Can You Use a Batwing RV TV Antenna for Digital Reception?
Dave SolbergDescription
Just because everything has gone digital in the modern age, that doesn’t mean you need to throw away all remains of the bygone technological era. We’re asked often whether you can use the classic batwing RV TV antenna that was once equipped on most RVs to receive a signal on digital flatscreen TVs.
The answer is yes, but there are a couple things to consider when doing so. In this lesson, RV expert Dave Solberg teaches you why batwings and digital TV are an all or nothing deal, and introduces a quick solution if you want to lengthen your reception distance. So hold onto that old antenna, it’s not out of a job just yet!
A lot of members have written in questions about their RV antennas with the new digital signal that came on HDTV. One question in particular is, "Can I use my old antenna with a new flat screen TV upgrade?" Now, the old bat-style or batwing, we called it, antenna that would crank up will take the new digital signal. It's just that the thing you need to be careful with is with digital, it's either on or it's off. The old analog style, you kinda tweak it a little bit, you would get maybe, you know, a partial picture. You can't do that with the digital signal. So you might have to get an extender they call the Wingman by Wineguard will actually enhance about twice the distance of the signal. So you can use the antenna, but there are some very inexpensive upgrades that will actually lengthen the distance for you.
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Many broadcaster moved to the UHF band when digital transmission became available. The older antennas did not do to well in these frequencies. Therefore adding a Wingman to your antenna gave more signal in these frequencies. Also RF is still RF and its analogue, there is really no thing as a digital antenna, this signal is encoded as digital. That being said its amazing how many channels we pick up at campgrounds. I have Dish for my RV but still use the off air signal a lot.
Have a 2017 Thor freedom Elite 22FE my tv gets 1/2 channels how can I get more channels? I’m in my second month owning a rv....help!!