Below are my recommended TV antennas. But before buying an antenna, you need to find out how many channels are available in your area. To do this, enter your zip code or full address into the Station Finder :. If you got a lot of green channels, congratulations! You should be able to use a simple non-amplified indoor antenna and get most of those channels, if not more!
Check out my recommended indoor antennas below. Skip ahead to my recommended outdoor antennas. Try some of these streaming TV services. So, check with your neighbors! Walk around your home and look for homes and apartments with TV antennas on the roof. Post on Facebook or Nextdoor asking people in your immediate area how many channels they are getting and what kind of antennas they are using.
Read about my suggested converter boxes here. You will get the most channels and best reception by using an outdoor antenna or attic antenna, simply because these are higher up and have fewer obstructions than indoor antennas have.
Skip down below if you are looking for an outdoor antenna. If that is your situation, keep reading. If you have a lot of strong stations in your area and are not able to install an outdoor antenna, I would recommend the Mohu Leaf flat indoor antenna. Disclosure: Some of the links on this page are affiliate links.
This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. I test or research each product or service before endorsing. This site is not owned by any retailer or manufacturer. I own this site and the opinions expressed here are mine. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. The Mohu Leaf is a super-flat indoor TV antenna that you can hang on a wall or window , as shown below.
It is made in the U. The Leaf is fantastic in terms of performance relative to other indoor antennas, and hide-ability. See my comparison between the Mohu Leaf and a bulky metal antenna. Mohu has a variety of Leaf models, but the one I recommend is the Mohu Leaf This is the original non-amplified version:. In my testing, this model hits the sweet spot of price and performance if you can't use an outdoor antenna. My only beef about the Leaf is that it comes with an under-performing RG59 coax cable.
I highly recommend swapping that cable out for a higher-quality RG6 coax cable which will give you more stations and better reception. See this third-party article on why RG6 is so much better than RG59 coax cable.
Happily, the cable is removable so you can attach any cable to the Leaf. Here are some RG6 cables that should work well:. VHF channels are more difficult to receive.
Even "green" strong VHF channels might be hard to pick up with your indoor antenna. If mounting an antenna outside is not an option for you, Clearstream makes some great outdoor antennas that you could mount inside. They're relatively flat compared to most outdoor antennas. If your TV stations are far away, an outdoor or attic antenna will get you the most channels, hands down.
But before going to the trouble of setting up an outdoor or attic antenna, I highly recommend asking one of your neighbors how many channels they are getting with their rooftop antenna. Just walk around your neighborhood and look for homes with an antenna on the roof! These are ideal if most of your stations come from one direction. Antennas Direct and Channel Master are two respected antenna companies with high-quality outdoor antennas.
I have purchased from them before and recommend them. Check out their sites, which have guides to help you pick an outdoor antenna:. Do you live in an apartment or condo? By Federal law, a landlord or HOA cannot prohibit you from setting up a broadcast TV antenna or satellite dish on a part of the building that you own or are renting.
While you might not be able to mount an antenna on the roof, you should be able to mount one in your balcony. The main thing to avoid in an antenna is one with the cable permanently attached to the antenna. All of the antennas I recommend have a removable cable. That will allow you to upgrade it to a better RG6 cable if necessary, or use a longer cable to reach that window. Those will not give you as many channels as the Leaf or Metro unless you have really strong TV signals in your area.
So, save money and get a quality antenna to start with. When you get your antenna, go to the next section where I give you tips on setting it up. Check out my other site, thefrugalnoodle. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. You could mount it on the wall below the TV like a soundbar, or there's a little attachable kickstand if you'd rather put it on a TV stand. In any case, it's stylish in a way that most antennas simply don't strive to be. And if you want, you can mount it in an attic or even outside.
But that style comes with frustrations. We struggled mightily to attach a coaxial cable or degree coaxial adapter to the back of the antenna, because its coaxial connector is wedged so tight to the backing. Ultimately, we used a screwdriver to remove the spongey support ring on the back to give our hands a bit more room, and then had to use pliers to tighten the adapter because it wouldn't budge using our fingers.
It was a real pain. None of the omissions were crucial, but it was still a difference. The Blade is sleek and stylish, but the smaller size brings a couple of frustrations along with it. But if you're thinking that a design like this is too good to be true, then you're on to something: While we experienced good reception in one location that we've used to test many antennas , we struggled to pull as many channels or as consistent of reception in another area that has been fine with larger, more powerful rivals.
We saw very different results on two floors of a house about 15 miles north of downtown Chicago. On the top floor, the antenna performed similarly to many others that we have tested in the location, picking up 55 channels and providing strong reception on most of them. We tested the antenna both directly behind the TV and a couple feet away from it on the same surface, and the results were similar in both instances.
Downstairs in the living room, the Clear TV was much less successful. We ran multiple channel scans with the antenna behind the TV, both resting on the stand and on the back of the set itself, and only pulled in about 20 channels. Those channels looked clear and were stable, but it was a fraction of what we had pulled one floor higher. If you have experienced troubles with interference or live farther away from a source, then you'll probably want to invest in something more powerful.
That depends! TV antennas receive content rather differently than the Wi-Fi or Ethernet enabled streaming apps on most smart TVs these days. Antennas for VHF-Low stations are harder to come by, but those frequencies are generally used by smaller stations that may transmit at lower power. Be prepared to put up with a lot of marketing speak when checking out antennas. No manufacturer can guarantee their antenna will pull in a signal from a given number of miles because too much depends on local topology, signal strength, interference, and other factors unique to your location.
Having said that, those range claims are useful in evaluating antennas from the same manufacturer. In the example above, an indoor antenna will probably pull in all the green channels coming from the transmitter at degrees, and the same antenna will also likely work for the third channel in the list, which comes from a different transmitter at degrees, but has a strong signal.
The last station on the list will require a bit more work. But, before you spend too much money, try an antenna and see if you can pull in all six. You also might need one if you have an excessively long run of cable, say from a distant spot on a piece of land to a house. It mounts onto the antenna mast and is fed with power through the coaxial cable. A rotator will turn the TV antenna in any direction with the click of a remote.
Many antennas do a good job pulling in stations from different directions, especially if they are strong, local signals. The connection from your antenna to your TV is every bit as important as the antenna itself.
Coax has a center wire that carries the signal and is surrounded by a plastic insulator. Make the cable a single run if possible because each time you connect shorter cables together, a little signal is lost. The most common type of cable for TV is called RG Predicting which antenna will work with certainty is almost impossible. The information garnered from sites like TV Fool will provide a strong indication of what should work, but there are other variables at work. In some areas, especially in cities or areas with lots of hills, signals can bounce off obstacles like buildings and cause interference, trees can grow leaves in the spring and block stations you got fine in the winter, and atmospheric conditions can alter the way signals reach your house.
For example, optimum reception of the lowest TV-signal frequency, channel 2, demands a 4. The lowest active TV channel in Los Angeles is channel 4 which TVs pick up as virtual channels 22 and 63 , so I used the Channel Master signal meter to measure the sensitivity of the antennas to this channel as a way to gauge low-VHF sensitivity.
All of our recommendations produce signals that, with a clear transmission in good conditions, are typically 25 to 30 dB or to 1, times stronger than the noise. Although the performance of the antennas we tested was sometimes inconsistent and thus difficult to gauge, all of our picks excelled in certain tests and at least placed in the middle of the pack in every other test. Of all the antennas in our latest round of testing, the Antennas Direct ClearStream Flex was the most consistent performer.
It always ranked at or near the top in the number of channels received, and in our technical tests it produced a strong signal with relatively low noise. The ClearStream Flex did the best overall in my in-home tests, pulling in the most channels 90 out of in the first room and the fourth-most channels in the second room.
In our tests in the Oceanside, California, area, it was one of several models that tied for second best, pulling in 21 channels. Without the amp, the numbers were a little lower: 81 and 87 in my home, and 19 in Oceanside. A supplied Sure Grip adhesive strip attaches the ClearStream Flex to the wall, and you can reposition the antenna by gently peeling it off the wall and resticking it elsewhere. You can even wipe the strip off with a damp cloth if it gets dirty, thus restoring its stickiness.
The cable attaches to the antenna with a threaded connector, so you can substitute a longer, shorter, or different-colored cable if you desire. The amplifier accompanying the antenna we received was a 3-inch-long rectangle, different from the amp shown on the Amazon page.
The ClearStream Flex is one of the larger flat models we tested. The new model retains the signal-level meter that lets you fine-tune the positioning of the antenna for the best reception, and in our tests, a subtle change in the size of the new antenna dramatically improved its performance even before we used the meter. In addition, it currently has limited distribution and represents a big step up in price over the original ANT3ME.
The meter incorporates five LEDs: two red, one yellow, and two green. As you move the antenna to different places in a room, more LEDs illuminate as the signal strength increases.
You could use your TV to do a channel scan in each location, but with many TVs, each scan takes a long time—in the case of my Vizio PG1 TV, it took more than 13 minutes per scan, which might mean an hour or two of trial and error versus a minute or two with the ANT3ME1. In my living room, where TV signals are fairly weak, getting even one extra LED to light up on the meter made a huge difference.
When I mounted the ANT3ME1 in the same aesthetically convenient place I used for the other antennas, three LEDs illuminated on the meter and the antenna picked up 51 channels out of , 11 more than the older model achieved in the same position a few minutes earlier. Moving the antenna to an adjacent wall caused an extra LED to illuminate and bumped the channel count up to , tying the Antennas Direct ClearStream Flex and improving on the 92 channels I got with the previous model.
That means your TV will have an easier time tuning in channels 2 through 6, if those are used in your area. Although the Amped Pro is a very respectable performer even before you use the app, we found that using the app let us get dramatically better results in problematic locations.
Using the meter requires downloading the Winegard Connected app for iOS or Android and pairing your mobile device through Bluetooth. It provides a count of strong, moderate, and weak stations that it updates every six seconds. In my living room, the Flatwave Amped Pro pulled in 57 stations from the aesthetically convenient position where I also tested all the other antennas; using the meter, I quickly found a position where I could get channels exactly what the app promised.
In my other room, where the five-step LED meter of the RCA ANT3ME1 proved to be no help, the detailed data in the Connected app allowed me to go from 82 channels in my original testing position to channels three more than the app promised.
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