[BC] OTA TV makes a big jump.

[Eric Adler]

One of the best 'consumer' receiver/decoders that we have here is actually one of the older ones that we have.  Stand-alone decoders almost completely turned into "converter boxes" for analog TV sets with the approach of 2008... err... early 2009....  err... mid 2009.  Before this, we had a lot of "HD Ready TVs" (HD monitors without digital tuners) available to the public and then external HDTV tuners were on the market.  
One of these, the Samsung H260F (ours has a datestamp of May 2007, Google Shopping lists it as being from October 2006), works beautifully.  We once had it hooked up as our off-the-air monitor for master control operators but we replaced it after one day watching a documentary production that had some purposeful 'bad video' that appeared proper ('bad') in program and preview but appeared clean ('good') on the off-air monitor.  We now use this box to feed the presentation display in our front lobby and it looks amazing.  We don't retune it so I cannot speak to how well it deals with the changing environment other than that I've not had to retune it since putting it in place (it does need a power cycle after we take a power hit but so does most everything consumer).  

As with Robert, we've had great success with bowties throughout our coverage area.  We even had one home that we visited that was able to use a single- or two-bay bowtie (it's been a while, but I know it was definitely not a 4-bay or larger, it had little feet to stand up) _indoors_ to receive all of the local stations (abt. 7 miles line-of-sight due South -- two UHF, two high-VHF [7,8]) as well as at least one station from the next market West (roughly 50 miles).  
We also have some viewers between markets that are able to receive stations from both markets but I haven't kept track of the antenna solutions they use.  Even if I were keeping track, many use a rooftop antenna that they had someone else install for them so they don't know exactly what it is.  Of course, I've also heard of a variety of interesting solutions to the TV reception issue for viewers beyond the our 'fringe' coverage but, with our hilly/mountainous terrain, somewhere just a few miles away could take more work to receive us than somewhere 75 miles away.  

Eric