Call me Ishmael. What the White Whale was to Ahab, better television reception on my mother’s TV is to my brother-in-law. He’s spent scores if not hundreds of hours and probably hundreds of dollars trying various different solutions.
He’s tried rabbit ears, unamplified and amplified. He’s tried rooftop antennas. He’s run coax. For some reason nothing seems to help much.
And it’s only the widescreen Hi-Def Samsung in the den. The TV in her bedroom gets great reception with just a set-top rabbit ears.
As of yesterday afternoon he was going to experiment with a different television in the den to see if he could determine whether the problem was the tuner.
I’ve had a similar issue, and the culprit was a faulty/poorly performing tuner. I’ve owned three HDTV’s w/ATSC tuners; the first two would pull in only ONE digital channel (their NTSC capability worked fine, however), while my recent TV is able to pull in over 25 (with terrific signal strength), despite my setup remaining exactly the same.
Ancedotal, of course, but I think some manufacturers weren’t adhering to the specifications, or just plain bad quality control. I personally know several others that have had tuner issues like me, though in all of our cases the TV models were between ’07-early ’08.