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Buying guides

Setup Guides

The practical half: aiming an antenna, finding out which channels your address can actually get, understanding the broadcast standard that is about to change, and fixing a dead Wi-Fi corner.

This is the part of Stick & Signal where we slow down and answer the questions the product roundups can’t. A roundup tells you which antenna to buy. A guide tells you whether an antenna will work at your address at all, which direction to point it, what happens to your channels when broadcasters finish switching standards, and why the dead spot in your back bedroom might be free to fix. These are the “how do I” and “will this even work” searches everyone types somewhere between deciding to cut the cord and actually doing it.

Two questions run through almost everything here. The first is what does my specific address actually receive?Reception is not a product property, it is a location property, and no amount of 300-mile marketing copy changes that — which is why every antenna guide here starts at the FCC’s own DTV Reception Maps tool rather than at a product. The second is is there a free fix before the paid one? Surprisingly often there is: moving a router, changing a channel, switching an amplifier off, or using the coax already in your walls.

Start with how to aim a TV antennaif you are about to buy one — it covers finding your transmitters before you spend anything. Read ATSC 3.0 and NextGen TV before you buy a tuner or a DVR, because it decides whether a cheaper box is a bargain or a dead end. And work through fixing Wi-Fi dead zones before you buy an extender, because about half the dead rooms we see described are a placement problem rather than a hardware problem.

Newest here: what a travel router is and what it does — the device that joins a hotel or campground network once and hands your own private network to everything you packed, with the honest limits of what it can and cannot fix.

One honest note before you dig in: the guides that touch mounting rules, carrier registration and electrical work are general information, not professional advice. What you are allowed to put on the outside of your building depends on your lease, your HOA and — usefully — on the FCC’s Over-the-Air Reception Devices rule, which limits what landlords and associations can restrict in an area you have exclusive use of. We will always point you back to your own documents rather than pretend one rule fits everyone. When you’re ready for the actual gear, the ranked picks live in the buying roundups, and our methodology explains exactly how we choose them.

Everything in Guides

Questions about our setup guides

Can you tell me which channels I'll get at my address?

Not from here, and nobody selling you an antenna can either. What we can do is point you at the tool that answers it properly: the FCC's DTV Reception Maps page takes a street address and returns the stations predicted at that location with their signal strengths. Every antenna recommendation on this site assumes you have run that first, because the answer changes which antenna you should buy.

Do the guides recommend specific products?

The guides explain the how and the will-this-work in plain prose. Where a decision genuinely comes down to one piece of hardware, we add the picks after the reasoning that justifies them, with live prices and our Setup rating. Where it doesn't, the guide stays bare on purpose and points to the matching roundup instead.

Who writes these?

Stephen V., who cut his own cable years ago and got interested in the unglamorous half of it. He does not run a test lab or own every device on the site, and the guides are written from published specs, install manuals and public reception data rather than from a bench. Where a figure is a manufacturer's claim, we say so.

How current are the guides?

Each guide is dated and reviewed on a schedule, and we update it when the facts change — a broadcaster moves to ATSC 3.0, a product line is discontinued, or a carrier changes what it asks of booster owners. If something reads as out of date, our contact page is the fastest way to flag it.

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