We are moving to a small city that has five stations with strong signals according to a government website.

So how and where does one start shopping for antennas knowing nothing about them and having never used them.

[Google first pulls up Angie's list but I find nothing there about antennas. Then several ''yellow page'' sites which list satellite and the like. No ghit on the first page mentions OTA antennas.]

Does one just go to Walgreen's or WalMart and buy something and try it?

1) How far in miles are you from the transmitter sites?

2) Are they all together on an antenna farm (a single shared area) or do they come from different directions?

3) Do you know the actual channels they are transmitting on as opposed to the "virtual channel numbers" that they call themselves and are displayed on your television?

4) Is the terrain flat or hilly?

5) Are you looking to use an indoor or an outdoor antenna?

I've no clue as to channel numbers yet.

Indoor vs. outdoor is one of the questions we are trying to answer.

A .gov site which said there were five of them a few weeks ago now says there are only four. Antenna point linked above says there are seven.

Here's a company with a good reputation.

With the distances, you are probably more in the direction of Fernley, and the arc for receiving both areas without using a rotor is pretty good.

You do need an outdoor antenna, and not one of those Star Trek looking ones, but a traditional antenna design. The stations are both VHF/UHF which require just a good old fashion TV antenna.

By the way, there is no such thing as a digital or HDTV antenna - it's just a television antenna tuned for the required frequency spectrum - an RF frequency is an RF frequency and the antenna does not know or care about how the information is encoded.

Unfortunately, several manufacturers designed and sold antennas, and still do, under the false assumption that all digital television was only going to be broadcast on UHF channels.

Retailers for antennas are not as prevalent as they once were but I included a link for something that should work for you and is available at Walmart - just to give you an idea of what you'll probably need.

BTW It's not really dubious if it does not work.

Thanks to everyone for saving us perhaps $70-100 per month.

True that? True with caveats? How can that be?

I seriously need to look into that OTA hookup via my cable internet connection. How did I not know that? I spent a week on a very popular OTA section of a very popular home theater forum and there was no mention of this.

In case anyone else finds their way here with similar questions regarding antennas I'll suggest simply identifying the type appropriate for your needs and simply ringing a couple of doorbells on homes in your area that have similar antennas on the roof.
This very common antenna will do you just fine...
http://parchoonbazaar.com/images/TV Antenna/tv-antenna-large-4-23-07 .jpg
Most owners will give them to you for the "service" of removing them. In 2012 the vast minority of roof mounted television antennas are set up to receive OTA digital broadcasts. The rest you see are simply vestiges of analog service and the owners never bothered to ladder up and take them down once they switched to cable.

Original Quote...
"Albert, are you going to be getting cable internet? If so, skip the antenna and just (using a basic cable splitter) run one wire to your cable modem and the other to your TV. If you have a newer TV with a digital tuner, you'll get all the OTA channels for free, in HD. And then some. I sent our new OTA antenna back to Amazon once I figured that out. Good luck!"

My Question at the other forum....
"What about that? True with caveats? Just his imagination? If true, why did I not find any "heads up" regarding the possibility of this during all of my research concerning OTA antennas and reception?

Thanks for all your help here."

Member's response....
"Partially true with caveats. Often times cable companies just neglect to block the "broadcast basic" when you sign up for internet. "Broadcast basic" by law includes all local full power stations for your DMA. Often times they are in HD and there are requirements that they be in HD if broadcast in HD (I don't know how that works since when I stayed in Philly, the local CW, that I know broadcasts in HD, was only SD on the hotel's pay service.). Broadcast basic service often doesn't include multi-cast channels, (i.e. you don't get the dot 2, dot 3 etc. channels) and the cable companies degrade the HD to save bandwidth (the picture isn't as clear and has a lot more compression artifacts). Also, if you're in an area where you can get out of market stations on your antenna, you won't get those with broadcast basic (I'd lose 50% of my channels if I signed up for broadcast basic).

Finally, the cable companies have petitioned the FCC for, and will probably get, the right to encrypt broadcast basic, so those folks that are getting it for "free" will probably lose it soon."