Are Flat USB Antennas Worth It?

Simple Rabbit Ears Can Often Outperform Expensive Flat Amplified Antennas

When the question was asked recently Are Flat USB Powered Antennas Worth It? In a large Cord Cutting group on Reddit, some of the responses were quite interesting. And we wanted to share some of the more interesting observations with you here.

On Paper Flat USB Powered Antennas Sound Amazing

Flat-powered antennas, USB or otherwise sound like the cat's meow if you believe the marketing hype. With their sleeker look, it's easy to see the attraction. But in the real world, their performance is hardly on par with a cheap set of rabbit ears. Or other less techy antennas that can often pull in many more channels.

Here are some comments from cord-cutters that have tried them, and their experiences were not too flattering.

"I hooked up a USB powered antenna and my TV couldn't tune a single channel. Then I took some old ass rabbit ear antenna I found in the back of a closet and plugged that in. TV found 20 channels."

This is something we can relate to because we experienced something similar when we tried a very popular flat antenna brand on a TV in our guest bedroom. We could barely pull in a single channel, and when we tried a larger passive Antennas Direct 4Max antenna in our attic the difference was night and day.

We went from one channel to 16 crystal clear HD channels. And these included the more popular ones like CBS, ABC, NBC, PBS, and CW. Channels we would have otherwise missed out on had we not tried another type of antenna.

Another interesting observation. The signal strength on the CBS channel for us was always a little iffy, somedays the channel would come in clear and on others the signal would break up. Since their transmitter was the furthet from our home we thought this was just the way it was. Then one day we removed our powered amplifer and the signal actually improved.

Ampifiers can help if you split your antenna between several TVs, but if you are only using it with a single antenna, sometimes it can actually hurt TV antenna performance.

Flat antennas are really weak. Actually, rabbit ears work better as long as you are within the range

"This really depends. They don't do anything in my house which is concrete block. I'd assume they wouldn't work well in brick homes either. If I move the rabbit ears in front of a window, boom suddenly it starts receiving stations. Same with those shitty square antennas with the amplifier. Nothing when stuck to interior wall. Move it to the window and it "works" (it's still shitty and the rabbit ears worked better)."

And this response summed up the Flat USB Powered Antenna debate beautifully

"Amplified antennas are not the right choice for most people and the ones who do need/want amplification aren't gonna have a good time with something that is usb powered. Just my .02

Steps to having a good experience with an antenna

Choose a good high gain antenna and put it as high up and unobstructed as possible and run a good quality coax cable directly from antenna to tuner and adjust your antenna position to balance the signal strength of towers sending channels you're actually interested in.

Once you've done the above, then you can make smart decisions about whether you can tolerate the db drop from a splitter and/or if you get a clean enough signal at the antenna to bother with introducing an amplifier.

Every split is, at best, a 3.5db drop. So you need at least 3.5db of signal headroom to support 2 receivers, 7db for 4 receivers, 10.5db for 8 receivers etc."

So next time you see a flat antenna advertised on eBay claiming a signal range of 5600 miles. Don't buy into the hype. You would just be wasting your money. Because not even the largest roof or attic antenna you can buy would acheive this kind of range. But they will certainly do a much better job of pulling in distant stations than any USB flat powered antenna which can hardly hold it's own against cheap rabbit ears.

If you can afford it, choose one of these antennas for your roof or attic instead.

Try Our Free Web App!

Join Us!

For the latest in TvStreaming and Cord-Cutting News

Join US @ TVSTREAMERSCLUB.com
And you will be notified whenever we post a new article

Thanks for Making us Your TV Streaming Destination

Roku Channels • Index • Contact • Disclosure • Privacy

© 2024 mkvXstream.com

Use of third-party trademarks on this site is not intended to imply endorsement nor affiliation with respective trademark owners.
We are Not Affiliated with or Endorsed by Roku®, Apple, Google or Other Companies we may write about.