLY do you get antenna gain, but the antenna gain also gives you a S/N improvement (signal to noise) and my dual TV preamplifier experiment indicated strongly that I needed both gain as well as S/N improvement (no TV preamplifier was going to solve my problem regardless of the gain magnitude). Looking on the web I found two directional antennas which were getting good reviews, one was a cute parabolic dish indoor antenna (Antenna Hub AX-912) and the other was the Terk antenna, both were getting good reviews. I probably would of bought the parabolic dish indoor antenna but they indicated they were out of stock and wouldn't be able to ship again till the end of November of 2011. I looked at the Terk reviews and design, it was evidently a directional antenna. The advertised gain was 12 to 11db (1/3/2014 per the comment afer this review, he is correct I confused the active gain Terk antenna for passive antenna gain so the previous antenna gain of 12 to 11db is for the active Terk antenna and is NOT for this antennna, it is directional but I cannot find the UHF gain specification either), THIS WAS GOOD, what this means in every day terminology is if a typical indoor antenna works at a LOS of 10miles (for example the RCA indoor 1450 antenna) then the TERK (if setup properly and there aren't too many reflections) should generally work at 40 miles away from the TV antenna transmitter, meaning I would have a very good chance of picking up the TV transmitters 25 miles away right out of the box provided I pointed the antenna in the direction of where the TV transmitters are located at.
I connected the TERK antenna, pointed it in the direction of South Mountain, had my TV automatically acquired the TV channels and WHALLA...........right out of the box I got TV reception with NO patchiness (Hallelujah, choir crescendoing in the background)!! So, here I am writing a review FOR the TERK, because it works. My recommendation for indoor air wave antenna seekers who's omnidirectional antenna sort of works is to buy a directional passive antenna, Google and learn a little bit about directional antennas and buy the TERK. Also I would state, that yes it is tempting to buy a active antenna, to gain up or boost up the signal, but a passive gain antenna is much better since you also get an honest S/N improvement. If you want to gain/boost up the signal you can always buy a separate TV preamplifier (sometimes this will help, most of the time it doesn't).
The other directional antenna, Antenna Hub AX-912, claims a ridiculous 32 to 36db of antenna gain (WHEW!!!), this maybe true, however with this much antenna gain this means you have to be much more precise of aiming the Antenna Hub indoor antenna to the TV transmitters, a little off and you will go from receiving to not receiving. The TERK with lower antenna gain will not be as sensitive to the direction pointing for reception as the Antenna Hub. The Antenna Hub probably will have an advantage in the city, where a lot of ghosting and bouncing of the signals will happen, given its much narrower beam (higher antenna gain) it would be much better about picking up only one signal, but if you do this you would have to be patient and search every point in the 3 dimensional space with the Antenna Hub AX-912 and test the reception every time you move it till until you find the optimum reception direction, this would take some time.
BTW as an aside, if you KNOW there are two major and physically separate locations for TV transmissions within your area and with respect to where you are receiving TV, you can, with either the TERK or the Antenna Hub, consider buying two and power combine the two indoor antennas pointed in different directions. Before you do this you should buy one, run the antenna signal through a power splitter and point to the two different physical locations separately. If you can receive both then buying two antennas and power combine will work.
So the TERK antenna works but make sure you educate yourself a little about directional antennas (Google or/and talk to some experts (make sure they know a little about RF, not just store sales people)) before you buy and set one up, a layman can set one up but some education is needed (you need a feel for what is going on, not much of a feel but some). If you don't have some rudimentary understanding of what is going on, it is highly likely you are setting it up wrong and if the setup isn't correct it flat out will not work. One important setup issue is to make sure that any cable, connector and input is 75 ohms impedance, TERK advertises they are 75 ohms output impedance (the most common TV antenna input impedance). If the impedance from the TERK antenna to the input of the TV isn't 75 ohms all the way, it is highly likely the TERK will not work, for the uninformed this means any extra cable you use to connect the TERK to the TV needs to be 75 ohm cable (not all cables are the same at RF).
Reviews with images
Disappointing purchase
I purchased this antenna for use with Philips PET729/37 - 7 Inch LCD Portable TV / DVD PlayerPhilips PET729/37 - 7 Inch LCD Portable TV / DVD PlayerI wanted to use it in two rooms that don't have a cable outlet and during cable outages.However, downstairs I only 2 stations with the Terk Antenna. Upstairs I can get 3 channels with Terk Antenna ( NBC, ABC and PBS but I am missing CBS). If I connect the TV to a cable outlet it finds all the stations, but I don't need it in the rooms that I have an cable outlet.Disappointing!Other problems:* The antenna does not have a stable base, so it has to be on a very firm leveled area. Running cats or kids would easily knock it down without intending to.* The antenna is huge, it make the portable TV not portable.
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Reviewed in the United States on November 15, 2011
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Reviewed in the United States on February 1, 2011
