If this is the first article you’ve read about our little HD-BLADE antenna, you’ll wonder why it looks so tortured. It’s lived a hard life so far. We painted it. We let a 4-year-old play with it. We punched holes it in, took it in a moving car, even put it in a bathtub. It keeps performing, so we keep doing stupid things to it!
For today’s torture test, one of our Signal Pros suggested curling it up into a circle. Some people might like to put it behind a TV that way. (We tested putting it behind a TV, too… it wasn’t really ideal.) With the help of some painter’s tape and a little patience, the increasingly tolerant HD-BLADE let us curl it up carefully.
As with our other tests, we have to warn you not to do this. It’s against your warranty and if you curl it too tight you’ll probably break the silver foil inside it. Please, enjoy our feats of stupidity without trying to repeat them.
It took a lot of tape, plus a stapler to help the antenna stand up. The test was conducted in the same location where we got 83 channels from the antenna sitting flat. The TV is, of course, the cheapest one we could get so that we knew the tuner wasn’t that good.
65 Channels was a good result… about 25% attenuation compared to the same antenna sitting uncurled. Not bad, but obviously you would rather have more channels than fewer channels.
However, we’d seen similar results when we mounted this antenna to a wall, so it seemed like a good idea to run this same test with the antenna lying on its side. It was a lot easier to get it to lie on its side than it was to get it to stand up, that’s for sure.
The result was a little worse but really just about the same. Three fewer channels but definitely in the same ballpark. Either way, you’ll lose about 25% of the antenna’s power by curling it up.
As we’ve been testing, this antenna continues to impress. One thing for sure, it takes a lot of punishment. It’s not easy to break. It’s also really helpful to have that connector at the end, so that it can be placed anywhere and used with an appropriate length of cable.
