Antennas Direct DB8e Ultra Long Range Antenna Review

Every little boy has a fascination with superheroes. It's cause we always dream of being bigger, faster and better than the "normal" human being. Nobody wants to be average. Antennas Direct bills the the new DB8e as the "most powerful HDTV antenna in the world." If antennas dream of being superheroes, the DB8e is what they'd want to be. But does the DB8e puff out its chest and have little or no actual powers that exceed the norm? We wanted to find out, so we requested one and mounted it on a roof in Lakeland, a town in Central Florida that lies roughly between Orlando and Tampa. Before I spill the beans on how our experiment went, let me tell you a bit more about the DB8e itself.

The DB8e DTV antenna claims a range of 70+ miles and has an almost min-blowing gain of 17.4 dBi. If you don't know much about antenna's, the gain is the amount of signal it will pick up naturally through its physical design. It's more or less the dynamic range of the antenna and represents its ability to grab onto a signal that might be faint due to being located far away from the antenna. The DB8e DTV antenna is also multi-directional, using a "Bowtie" pattern to optimize the pickup pattern. But this super-antenna has one more trick up its sleeve. It has specially designed brackets that allow each element pair of the DB8e antenna to turn a full 360 degrees, allowing it to target transmitting towers in any direction. We used this feature and it rocks—but more on that later.

Because of the advanced design and size of the DB8e, it can be mounted in an attic or placed on a roof. We haven't recommended attic-mounting antennas unless that's your only option (neighborhood bylaws, etc.), but the DB8e's ability to target multiple towers means you're going to have far more success than you would with an antenna that is not so flexible.

We unboxed the Antennas Direct DB8e and assembled it, following the directions provided. Assembly wasn't too tricky and everything is pretty much accomplished with a 7/16" socket and/or adjustable wrench. When putting on the elements, make sure you orient the F connectors downward, for example, so that you allow rainwater to drip off the lower loop that is created when you wire it up. The last thing you want is to encourage standing water on the connection or leave it otherwise exposed. Antennas Direct provides boots for all connections and the twin leads flow into the main junction box which is completely sealed with foam. The metal that makes up the aluminum cages of the four elements was nicely coated, giving it a protective gloss black sheen that appeared to be of much higher quality than most antennas you'll see on the market these days. We also loved the bright red accents on the bowtie elements, which just gave the antenna a really impressive look. You feel like you really bought something substantial when you unbox the DB8e—and that's tough to say for a pile of what is essentially 10 pounds of aluminum and plastic.

We mounted the antenna atop a single story home which is situated in an historic-era neighborhood. The home is surrounded by trees, though not so dense as to be ridiculous. While Antennas Direct provided us with a heavy duty tripod mount ($45), we ended up using the standard pole mount the homeowner had already affixed to their home for their former antenna. That antenna was a $60 model designed to reach about 45 miles. When set up it received 65 digital channels, many of them in HD. We were even picking up some channels in Orlando which is roughly 50 miles away. It was going to be tough to impress us moving forward, but we ventured on with the installation.

On our initial setup we oriented the antenna in a single direction, facing the Tampa towers (which have all of the stations we desired to obtain). When we ran the auto-tuner on our flat screen television we were able to get 71 channels. This was 6 more than the former antenna, but nothing that made us think the additional $140 would be well-spent...then we began to notice which channels we had added to the line-up.

They were in Cocoa Beach!

I don't know if you're a geography major, but Cocoa Beach is about 100 miles from Lakeland. It's on the east coast of Central Florida! Those channels we got from Cocoa were a bit weak, jumping in and out and showing significant digital distortion. 

But we were hooked, now.

We went back up on the roof and redirected the arrays so that they were 90 degrees off the broadside. You see, Cocoa Beach and Orlando are almost 180 degrees out from Tampa, our primary (and closest) source for transmitters. Since we believed we had more than enough signal to pick up Tampa, our new goal was to better collect signal from behind the antenna's position. Since we were picking up so many extra channels just from having the backside of the antenna perpendicular to those distant towers, the ability of the DB8e to rotate its elements allowed us to address those transmitters directly.

After reorienting the elements and turning the antenna body on the mount so that we faced both Tampa and Orlando (and Cocoa Beach beyond) we went back inside. Here's what we got: