Television Antenna and reception...

Your living in country may have actually had you closer to the TV transmitters than where you were in the city for trying to do off air pick up which is a minority of the ways people are doing it today as Febuarary 09 is comming and all digital Tx is required and the range of digital is far smaller than analog. Also you must have TV with a digital tuner as well for any pick up not just HD. You need the correct antenna for good reception oriented at the direction that the Txs are located. The dish's you encountered may have been disabled dish or direct tv units that just the coax was picking up stong off air in the area since the dish units were off. All of this is just general speculation on my part as I don't have long lat #s for your diff locations that I could look at where in your local stations TXs are and where in the grade contours you fall at your locations. There are maps that show the garde A and B signal lines for each stations Txs that would tell us with the correct Rx equipment what quality of signal you should expect and how much of the time given terraain and weather quality. There are many others sources of RF interference natural and man made that can cause a lot of poor to no reception especialy if your equipment isn't correct or even close to being what is needed. Even the length or impedance of the coax you use can have major impact to signal quality. Many a great signal is totally ruined by a person just crimping a connector on their coax causeing major impedance mismatch causing major reflections, standing wave, signal loss and many other signal distortions and loss.