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Message: [QUOTE="FOX TV, post: 32465, member: 4493"]mileage versus gain !Gain is obviously a major factor in antenna performance, and the mileage rating is just a poor reference at best for the non-antenna savvy consumer to have some type of indicator, and to possibly attempt to pick a somewhat proper antenna for their location. Granted it is not the best system for choosing a proper antenna on a technical level, but the minute you start talking dB, gain, rejection, beam width etc. in front of the average consumer, you can just see the confusion start to take them over and they quickly realize that they are at the mercy of someone else when selecting a proper antenna for their location.In my area of the country in the mountainous region of southwest Virginia, we deal with reception issues from viewers quite regularly. We have a very good area in which to test antenna theory, especially in regards to Digital reception and the multi-path problem. We broadcast to our city of license, which is essentially a big old soup bowl with mountain ranges on virtually every side.The transmitter is on a 4000 foot mountain, and I can literally look down on a large portion of our main city of license and it is easy to see why this area has all of the reception issues that it does. This would have been an ideal area to test and install a Distributed Transmission Network, but everyone in this area had already committed to Full Power operations, and the FCC waited way to long to approve the concept for it to be useful in the DTV transition.Rear and side rejection to me are the most important issues for this area, and a narrow beam width seems to also be desirable. We are also a LowV/HighV/UHf market, with one of them being trips favorite PBS station,  which adds several more levels of complexity in itself. On top of that, not all of the transmitters are located in the same direction. It almost seems as if you need a dedicated mini antenna farm in this area to receive all of the stations reliably.The best antennas we have tried, and they are used in our signal strength field tests for viewers are the Clear Stream C series antennas. They have decent rejection, and seem to work in high echo areas where other designs don't work as well or at all.  I went to one viewers home who had just erected a brand new fringe area VHF/UHF antenna, brand unknown with a 10 foot boom (100 MILE Antenna LOL ) . It was mounted on top of a two and a half story house at over 45 feet in elevation.This house sits deep in a hollow with mountains on 3 sides, and the only channel it would receive was Trips favorite channel PBS on 3. The Rhode & Swartz DTV spectrum analyzer showed echos out to the end of the 80 microsecond scale. We used a Clear Stream C2 at 20 feet for the first test, and all of the signals from the 4000 foot transmitter site showed up at receivable levels except for channel 3, when the 10 foot boom combo only received the channel 3 signal.I have proven the performance to myself of the Clear Stream C series antennas beyond a shadow of a doubt. This is just one of many stories from our last 5 to 6 weeks of field strength tests to see where all of the signals in this market are strong or weak since almost all of us have new antennas and transmitters and it also proved the performance of the C series antennas in my eyes.The C series of antennas work very well on UHF as Ghost Killers.:cheer2:All of the numbers on a spec sheet are all needed for reference, but in the trenches is where the rubber meets the road, our should that be where the F connector meets the antenna?[/QUOTE]

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