i am looking for an antenna for st lois area i live about 70 mile east of towers. area code is 62471. i have a 35 foot tower to put antenna on it will take about 60 feet of cable to get to my tv im after the hd signals. wondered if it was worth trying or not any ideas would be appreciated

Might want to start off with the local St Louis thread in the local reception forum.

You need to determine if your digital OTA stations are all UHF or if you have VHF ones also. Another thing to consider is do any of your local stations plan to move their digital broadcast back to their original channel number once analog is turned off in 2009.

i am looking for an antenna for st lois area i live about 70 mile east of towers. area code is 62471. i have a 35 foot tower to put antenna on it will take about 60 feet of cable to get to my tv im after the hd signals. wondered if it was worth trying or not any ideas would be appreciated
The good news is that all the network stations in St. Louis are digitally broadcasting on UHF and will stay at UHF after the analog shutdown in Feb, 2009. The stations in Springfield, IL are all at UHF as well, although one - WCFN-DT 49 - is shown as switching to VHF 13 in 2009, but that is a My Network station and probably not important. This simplifies your antenna selection for digital reception to a good long range UHF antenna.

I had to plug a silly antenna height of 600' into antennaweb for your zip code into the options link to get a full list of the digital stations around you, so ignore the color codes of the list below:

* yellow - uhf WPXS-DT 21 IND MOUNT VERNON IL TBD 220° 33.5 21
* green - uhf WRSP-DT 55.1 FOX SPRINGFIELD IL 344° 63.0 44
* blue - uhf KSDK-DT 5.1 NBC ST. LOUIS MO 251° 71.1 35
* blue - uhf KTVI-DT 2.1 FOX St. Louis MO 250° 74.1 43
* blue - uhf KMOV-DT 4.1 CBS ST. LOUIS MO 248° 70.5 56
* violet - uhf KPLR-DT 11.1 CW ST. LOUIS MO 251° 70.6 26
* violet - uhf WSIU-DT 8.1 PBS CARBONDALE IL 189° 57.5 40
* violet - uhf WBUI-DT 23.1 CW DECATUR IL 11° 71.5 22
* violet - uhf WEIU-DT 50.1 PBS CHARLESTON IL FCC Ext 44° 61.1 50
* violet - uhf WAND-DT 17.1 NBC DECATUR IL 12° 72.1 18

I don't know how much area your zip code covers, but lets round it off to being about 70 miles from the St. Louis stations as well as 70 miles to Decatur. Don't worry about putting up a 600' tower as antennaweb is very conservative on long range digital reception, but you are clearly in a challenging spot for OTA reception. Can't guarantee that you will be able a stable signal for the St. Louis or the other cities to the north, but if you already have a tower and are willing to take a shot at spending several hundred bucks, go for it.

You should look into getting the AntennasDirect 91XG UHF antenna, a rotator, and a CM or Winegard pre-amp. You will need the rotator to tweak the antenna aim and maybe take a shot at the IL stations to the north. At your long range, you may get better reception at night than in the daytime and lose some stations in poor weather. Recommended on-line dealers are solidsignal.com and warrenelectronics.com. Good luck!