Pick by distance, then by band, then by bearing
Antenna selection looks complicated and is actually three questions in a fixed order. Everything else is marketing.
Distance: how strong is the signal at your address?
The FCC map gives you predicted signal strength per station at your street address. Strong predictions put you in indoor-antenna territory — a flat panel in the right window will do it. Moderate predictions mean an indoor antenna might work and an attic antenna definitely will. Weak or no predictions mean an outdoor or attic antenna with real gain, and the FCC states its own position plainly: “generally, outdoor antennas will get better reception than indoor antennas and are strongly recommended for the most reliable reception.”
What you should notdo is pick by the mile figure on the box. Those are manufacturer claims measured in conditions of their choosing, and the inflation in this category is extreme: a “300 mile” antenna is not an exaggeration, it is an impossibility for line-of-sight broadcast. Where this page quotes a figure it is labeled as the maker’s claim, and where a listing publishes none the spec row reads Not published.
Band: UHF only, or UHF and VHF?
The FCC defines VHF as channels 2 to 13 and UHF as 14 to 36, and it specifically warns that many antennas sold as “HDTV antennas” receive UHF well but VHF less well. This is the single most common reason someone buys a big expensive antenna and still cannot get one particular station. Check your reception report for low channel numbers. If there are any, you need published VHF coverage — the ClearStream 2V has it, the 8-Element Bowtie explicitly does not.
Bearing: one direction, or several?
In most US markets the stations share one or two tower farms, so a directional antenna aimed at them beats an omnidirectional one by a useful margin. Where the towers are genuinely scattered — or where you are receiving via reflections off terrain — an omnidirectional design like the Omni+ 50 removes the impossible choice between two groups of stations. The trade is real: an omni collects interference from every bearing too.
Indoor, attic or roof?
Our standing advice is to work up the ladder, not down it. Start indoors, because it is cheap and reversible and about half of US households are close enough for it to work. If that fails, go to the attic before the roof: you get most of the height benefit, the antenna is out of the weather, there is no grounding or wind-load question, and the install is reversible. Only go on the roof when the attic has failed, and then treat it as a real job with a mast, a grounding plan and ideally someone who does this for a living.
Our Setup rating on each pick above says which category it falls into, and we do not soften it: everything outdoor on this page is rated Install job, because that is what it is, regardless of what the box says about easy assembly.
Budget, and what to spend it on
The antenna is usually not the expensive part of an outdoor install — the mast, the bracket, the coax and your Saturday are. That changes the calculus in a useful way: once you have committed to mounting something outside, the difference between a $40 antenna and a $100 one is small relative to the total, and the better antenna is worth it. Indoors, the opposite is true: there is no install cost, so starting cheap and upgrading if needed loses you nothing.
Do not spend the money on an amplifier by default. Amplifiers solve cable loss and signal splitting, not distance, and adding one in a strong-signal area will cost you channels. See antenna amplifiers for when they genuinely help.
If you are a long way from the towers
Distance changes the shopping list rather than just the model number. Out in the country the decision is attic-versus-mast, which bands your station list needs, and whether a preamp belongs on the mast — all of which we work through on best TV antennas for rural areas.
And if you have been searching for a 100-mile indoor antenna, read what the long-range claims actually mean before you buy one. Those mile figures are unregulated marketing numbers, and no indoor antenna receives television from 100 miles away.
One more thing to check before you buy a tuner
US broadcasters are migrating to ATSC 3.0, marketed as NextGen TV. Most televisions sold today cannot decode it, which means a cheap antenna plus an old TV may at some point need a converter box. That does not change which antenna to buy — antennas are standard-agnostic pieces of metal — but it does change whether you should spend extra on a tuner or DVR today. Read ATSC 3.0 and NextGen TV before you do.
And if the set you are feeding is a smart TV — a Roku TV, a Fire TV or a Google TV panel — the tuner inside it is the same ATSC tuner every other television has, so nothing on this page changes. Our antenna guide for smart TVs covers the two questions that are genuinely specific to those sets: whether the panel has a coax socket at all, and how to get the channel scan to run.
Two ways to narrow this list down. By your own address, which is the honest way to choose an antenna — best TV antenna for my area walks through the two free FCC lookups that give you a distance and a direction. And by where it is going: if the answer is the roof space rather than a wall or a mast, best antenna for an attic covers what the roof costs you.
Two companion pages
Does an indoor TV antenna work settles the question most people ask before buying anything, with the free FCC lookup that tells you what your address receives. And the best TV antenna brandspage covers who to buy from if you intend to buy once and keep it — and which range claims on a box are physically impossible.
Three situations have their own rankings because the right answer changes. Cheap TV antennas is the price-first version of this page. Basements and apartments covers the hard indoor cases, where moving the antenna matters more than upgrading it. And antennas for an RV is for hardware mounted on a vehicle, where an omnidirectional pattern beats gain because you re-park every week.
