Originally Posted by Vern_in_IL
I do not have off the air T.V.
So how important is gain nowdays?
Gain and directionality are related. The higher gain the antenna, the more directional it tends to be. So if all of your stations are in one direction, the highest gain antenna you can buy is to your advantage, and just aim it properly.
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When T.V. was still analog, we always bought the highest gain channel master antenna we could. I'm not sure if gain would really help on UHF, since it is UHF and digital, it's either signal or nothing at all.
Digital absolutely and utterly relies on a good analog antenna design. Unlike Analog which just gets fuzzy if the reception isn't good, but is mostly usable, albeit with degraded audio and picture, picture quality, sound, etc., goes downhill really, really fast (into un-watchability) when MPEG compression is involved, ie: ATSC 1.0. ATSC 3.0 is a neat technology for 4K broadcast, and has much more advanced decoding algorithms which help with things like multipath reception, etc., but that's still a few years off. ATSC 3.0 should function better with a lower noise floor.
It annoys to me to no end when lay-people say "digital antennas" or "HD antennas". The best antenna for HD reception may very well be something that your grandma on the farm stuck on her roof in the 1950s if you're watching VHF-LO. Wired to a proper receiver/decoder, of course, with good impedance matching throughout.