Digital is different than analog. It takes more signal for digital as a general rule. Analog will fade in and out, sometimes even from an airplane going over. If a digital signal is not received at 100% you will get the pixelation. It is an either on or off condition where analog will just fade. Sometimes on the old analog you would see what is called a ghost. Where one picture will seem to overlay another but be an inch or so to the right. This is when 2 signals arrive at different times. If this hapens with digital, you may get the pixelation.
There is nothing special about a HD antenna. Just advertising hype. It is the same as the old UHF antenna.
If you are getting good signal strength and providing nothing temporarily walked in front of the antenna that would decrease your signal, then what you are experiencing is an issue with the signal coming from the TV station.
The way HD works is that they try to save on bandwidth by "compressing" the digital signal. What this means is that they scan the data for repeats and create a table of repeats. Then they send the table. Your end then recreates the repeats based on the information in the table.
This works well, unless there are few repeats or there is a lot of changes in the data all at once that won't fit down the pipe, then they just drop the extra data and you get your "pixelation".
Drives me nuts when Arron Rodgers is about to pass and it getting chased by someone.
In retaliation for all the cord cutters, the cable tv companies are sucking the digital signal out of the air so you'll have to abandon your antenna and subscribe to their cable.
I hate commercials too. I have Comcast cable with X1 DVR and DVR all I watch so I fast forward through all commercials. Netflix is great and can be shared as long as not in use by maybe 3 viewers at one time. They do not need to be in the same home or state for that matter.
It doesn't have to be 100% signal strength. It doesn't even have to receive all the data correctly, there is error correction built in. But when it de grades enough that there are unrecoverable errors, then it shows up as pixe lation. With an analog system it showed up as a less than perfect picture o r snow. Also, with HD any imperfection is going to be more noticeable than on a low resolution one.
If this was working, but suddenly isn't, could be a cabling problem, poor c onnection, etc. If it's always been marginal then a better antenna and/or l ocation could help.
My first antenna was "HD" (Channel Master 4228), then I got the pixellation issues (in this case I think it was a neighbor's tree having grown into the signal path) and, coincidentally learned that "HD" means nothing in the context of OTA antennas.
I left the "HD" in place - strapped to the chimney:
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But supplemented the "HD" with one of these Bad Boyz:
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mounted on my garden shed and aimed at the antenna farm that supplies virtually all of our local TV channels:
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The Windgard is *Huge*, but does the job.
Per
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that antenna farm is less than 35 miles away - looks like about 15...
Now my TV's "Antenna" input is still connected to the old "HD" Channel Master, but my Tivo-On-Steroids PC application that is connected to SiliconDust digital tuners gets all it's input from the monster Winegard HD7084 and life has been good.
I am strictly OTA, but get the same effect using a Tivo-on-Steroids app called "SageTV".
It even has an add-on that claims to automagically skip over commercials, but it's so easy to just hit the 60-second jump and then a few 10-second jumps that I never bothered to look into it.
It's been at least five years since I have seen or heard more than a few seconds of *any* TV commercial.
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