Bruce Mohl, writing in the Boston Globe, reports on the "renaissance of the old-fashioned TV antenna," as described by Arthur Gubeskys, chief technology officer of Convexicon Inc., which operates the Web site HDTVantennalabs.com. The article, Want HDTV without paying the cable bill? Get one of these notes there is a lot of misinformation about digital TV. Dan L. Smythe Jr.'s experience is cited in the article. Smythe said many people told him the only way to receive DTV and HDTV was to subscribe to cable or satellite. He hooked his set up to an antenna in his attic and immediately picked up 20 local DTV channels, seven of them in HD.

The article clearly explains the free off-air option and recommends viewers check HDTVantennalabs.com for information on off-air reception. You may be interested in the antenna reviews on the Web site. I was surprised to see that the Terk TV-3 received a slightly better rating than the HDTVa log-periodic indoor antenna with preamplifier. In addition to the reviews, the site has technical information on the antennas, such as gain, front-to-back ratio and whether or not they incorporate a preamplifier.