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(More customer reviews)I don't think it's really fair of the other reviewer to give this antenna a one star rating because it didn't fit in HIS attic. I mean, really, how is that relavant to the the quality of the antenna or how is it relevant to anyone else? The fact that he has a small attic isn't a problem for the rest of us!
I bought this antenna because indoor antennas were not getting signals through the stucco of my house. When I got it mounted, It let me gets signals strong and clear from the tower about 25 miles from my house. I am very happy with it!
It comes in a large box and comes with mounting hardware for mounting it on the side of your house, on your chimney and in your attic (if you have a huge attic). The generic universal mount probably lets you mount it to anyvertical pole you have access to.
It comes in 5-6 pieces and you have to assemble them all into a the final antenna, which is surprisingly light for its size.
The fins fold outward easily and snap into position. It's huge when it's all together, Unless you have a large attic, forget about the attic mounting!
The problem I had was that the instruction manual is a not very explanatory. I'm very handy, and the antenna is actually easy to put together BUT this is only in hindsight, having built it.
While I was building it, I was cursing the manual writers. The reason why is that they refer to the pieces by their technical terms like "attach the phasing arms" and "connect the reflector to the main boom". Um...the WHAT? The pieces look pretty similar and are not marked at all, and with all the antenna fins (whatever they're called) folded up, the parts do NOT look like the illustration. It also says stuff like "use the nut and bolt to connect the main boom to the small boom" and that sent me hunting in the many packages for "the nut and bolt" ... which I discovered were already holding some part of the antenna together, so I had to remove the nut and bolt before adding the boom (or whatever). Phasing arms? They're Z shaped pieces.
When you assemble it, do yourself a favour and lay it all out. It's REALLY simple because the main part is only 3 pieces. The trick is to figure out which piece is which and WHICH WAY IS THE TOP of the antenna. Once that's figured out, it's a quick assembly. In fact, since I deciphered the manual, I could put the antenna together now in probably 20 minutes. Do yourself a favour and have a TABLE nearby on which you can lay the antenna because the "reflectors" will make it difficult to assemble on the ground. (the reflectors are the angled pieces that are kind of like a duck's open beak when seen from the side. ie; they are the pieces that drop below and above the horizontal plane of the main antenna)
I used the chimney mount and the instructions are absolutely worthless here. It says "Thread the bolt that is attached to the strap into hole A. Wrap the strap around the chimney and attach a bolt to the stap, which then goes into hole B". Too bad there was no A or B on the picture OR on the parts. Too bad the part was completely different than the illustration. Too bad the strap had no bolt attached to it, but rather several bits of metal that I had to search the internet to see if I could get a picture of how this was supposed to work! In short, I got a strap, a piece of metal and a bolt. No reference how the bolt is magically attached to the strap. After much surfing (for pictures, of which there are none) and trying to figure out the cryptic instructions in the manual ("pass the strap into the loop part then loop it back through the upright part") I figured out how it kind of works, which is really impossible to explain here, though I wish I could, to avoid frustration for other installers! My advice is that once you get the unit and you want to use this mount, look at what you are given, then go to the local hardware store that and ask them, or take a look at any sample mounts they might have.
Antenna performance is claimed to be "pink" (long range) and with the help of the Terk website, which has a link to [...], there is a really cool applet that tells you where to aim your antenna to get which channels! I aimed my antenna in the general direction (north to San Francisco) and attached all the parts and ... Holy cow, it works great! Channels that I could barely see before now come in clearly! I don't have HDTV, so I can't attest to it's HDTV quality, but it certainly gave me all the channels that were coming off the tower I was aiming at! You might consider getting an antenna rotator if you have multiple towers you can receive from.
One thing they should have included in the package is a cable/antenna grounding adapter. Which is simply a metal piece that you can attach a ground wire too and is used to connect the antenna downlead cable to the cable running into your house. It's pretty important to ground the antenna itself, and the coax cable (if you use twinlead cable, I don't know what you do) in case of lightning strikes.
I'd have given the antenna 5 stars except that;
1) The instruction manual is the bare minumum and with just a few clearer instructions could easily make the assembly less frustrating. Also the mounts I actually got do not match the mount they are explaining in the manual! The extra hour of frustration I spent cost them that last star.
2) It's pricier than other antennas you can buy from many large chains (Walmart, HD, Lowes, Radio Shack, etc) but it includes mounting hardware and a mast. I paid the extra so that I'd have "durable coating" (I didn't really notice it) and the mounting hardware.
3) The antenna comes with one section of 5 foot mast (the pole it sits on). With the chimney mount, that puts the bulk of the antenna RIGHT on top of my chimney. If I ever want to have a fire in the fireplace, I'd have to move it up. It would be MUCH nicer if it came with 10 feet of mast. But honestly, I think a 5 foot mast extension is probably less than 20 bucks, so it's not such a huge deal. However, since this antenna is more expensive than others though, a 10 footer would have been expected.
I can't really compare it to OTHER antennas because, well, I only have this one and can only compare it to indoor antennas, which it is MUCH better than. If I had to do it again, I don't think it's a bad purchase, and if the cheaper antennas still require you to buy extra mounting hardware, I'd buy it again. If the cheaper/smaller antennas are cheaper and come with mounting hardware, I might try them instead.
Bottom line is that I'm happy with the antenna. It works and if you are pretty handy, you might have a slightly less frustrating experience than I did.
Enjoy!
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