In article ,
David Thompson wrote:

I have a set of rabbit ears that was given to me several years ago for the
TV in the bedroom. The antenna cost about $15 in the 2002 catalog (Radio
Shack quit publishing a catalog soon thereafter).

I use a digital converter made under the RCA name and after the scan
virtually all of the pictures came out far better than the old analog
reception. However, almost all say "cannot get good reception rescan". The
sound tiles in and out.

That does suggest that the signal is inconsistent - possibly it's
weak, over-all, or possibly it's subject to momentary dropouts due to
multipath reflections from moving objects (airplanes, trees, etc.).

If you're in an urban area, multipath problems are likely to be at the
heart of your problem.

Moving the rabbit-ears around to different positions will give you
some amount of gain and inteference rejection... you might find a
position which gives you a more stable result on one or more channels.

The bedroom is on the second floor. I looked at
amplified indoor antennas at Target and they sell for $20 to $50. The
non-amplified is $18 (only one they have).

Do most go to an amplified antenna or use an outside antenna?

As a general rule, I don't favor amplified indoor antennas. The
amplification usually doesn't buy you very much, since the front-end
section of the TV set has quite a lot of gain/sensitivity. The
antenna's own amplification will simply "replace" some of the
amplification in the TV (to no particularly good end), it will add
some amount of additional noise, and it may be subject to
strong-signal overload. Antenna-based amplifiers won't do anything to
help multipath problems, or noise problems from nearby interference
sources.

Indoor antennas may work well, or very badly. A lot depends on the
building construction. In some wood-frame buildings, they can work
fine. If the outer walls are stucco (with embedded chicken-wire), or
if the walls have foil-backed insulation, they may work very badly...
the building acts as a partial Faraday cage, and blocks most of the
signal.

I just took
down my old big outside antenna 3 years ago as we have Comcast cable in 3
rooms. Comcast cost $$$ for each set up and add more wires to the house. I
also assume the signal gets weaker the more I add.

For good TV reception, a reasonable-sized outdoor antenna on a mast is
hard to beat. Getting the antenna up into direct line-of-sight of the
transmitter/tower can help eliminate all sorts of reception problems.

If you can't arrange a roof antenna, then a smaller beam antenna
located in the attic might be a workable second choice.

Yes, when you feed a signal down the coax into the house, and split it
among several rooms, the signal in each room is weaker than if you fed
the antenna output directly to a signal room. This is actually one of
the situations in which an antenna amplifier can help: it makes up
for the losses in the signal-division process and in the coax.
Ideally, the amplifier is located close to the antenna, before any
long run of coax and before any signal-splitter.

Be careful, though. Many inexpensive antenna amplifiers (mast-mounted
or part of a splitter / distribution box) use only a simple
one-transistor amplification circuit, and can be prone to problems
from strong-signal overload. If you're located near a TV transmitter
(or a ham operator, CB'er, police/fire station, AM broadcast station)
a strong signal from the nearby transmitter can saturate the
amplifier, pushing it into distortion. The resulting signal on many
channels can be worse than if there was no amplifier at all.

--
Dave Platt AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
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