Antenna packaging has always had one technical weakness: the marketing department gets to print numbers on it.
Visit HDTV Primer’s antenna comparison page
HDTV Primer took the problem in a different direction. Rather than trusting manufacturer gain claims, the site’s author modeled a long list of commercially available TV antennas and published graphs showing how their performance changed across channels.
The page dates to October 2009 and reads like somebody got annoyed enough with antenna advertising to build the comparison they wanted to see.
Raw gain, net gain, and the part the box leaves out
The models were produced with NEC-4/EZNEC4-style antenna simulation software. The site explains why modeling can be useful: physical measurements are affected by surroundings, while a simulation can compare antennas in controlled free-space conditions.
More importantly, the page distinguishes between raw gain and net gain.
Raw gain describes how much energy the antenna captures in a direction. Net gain accounts for power lost because the antenna and transmission line are not perfectly impedance matched.
That difference produces some wonderfully inconvenient graphs.
The site compares indoor loops, log-periodic designs, Yagis, four-bay and eight-bay arrays, old Channel Master antennas, Winegard models, Antennas Direct products, VHF/UHF combination antennas, and rabbit ears. Several discontinued models remain in the charts, which has made the page more useful with age rather than less.
There are also practical discussions of beam width, side nulls, VHF performance from nominally UHF antennas, and why some published gain figures should be treated cautiously.
This is old-web technical culture at its best: not a product roundup, not affiliate links, and not a single “best antenna” answer.
It is somebody showing the curves.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains many specialist pages where the useful thing is precisely this kind of stubborn measurement and explanation.
The antennas have changed. ATSC has changed. The underlying RF problems have not.