Philips MANT940 HDTV antenna - signal MAGNET!

[Bilar Crais]

I've had an OTA HDTV card for around a year now, and as of late, it's been unused and disabled because of a move to the basement, and unsatisfactory reception.

I've tried half a dozen antennas - amplified and unamplified rabbit ears, and the Zenith HDTV1, which is a clone of the antenna sold by SnapStream. While I could get reception on one or two channels, I could never get 100% coverage of all five stations, which are CBS, NBC, and PBS and it's subchannels. Even then, decent reception relied upon precise placement of the antenna (we're talking millimeters here) and perfectly sunshiny, clear weather. Once I moved to the basement, forget it...game over.

The other day while browsing through Wally World, I noticed a new Philips indoor/outdoor antenna. With the fall season looming, I figured I'd give it a try. What a happy accident!!!

Outdoor placement isn't really an option for me, so I mounted the antenna in my window, and screwed the mount down with an existing hole in the sill. It's lightweight, so one screw easily holds it in place. I've got 5x5 signal on every channel - through tornado warnings, hail, rain, etc. Mind you, this is a basement window! Placement doesn't seem very critical - I had great signal strength while the unit was face down on my bed! The antenna is encased in a gray plastic enclosure, and measures about 5"x10". It includes an inline 18db signal amplifier, 20ft of cable, and mounting hardware for mounting on a mast.



The antenna was easily worth the $40.00 price tag.
I wish I'd known about this baby a year ago.

[tjstraz]

Very cool. How far are you away from the signals origin?

[Bilar Crais]

I'm guessing somewhere around 7 miles.

[blade]

i was thinking of going for a mid size outdoor antenna before i thought
i would give the mant940 a try.. i was impressed with the # of
channels that this antenna receives..
it comes with stuff that u can use to attach to a mast. i was thinking
of going and buying one but just placed it close to a window and its
been working fine.. one thing i noticed is if i didnt power up the amp
then most of the channels are not received ok. the amp itself is
pretty compact.. does anyone know how it works? i have the power
supply connected to the surge protector but was wondering if the
tv is protected from any spikes coming from the RF antenna input?

bottomline: would definitely recommend it?
thanks..

[ClamsTheCat]

Hmm I tried this one, but I am more like 15 miles from the signal. When I put my antenna outside on he roof it works great. I don't want to roof mount anything though. I will just wait for QAM support since my cable company has all the local channels on it.

Besides, Rakesh is working on it as I speak

[pwlong]

Very interesting -- thanks for the info Bilar.

As a semi-satisfied owner of a Zenith SS with a cheapie RadioShack powered amplifier, I get blips and blockiness from my setup more often than I like to admit, even with relatively clear line-of-sight to the tower farm ~17 miles away. If the MANT940 is really "all that", I'm very tempted to gamble $40 on it. It doubles the price of the SS, so it should at least be 2x as good, right?

More opinions would be helpful: anyone else have any experiences with this antenna to share?

Relentlessly pursuing 100% OTA HDTV satisfaction, one C-note at a time...

[Bilar Crais]

Well...inexplicably about a week after my purchase, the MANT940 quit working perfectly as it did initially. Bummer. There must be something about the weather that messes things up...like maybe it's vulnerable to low or high pressure systems. It'll be great for days on end, then it's crap.

I've also purchased a MANT510 in the interim, and it's OK, but probably not as good as the '940.

I'm sure if it were possible to put it on the roof, it'd be just fine. I guess I'm just going to have to shelve the OTA and wait for QAM.

[whyteknt]

I just thought I'd post my results with this antenna.

I'd been trying an number of simple outdoor omni-directional atenna's (both a double loop [figure 8] and a flat grill type antenna), but was not having any sucess getting all my HD channels. I could usualy get 5 out of 7 channels, but whatever position I had it in, I could not seem to get them all at once. So I bought this Mant940 phillips - hoping it would do the trick. Figured it should work great on the roof hooked to my satelite dish.

It really didn't do much better than the other antenna's I'd tried before, it would pull in good signals on all but one or two stations, and then if I adjusted the antenna to get the missing stations, I'd drop the signal from one of the other channels I was getting. To it's credit, the Mant940 is easy to adust and does attach to a satelite mast very nicely. But I will be returning mine to Walmart tomorrow.

after spending hours of antenna adjusting, I had an appifiany: I went to dollar store and bought a simple coax splitter, and used it as a coupler to hood up two different antennas, and send both different antenna signals back down to my Kworld ASTC 110 card through the single line.

This seems to be working quite well. Wish I had just thought of this solution before wasting my time trying to find the one 'perfect' antenna. I suspect, that if I had started with a large outdoor antenna with multiple elements - that would have been the perfect solution.

I would suggest to those of you having problems getting your outdoor antenna to pick up all stations - try a dual antenna setup, worked for me.

and the splitter only cost a buck....(love that dollar store)....

now my only final issue is a loss of audio synch that occurs quite regularly that requires me to shut down the BTV4 player window, and restarting it. Everything is usually in synch after I restart, and all my recordings are fine. I suspect this is an audio driver issue (I'm using onboard audio due to a lack of an extra PCI slot for an audio card). I plan to log a ticket here in the next day or so on this problem.

[dhrandy]

I just bought the Philips MANT940 HDTV antenna and it works great with my HVR-1800.

[karlderspinnt]

I couldn't agree MORE that this Antenna is an engineering miracle. At first, I mounted it about 3.5' to 4' above the ground on the same mast that my Direct TV Antenna was originally mounted on. Got especially sharp HDTV pictures on the local PBS station, the Christian Broadcasting Network, and FOX Broadcasting.
I moved it to the roof to remove the obstruction of other buildings and located it on the peak of the front dormer.
This required installing a couple splices in the RG-6 cable. (My local TV Repairman counseled applying hard-setting silicone to any such joints in the line while being care to keep all Silicone away from the center lead.)

The RG-6 Lead is firmly attached to the roof with Cable Clips and 100% Silicone Seal.

I've got exceptional-quality HDTV PBS, FOX BROADCASTING, & CBN. Also UHF TV from ABC & RTN "Retro Television Network".
Good Analog TV from NBC. Marginal Analog TV from ABC.

GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN Market. OFFICIAL CENSUS (2007) = 776742 PEOPLE