HDTV Can't get a signal? Dust off the antenna

Is that 1960s outdoor antenna still dangling from your rooftop?
HARTFORD COURANT
The television antenna -- didn't we get rid of those things during the Reagan administration? -- has become either a savior or necessary evil for many HDTV owners.
For those without access either to cable or satellite providers, the preferred route to high-definition programming, an old-fashioned antenna is the only hope of pulsing a digital signal through the veins of their new TV. For those with lapses in cable or satellite coverage, an antenna is often the only way to get some local stations.
Either way, it's a headache. Most cases require an outdoor antenna, which is great if that towering 1960s relic still dangles from your rooftop or apartment building. And the digital television signal is far more vulnerable than the trusty analog signal. When an analog signal runs into tall buildings or a mountain before it reaches your house, it still creates a viewable picture, however flawed. When a digital signal runs into something, doink! it's knocked out cold. The screen goes blank.
What you need
You need a good antenna, some luck and a digital tuner. Although more cable-ready HDTV sets with built-in tuners are becoming available because of a Federal Communications Commission requirement, most digital sets now in homes have no built-in digital tuner. Those sets, called HDTV-ready, are ready, and willing, but they need a tuner like a satellite receiver or cable set-top box to produce a high-definition picture. If you don't have either satellite or cable service, a stand-alone tuner for receiving local high-definition channels will cost about $250.
An indoor high-definition antenna usually isn't even worth the effort. Terk's HDTVi, a $40 indoor model that looks like a just-born rooftop antenna affixed to the base of an old rabbit-ears antenna, promises off-air HDTV broadcasts with strategic placement. If pointing the antenna in the direction of the broadcast tower doesn't work, Terk suggests, try aiming it a building that might be diverting the signal's path. Now we're playing angles? OK, "CSI" in the corner pocket.
You can also try a more scientific way. The Consumer Electronics Association has set up AntennaWeb (antennaweb.org), which, using your address, compiles a list of area digital channels (and analog, if requested) with everything from the channel and network affiliation to the compass orientation of the antenna and the tower's distance from your house. It also prescribes the type of antenna required to receive each channel, using color codes. My list, 12 stations, called for a Benjamin Moore sampler -- yellow, green, red, blue and violet.
Sold with charts
HDTV outdoor antennas are sold with corresponding pie charts. Yellow, for instance, represents a small multidirectional rooftop antenna, green a medium multidirectional and red a medium directional rooftop antenna. Indoor antennas are excluded from AntennaWeb's mapping system because too many things can go wrong, like placing them too close to metal objects or installed in a basement, making it impossible to receive the digital signals.
Terk, however, rates the HDTVi yellow/green, which made it eligible to pick up six stations from my list when I connected it to the media receiver of a Pioneer PDP-5040HD, a 50-inch plasma set with a built-in digital tuner. The HDTVi hit on only two of the six, a nice day if you're batting cleanup but less than so-so for an antenna.
If you really must get HDTV over the air, you'll probably have to work for it. You can start at AntennaWeb. Then it's up to the roof. Or wait until your cable company signs up the rest of your local high-definition stations.