If a channel you used to get has gone, rescan before you do anything else. It is free, it takes a few minutes, and it is the fix for the single most common cause — a station changed the frequency it broadcasts on and your television is still looking in the old place.
If the rescan does not bring it back, the cause is physical, and the rest of this page is the order to work through it: free things first, then cheap things, then the one part that sometimes helps and frequently makes things worse.
How to run the scan
Every television has this and every maker names it differently: Channel Scan, Auto Program, Auto Tuning, Channel Search. It lives wherever your set keeps channel or broadcast settings.
The one setting that matters is the input source, and it must be set to Antenna — sometimes shown as Air or Over-the-Air — rather than Cable. A tuner set to Cable scans a different set of frequencies and will find few of your broadcast channels or none at all. This is comfortably the most common reason a scan comes back nearly empty on an antenna that is working perfectly.
We deliberately do not publish step-by-step menu paths for each television brand. Menus change between model years, and a path that is wrong for the set in front of you is worse than no path at all — the same reason we only publish product specifications we have read from the listing. Your television’s own manual has the exact sequence, and the words above are what you are looking for.
Two things worth knowing about what a scan actually does. It replaces the stored channel list rather than adding to it, so a scan run in poor conditions can lose you channels that a later scan brings back. And the channel number you see on screen is a label, not a frequency: stations kept their familiar numbers through the digital transition while the underlying frequencies moved around. That gap is exactly why a station can change frequency without appearing to change anything.
Scan at a sensible moment, and in the right order
Reception is not constant. It varies with weather, with temperature, with the seasons and with what has grown between you and the transmitter since the last time you looked.
Move the antenna first, then scan. The stored list is a snapshot of what the tuner could receive at the instant you scanned it. Scanning and then repositioning records the old result; repositioning and then scanning records the new one.
Scan when conditions are typical for how you watch. A borderline channel can be present in the evening and gone at midday. If you scan during the best hour of the best day of the year, you will store channels that are not reliably there.
Use the signal meter rather than repeated scans. Most televisions show signal strength per channel in an antenna-setup or diagnostics screen. Tune to the channel that struggles and watch the number while someone moves the antenna a few inches at a time. Small movements matter more than people expect, and this single technique is worth more than a dozen rescans.
Why a channel disappears, in order of likelihood
The station changed frequency. Broadcasters do move. Your tuner is still looking where it last found them. A rescan fixes this completely and is why it is step one.
The antenna moved. Indoor antennas get knocked by cleaning, by pets and by anyone reaching behind the television. Outdoor antennas rotate in storms. Both show up as one or two channels going missing while the rest survive, because the ones you lose were the least well aimed to begin with.
Something new is in the way.Leaves are the classic one: a channel that worked all winter goes in April and comes back in November. Construction, a new fence, a delivery van parked in the wrong place, or a neighbor’s extension can do it permanently.
It was always marginal.Digital television does not fade gracefully the way analog did — it works perfectly, then it stops. Everything above the tuner’s threshold looks identical on screen, which means a channel can sit one decibel above failure for a year and look exactly as solid as the strongest station in your market. When it goes, nothing broke; the margin simply ran out.
It is on a band your antenna is poor at.The FCC states that VHF is channels 2 to 13 and UHF is channels 14 to 36, and that many antennas sold as “HDTV antennas” receive UHF well but VHF less well. A single stubbornly missing low-numbered channel is very often this, and no amount of rescanning changes it.
It is on a different tower from everything else.If your antenna is directional and one station transmits from a different bearing, that station is the one you lose. The FCC’s address-level reception tool shows which direction each station is in relative to your home, which is how you tell this apart from a general weakness.
Or the standard changed underneath it.As broadcasters move to NextGen TV, a station’s programming can shift to a signal an older tuner cannot decode. It looks identical to a channel disappearing, and a rescan will never recover it because the issue is the decoder, not the list. Our ATSC 3.0 guide covers how to tell and whether a new tuner is worth buying yet.
The fixes, cheapest first
Re-aim and raise the antenna. Free, and routinely worth more than anything you can buy. Height matters more than almost any specification, and small changes in aim produce large changes at the margin. Our antenna setting guide is the method, including finding your towers first so you are aiming at something rather than guessing.
Take the splitters out of the path.If the antenna feeds more than one television, every split costs signal — roughly 3.5 dB on a two-way and about 7 dB on a four-way, and a four-way costs the full amount even with two ports unused. Run the antenna straight to one television to test. If the channel returns, you have found it, and the splitter guide has the rest of the free recovery steps, including disconnecting the leg that still runs out to the street in a house that used to have cable.
Tighten and inspect every connector. Hand-tight is not tight, corroded outdoor fittings cost real signal, and a damaged run can cost more than the splitter does.
Then, and only then, consider hardware. Three situations where a purchase is the right answer, and they are different purchases.
If the antenna is simply not enough for the distance or the band, a better antenna is the honest fix — more gain, aimed properly, ideally mounted higher. If the problem is a long cable run from an outdoor antenna, a preamplifier mounted at the antenna lifts the signal before the cable eats it, and the LTE filtering on a modern preamp matters as much as the gain, because cellular transmissions in neighboring frequencies are a real cause of a channel that degraded without anything visible changing. If the problem is that you split the feed to several televisions, a distribution amplifier at the split point replaces what the splitter took.
What none of them do is rescue a signal the antenna never received. An amplifier raises noise along with signal, and close to strong transmitters it can overload the tuner and lose you channels — the same symptom as too little signal, from the opposite cause. Confirm the channel arrives cleanly on one unsplit television before adding gain to anything.
When the answer is that it is not coming back
Sometimes a station is genuinely not receivable at your address any more, and the useful thing we can do is say so rather than sell you hardware. Check the FCC’s reception tool for your street address: if the station you are chasing is not in the predicted list, or is shown as very weak, then height and aim are the only levers that will ever matter and a bigger antenna is a gamble rather than a fix.
In that situation the realistic routes are an outdoor or attic install if you are currently indoors, which is the single biggest change available to you, or accepting that this particular station arrives another way. Our page on what your area can actually receive walks through reading that tool properly, and getting local channels without cable covers the non-antenna options honestly, including what they cost.