How to choose a TV antenna

Putting up a TV antenna is one of the best steps you can take to breaking your reliance on pay TV. Most areas of the U.S. have access to several dozen TV channels broadcast over the air for free. A TV antenna will bring them to your TV, so you won’t be stuck with the “local broadcast TV fee” charged by your cable or satellite company. And if you decide to subscribe to an online TV provider, you won’t need to worry about which ones carry your local channels (not all of them do).

As a bonus, they’ll make your big-screen TV shine with a better picture than cable or satellite can deliver. This is possible because those transmissions are typically compressed in order to preserve bandwidth, so the service providers can cram more channels into their pipes.

You’ll notice the difference in quality on the major broadcast networks mostly, because all of them broadcast in high definition. Most stations broadcast a 1080i (interlaced scanning) signal, which is the