Member mrerick has been coaching me on Over-The-Air TV. I have two 10-year old CRT TVs that I thought I'd try the OTA reception on.
I used
http://tvfool.com to check out what stations & channels might be available here, and bought an amplified indoor HDTV antenna with an advertised 'range' of 60 miles. Mounting it on my window behind my TVs was pretty much a failure. (I live at the bottom of a long East-West ridge called "The Escarpment". It runs from the Canadian border to somewhere in central New York State. It's 167' high and represents the difference in height between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. It's what made Niagara Falls. The Erie Barge Canal is 2 miles upslope from me.)
Putting the antenna in my 2nd floor window and using the amplifier I was able to receive 6 stations with 12 channels with a Toshiba, 7 stations with 11 channels with a Philips. All OTA channels, a pretty eclectic selection. But nothing I really watch here on Time Warner cable.
As an experiment, it was mildly interesting, but my location, where only the Toronto CA and Buffalo NY channels come through without any disruption, was disappointing. Besides being at the bottom of a ridge, in a rural area, I'm surrounded by trees twice as high as my house. Even boosted, I only get signals from line-of-sight stations.
Pic below is from TVFool and represents the channels reported in my area (but not my address). The most are the NorthWest and SouthWest stations, which is the two directions to Toronto and Buffalo. Anything over 46 miles doesn't come in here.
Green indicates good reception, yellow fair, and pink & gray progressively poorer as the distance increases.
My lensatic compass grew legs, or I would try shooting a bearing and aiming my antenna directly. That might help reception.
