Its been my general feeling for quite a while now that for many people reception problems are usually related more to signal quality than signal strength.
The above post by FoxTV indicates how complicated the signal environment can be and how difficult it can be to resolve these kinds of problems without a truck load of test equipment.
Probably the simplest way to avoid a lot of these problems is to get the antenna outside and to avoid amplifiers.
Putting the antenna outside helps reduce the impact of household noise sources. It also dramatically increases signal level and reduces the effect of indoor multi-path.
While amplifiers increase signal level, they always add something (e.g. noise, harmonic distortion, and inter-modulation distortion) that's not actually on the air. A cheap amp can easily saturate on a strong in-band or even out-of-band signal and generate a wide spectrum of "crud" that makes it impossible to detect anything with the receiver. By starting off without an amp, you can make a better determination of what your true signal situation is like. Then, if you're missing some weak stations you can add the amp and see if it really helped.
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