Home > Consumer Reviews > Winegard MS-2000 HDTV Antenna with Cable

I live in southwest Florida between Tampa and Fort Myers and needed a multi-directional antenna. This looked like it would work well so I bought it. It gets fantastic reception on digital channels and I am very pleased with my purchase. Delivery was very quick also.

A reputable manufacturer, but this antenna did not perform as well as our 15-year old VHF/UHF antenna in the attic. We're about 30-miles and one laughably-low set of "mountains" from the major TV transmitters. We tried a variety of positions and orientations, but it never caught as many stations, either analog nor the newer digital ones, as our old antenna. Admittedly, our old one was a "premium" antenna at the time, but we figured that this one should be newer technology and get a stronger signal with the new digital channels or catch more of them, and it was the opposite. The manufacturer was very responsive and provided some advice, but we ultimately returned it and may have to (sigh) consider cable when we finally lose all the analog stations later this year.

Very easy installation and setup. Light in weight and sturdy.

I live in a mountainous area and I didn't have quite the luck that others did with the antenna pulling in stations from long distances. I only wanted to use the antenna to receive two local stations (12 miles away) and based my purchase on that. It receives just as the manufacturer says it will. Any stations received beyond that range I would look at as a bonus.

Installed the MS-2000 in my attic on the side of my house facing Houston. Installation was easy and painless. Using a small TV at the antenna, I was able to find the sweet spot between two fringe stations. So the MS-2000 did not prove to be as omnidirectional as I had hoped. After checking the TVs in the house, I found that I was still able to tune the rabbit ears and get better reception than I was getting with the MS-2000. This gave me the idea to take the rabbit ears up to the attic and plug them into the Winegard's power block. I now have fantastic reception throughout the house, although I must admit I wish I had thought of this before spending the money for the Winegard antenna.

The MS-2000 was not as wonderful as the reviews make it out to be. I don't know why, but for some strange reason the one channel with the strong signal with regular rabbit ears is now the one with a weak signal on the MS-2000. The other channels saw a little improvement. Some really distant channels showed up, but they are so weak that they constantly stop. The MS-2000 appears to not work without the amplifier and kind of makes me wonder if the model without one would work better. The good part is that I am off cable. Now to find a switch, so that I can use both the rabbit ears and the MS-2000 and correct that weak signal channel. Reversing a cable splitter and connecting both antennas to it did not work.