How We Pick

Most “best TV antenna” roundups open with a line like “we tested twelve antennas.” We didn’t, and we won’t pretend we did — and in this category that claim is weaker than it looks anyway. An antenna test run in someone else’s city tells you almost nothing about your address, because reception is decided by distance, terrain, building materials and tower bearing, not by the product alone. What we do is a specific, checkable process built around the question the review sites skip: what will this actually do at your house, and what does the install really involve?

The Setup rating

Every product gets a Setup rating — Plug-in, Simple, or Install job. It is an editorial rating we derive from the manufacturer’s published install method, not a test result:

• Plug-in— HDMI, USB or a wall outlet and you are done. No tools, nothing mounted, nothing run through a wall. Streaming sticks, wall- plug Wi-Fi extenders and mesh nodes land here.
• Simple— needs placing and aiming, or one cable run inside a room. A screwdriver at worst, reversible in minutes. Indoor antennas, distribution amplifiers and MoCA adapters land here.
• Install job— needs roof, attic, wall or exterior mounting, a cable run through the building, or power at the antenna. Ladder work. Outdoor antennas and home cell boosters land here, and we say so rather than letting a “15-minute setup” claim stand.

It exists because the biggest reason this gear gets returned is that the buyer didn’t know what they were signing up for. A $40 antenna in a window and a $120 antenna on a mast are the same product category and completely different Saturdays.

Range and coverage claims are quoted, never asserted

Antenna boxes carry mile figures. Extenders carry square-footage figures. Boosters carry both. Every one of those numbers is the manufacturer’s marketing claim measured under conditions they chose, and we treat them that way: where a figure appears on this site it is labeled as the maker’s claim, and where a listing publishes no figure, the spec row says Not publishedrather than inventing one. A “300 mile” antenna claim is physically impossible for UHF broadcast and we will say so instead of repeating it.

For the question those numbers are pretending to answer — what can I receive? — we send you to the FCC’s own DTV Reception Maps tool, which takes a street address and returns the stations predicted there with their signal strengths. That is a free, authoritative, address-specific answer, and it beats any product claim.

Specs come from the listing, dated, with gaps left visible

Every product entry records the listing it was read from and the date it was read. Where the manufacturer does not publish a figure, the field is empty by design and renders Not published— the data type makes an unknown impossible to quietly convert into a guess. Nothing on this site is recalled from memory.

Every ASIN is confirmed live

Products are resolved through Amazon’s Creators API, and a listing only enters the registry if that call returns it in stock, priced and with a product image. Dead listings and discontinued models get removed rather than left to rot behind a buy button.

Prices are live, dated, and expire on their own

No price is ever written into our content. Prices are fetched daily and rendered from that one source with an “as of” date attached. If the refresh stops for 48 hours every number on the site disappears and the buttons fall back to “Check price on Amazon” — the failure mode is silence, not a stale claim.

The monthly cost is part of the verdict

You are reading this site because you want to stop paying a monthly bill, so a device that quietly reintroduces one is a worse buy than its spec sheet suggests. We state whether a subscription is required for core function, and we rank a no-fee OTA DVR above a cheaper box that charges for its program guide.

Bandwidth claims use the FCC’s published figures

When we say how much internet a stream needs, the numbers come from the FCC’s own Broadband Speed Guide — 3 to 4 Mbps for standard definition, 5 to 8 for HD, 25 for Ultra HD 4K — not from a vendor’s recommendation page.

What we will not do

• Claim to have tested, owned or bench-measured anything.
• Publish a numeric score, which would dress spec-reading up as testing.
• Repeat an impossible range claim because it is printed on a box.
• Recommend a product whose listing we could not confirm is live.
• Let an affiliate rate change a ranking. If we would skip something, we say so.

That is the whole method. If a page here ever states something you can’t trace back to a cited listing, a cited authority or a labeled editorial judgment of ours, it is a defect — tell usand we will fix it. The questions we are asked most often about how any of this works — who writes the pages, how the prices stay current, why there are no review scores — are answered on the FAQ.