HD antenna issue
 

So when I dropped Comcast cable last month, my wife insisted she wanted the 2 local PBS stations (not available streaming, of course), so I started with the living room TV, found an antenna with AC power, shown as 55 miles range (we're about 30 miles from Boston). Played around with positioning, finally found something decent, and able to get about 20 broadcast stations with it. Great!
So of course my wife wanted this added to the upstairs tvs, too. Got a set of 2 different antennas (Walmart no longer had the same one as I got before). These were USB-powered, no big deal. Got them set up, antennas positioned, everything worked fine.
Then all of a sudden last Friday, none of the antennas were picking up all the broadcast stations any longer - they each picked up a few only - but of course not the PBS broadcasts that my wife wanted.

I played with the living room antenna position last night with no luck getting all the stations back - where before I was getting a couple of 'green lights' with the signal strength indicator, now I'm not.
These antennas hook up through the coax 'RF antenna' input on the TVs. Any ideas/solutions? Signal amplifier?

For several years I used a conventional outdoor rooftop antenna to pick up local (about 15 miles away) stations. Signal reception was hit or miss - sometimes this local station came in and sometimes that one. I will say that when I got good reception on a particular station, the picture was excellent even on a cheapo Walmart flatscreen TV. At other times, the picture would be broken up or not come in at all. When PBS, NBC, FOX, ABC and CBS all came in, I bought lottery tickets. I tried to objectively assess what might cause good signal strength in terms of season of the year and/or weather, but could never really come up with a consistent cause & effect. I wonder if these indoor antennas work with a similar consistency and signal strength becomes weaker as the source is farther away....

Try a rescan
 

This happened to me too. I had to rescan my channels. I looked online and found this:
By law, many local TV stations are moving to new frequencies. If you watch TV for free, using an antenna, you must rescan your TV to keep your channels. ... Because stations must move at different times, you may need to rescan your TV more than once. No new devices, equipment or services are needed to rescan.

But that's over weeks or months. He just hooked it up.

^^THIS. It's become quite common to have to do this.

Hmmmmmm.....
 

My Brother in law gave me an old hd antenna that looks like a small, thin black rectangle with a thin cheap wire attaching to the tv. I have had to re-scan stations many times, and invariably they come back for a while. The only stations I have no trouble with are the 4 pbs stations I get signal from. I'm a long ways from any pbs signal tower...go figure:guitar:

By the way, interesting timing. According to an article over at Boston-area TV stations are shifting to make room for mobile data, beginning the week of July 30, 2019: "Many Boston-area TV stations are shifting their spot on the airwaves this week, requiring people who use over-the-air antennas to rescan their television sets to find them again." And this, as well: "Nine major Boston stations, including the main networks and PBS, will be making the transition between now and Friday." "The Boston-area stations changing frequencies include CBS 4, ABC 5, Fox 25, NBC 10, PBS 44, PBS 2, UniMas 27, Channel 68, and Channel 23."

Re-scan and see what happens.

We only have HD antennas. I refuse to pay huge monthly cable fees for 300 channels of Bravo Sierra. There is so much stuff that we would never ever watch. We have to re-scan channels about three times a year, but we are now up to about 30 free HD channels locally. Of course many of the channels need to be hidden - we don't care about the Home Shopping Network in either English or Spanish, etc. We have about 15 channels displayed, which is plenty of options for the time we care to waste staring at the TV.

We DVR everything that we watch and zap the commercials, theme songs, and closing credits. There is maybe 20 minutes of content in a half-hour show and barely 40 minutes in an hour-long show. We can watch the five hours of weekly recorded content in about 2½ hours on a Sunday afternoon (or whenever the weather is not great to be outdoors).

Hundreds of stations dropped to lower frequencies in the last month. Rescanning will help, but you might find that reception is not as good because the antennas were designed for the higher frequencies.

We cut the cable several years ago and have found many other ways to occupy our time. I swear that most of the time we were shuffling through 200 or so useless channels.

Solutions to your problem would be a roof mounted or attic mounted antenna with a splitter and an amplifier. Or, what we did is this: I have a large antenna in the attic; a coax line goes down to an upstairs bedroom; there it feeds into an Amazon Fire Recast (which is a tuner and DVR). The signal is sent WiFi, and received by Amazon Fire dongles around the house (they plug into an hdmi port).

This eliminates the cabling and results in better reception with a DVR include. One caveat, my wife finds the Amazon Fire interface confusing, so she still opts to use the small antenna behind our tv and channel surf that way.

Good luck!

Rick

Ps: the site tvfool.com will give you a pretty accurate map of what stations you can expect to pick up at your street location.

!!!!!! That's it, of course. Channels 5 & 7, 38 and 56 all continued to come in. Installed the antennas in mid-July.

Thanks

OP's problem is solved. I'll just chime in to say that the antenna that works well enough for me is one of those small, flat antennas that look a little like a thin mouse pad and are smaller than a letter size sheet of paper. I don't use an amplified one,

I have mine upstairs and in a window which helps.

Yes used to get 12 channels with my rabbit ears now I had to go to Best Buy and a get an RCA powered antenna.Stupid they have to mess things up !

yup
 

Same here;)

Re-scanned, the two upstairs antennas picked up all the stations again. The downstairs one won't pick up channel 2.1 (main PBS channel), will have to try repositioning it, but my wife is happy she can get the stations again.
Thanks for the help.