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You are confusing what happens at the decoder with the broadcast. An amplifier WILL help when a signal is low dB, and you DO "turn up the brightness" (which is a poor analogy). Low signal strength does not mean the signal is not there at all. There can be more dropouts, but those are generally due to other factors. There is still a limitation on how MUCH amplification works, just as with analog.
I live rural in hilly country. There is a slot on my property that "sees" the antenna farm 60 miles away. To get reception, I have to use a large Yagi AND an amp on the tower. Without the amp, only the strongest station comes in. With it, I get three more. Dropout comes from multipath interference when planes take off from an airport near te stations, or from storms.
Yep. You saved me some typing. If you have signal, you can amplify it. Of course, not all amplifiers are created equal. The higher quality ones induce less noise. That’s a bigger deal with digital TV where you get no image at all if there are too many errors in the signal. If the OP can run a TV next to that indoor antenna and get good picture, they can distribute it around their house using the coax they already have. It probably will need to be amplified since the splitter in the attic will induce a bunch of loss. The cable also induces loss though not much on short runs inside a house.
In the attic, only use as big a splitter as you need since the more outputs, the more the loss. A 2-1 splitter is usually -3 dB. An 8-1 splitter is more like -12 dB. The antenna goes into the input of the splitter.
You are confusing what happens at the decoder with the broadcast. An amplifier WILL help when a signal is low dB, and you DO "turn up the brightness" (which is a poor analogy). Low signal strength does not mean the signal is not there at all. There can be more dropouts, but those are generally due to other factors. There is still a limitation on how MUCH amplification works, just as with analog.
I live rural in hilly country. There is a slot on my property that "sees" the antenna farm 60 miles away. To get reception, I have to use a large Yagi AND an amp on the tower. Without the amp, only the strongest station comes in. With it, I get three more. Dropout comes from multipath interference when planes take off from an airport near te stations, or from storms.
You're absolutely correct, but I was trying to keep the advice simple, which is all 99% of users need. I've discussed cord-cutting and OTA with groups and audiences for the last several years, and there are rarely any broadcast engineers in the audience.
Especially with modern OTA, most people are clueless - in a general sense, and in the more damaging sense that they are relying on their and dad's and grandpa's knowledge of how it was done in 1974. In some cases they are using old analog TV gear that may well have been installed since 1974. That such gear will kinda-sorta work with DTV just compounds the misunderstanding.
(I find it endlessly funny that broadcast TV was given a massive technical overhaul and greatly improved just as the last viewers took down their antennas and switched to local-channel cable... )
Antennas specifically for DTV work better than old analog bird roosts. Aligning antenna planes to sources is somewhat more critical than it was for analog. And while amplifiers are still useful and can be a critical link in getting the mostest channels with the bestest reception, they (and the whole signal scheme) don't quite work the way they did with analog. Just throwing an amp on the antenna or at the TV will probably improve things, but not quite as much, quite the way or for quite the reasons one did in the old days.
So it's best to be selective. Put the time and money into a good antenna, well positioned, first - and then if the results aren't satisfactory, add an amp at the antenna. It's probably not needed at all if you do everything else right, it will add marginal improvement for most installations, and it is NOT the universal band-aid that worked pretty well in the analog days.
(With analog, you COULD just "turn up the brightness" of the signal and tune in weak stations, with or without some signal loss and noise. That largely won't work with DTV; either the signal is strong and clear enough to reach the lowest levels of decoding, or amplifying all the missing bits and noise will do no good.)
OTA is a great system these days, a quantum improvement on what it replaced... but it's not exactly the same and the details matter a bit more.
An antenna is an antenna. To tell someone that they must buy a “digital tv antenna” is nonsense. A good antenna, yes.
...yes and no. By and large, a TV antenna is a TV antenna - antennas work best when closely matched to a frequency range and there are many designs that would work poorly, if at all, with DTV signals. And vice versa.
But yes, the broadcast signal itself has not changed and a TV antenna must still be able to receive a select set of frequencies with as much signal strength and as much noise and reflection rejection as possible.
That said, the US broadcast system was switched over almost ten years ago, and any antenna in service since then has probably degraded to a poor condition. So any antenna bought and installed now would use newer design that is optimized for DTV conditions. Maybe calling it a "digital TV antenna" is somewhere between a tautology and meaningless, but the phrase does indicate something with likely better performance than the giant sparrow perch that might still be poking out of your farmhouse.
Generally speaking, modern antennas are much smaller and arguably more invisible/attractive than the ten-foot Buck Rogers rayguns of yore.
"Modern" antennas are smaller for a couple of reasons - UHF is now dominant, VHF less common, and makers are simply making the (natively smaller - due to shorter wavelength) UHF antennas; a higher proportion of people live in urban centers where signal strength is high and omni-directional low gain antenna work fine and are cheaper. VHF in such locations is most often strong enough to overcome mismatch.
Age of an antenna is mostly irrelevant, provided connections aren't corroded and there isn't physical damage. "Buck Rogers" resonators still are used in fringe areas where a directional antenna is needed. What has changed with digital is that "fringe" is tighter in to the antenna of the station, making a lot of the directional antennas unable to provide reliable reception unless moved twenty miles or so closer to the station.
Went up the attic - this is the hub I was talking about. So guessing the black wire (top left) is the input that I will be replacing with the antenna out ?
That's a hell of a nice amplified distribution hub. Yes to your original question: disconnect the incoming cable source, put in a modestly-sized, correctly-aimed antenna right there in the attic, connect it to that hub, and you're good to go.
(All of my experiences with were one to three generations of Comcast/Dish installer cabling, using festoons of coax and a splitter every twenty feet. Since I tore out and/or disconnected them all, I didn't care... but I and others ass/u/med you had passive splitters etc. instead of this very nice setup.)
DTV antennas have surprising performance that is much more regulated by height above ground than most non-metallic obstacles.
I can't say that the obstacles in my attic are all non-metallic (it's a mess up there, and there's definitely some chicken wire over the gable vents, for instance), but they're pretty effective at eliminating DTV reception.
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