FRED MANTEGHIAN BLOG

If you look real close, you can see Capt. James T. Kirk sitting in his command chair. The Radio Shack Indoor VHF/UHF/HDTV Antenna with RF Remote Control may not be able to pick up intergalactic transmissions, but it does a decent, if somewhat mixed job, with HDTV signals. In one case, it reached out over twenty miles to pull in a full-time digital "multi-cultural shopping" station (so now you can not only buy things you don't need, you can buy them in languages you don't understand). But what wasn't so impressive was its inability to pull in the closest tower, a mere 8 miles away, in anything but analog (and miserable looking analog at that!).

The Rat Trek antenna is powered, with 10db, 15db and 19db gain settings accessible from the remote. Internally, the antenna filament rotates in 12 positions to cover 330 degrees of rotation. In theory, you can find the best position and gain setting for each station and then program that in with the remote, so that if you're switching to channel 59, you also punch 59 into the antenna remote and listen to the grinding noises as the crew of the NCC-1701 get throw around during repositioning. But the reality is, you really would love it if you could find a single position that works for all the stations in your area.

I did that, in what was a time-consuming, mind-numbing exercise, but when I was done, all the stations I could receive digitally (3-CBS, 8-ABC, 24-PBS, 30-NBC & 59-MyTV) were available on a single setting, with only one of them (24-PBS) experiencing any blocking at times. Two of the other channels (20-CW & 61-FOX) refused to come in anything other than analog. Still, these are respectable results for a $50 antenna that doesn't involve roof climbing or attic crawling.

The unit does double duty with a rabbit ear UHF/VHF antenna at the back end of this enterprise, hidden for the most part when used strictly as an HDTV antenna. There is a separate dipole output on the rear for the rabbit ears next to the connector for the HDTV antenna. After June 9th, when analog goes dead, these rabbit ears might still be useful for analog FM reception. Power for the ship is provided not by dilithium crystals, as I first thought, but by a simple wall wart transformer with a 6' cable. Everything's included, batteries for the remote, a manual which has pictures not found on the downloadable version on Radio Shack's website, and of course that feeling you get when you make a purchase at a Radio Shack.