OTA Antenna Question

[bpasker8]

Sorry, I haven't been on this board in a while, so please forgive my ignorance if I missed this same post a while back. I searched but couldn't find the answer...

This Antenna...

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=1081899793854&productCategoryId=cat08084&type=product

indicates it is HD ready. Now I already know, thanks to this site, that the HD ready advertising is all a marketing ploy to get us to pay more for one antenna over another and that all antennas recieve HD signals the same and our STB's or in TV HD Tuners have to conver the signal to HD for us. Can someone please verify that is correct? Second, what is up with the 1080i line in the description? Does my dish 811 not give me 1080i on HDNET, etc...? What up my regular roof top antenna I have feeding into my TV through my 811, am I not gett 1080i from that due to the 811?

[mjones73]

Some cable and sat feeds are compressed to save bandwidth where the over the air broadcasts are not, maybe that's what they ment by "true" 1080i.

[Ratman]

Not to worry... it's all incorrect marketing hype.

You get 1080i or 720p from satellite, cable or OTA (true HD). Although, there may be compression issues as mjones73 mentioned, but with HD it should be unnoticable.

In reality... even OTA HD is compressed to ~19Mbps using 8VSB. Also, multicasting by many local stations 'steal' bandwidth to provide additional programming via OTA.

Your rooftop antenna is probably better than the Terk.