Long-Term Update: Televes DigiNova Boss

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OK, not too long term so far. It’s been a little over six months since my first review of the Televes DigiNova Boss, the apartment-friendly antenna with build quality far beyond budget antennas. It’s time to get caught up.

The antenna has been baking in the heat of our Southern California testing facility and while you’d expect an antenna like this to last more than 6 months, you would also expect some sign of how it’s going to age. California sunshine quickly oxidized plastics, turning whites yellow and blacks brown. Daily heating and overnight cooling can cause bolts to loosen, and while water damage hasn’t been a problem for a while and snow never enters into the picture, that doesn’t mean antennas out west have an easy life.

Of course you would expect an antenna to have the same performance after six months that it had the first time you put it in. Hopefully, with an antenna like this you’ll see the same performance year after year for decades. Still, I’m pleased to report that the Televes antenna is giving very similar results to day one. Of course every test scenario will be different but the numbers I pulled from last week were all within 3dB of the original numbers. Most were within 1.5 dB and some numbers were higher than the original tests. This probably doesn’t mean the antenna got better, just that reception was a little better in those frequency ranges that day. I’ve sometimes seen a 3dB shift within one hour, so this doesn’t worry me.

More importantly, other than some surface dirt, this antenna looks brand new. There’s no significant yellowing or degrading of the white shell and the decal is even nice and clean. Of course the decal doesn’t get direct sunlight so you wouldn’t expect it. Still, with temperatures reaching 109 at the labs this summer I wouldn’t have been surprised to see some peeling there. As it is I see nothing.

The mounting bolts were slightly looser than I remember them being but not so much that the antenna was capable of moving. I recommend that every antenna be checked every quarter or at least every six months because this is bound to happen. I would say, though, that if I hadn’t tightened these bolts at all, there’s nothing to make me think they would have worked themselves loose for quite some time.

It’s so far so good for this antenna and I hope to continue usability testing for a very long time. It would be great to see how it holds up to a decade of use.

About the Author

Stuart Sweet
Stuart Sweet is the editor-in-chief of The Solid Signal Blog and a "master plumber" at Signal Group, LLC. He is the author of over 10,000 articles and longform tutorials including many posted here. Reach him by clicking on "Contact the Editor" at the bottom of this page.