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There's nothing particularly special about a “digital” antenna. The RF (radio frequency) is still RF. The signal is encoded differently (ones and zeros now) and that's what the converter box or digital TV deals with.

I still have my very old antenna. The only thing I did was replace the baluns (the piece that converts the antenna leads to the coax cable) and the coax cable from the antenna to my TV. These pieces are exposed to the elements and were very old, so I decided to replace them when the digital transition happened.

The main difference with digital vs analog is this: As the analog signal gets weaker (because of distance, trees or other obstructions) the signal would get snowy. We each had our tolerance for how bad of a signal we would put up with. Digital needs a certain percentage of the ones and zeros to come through correctly to work. If it gets them you have a perfect picture. It it doesn't, you get nothing. There's a small range in the middle where the TV tries to fill in the missing parts and you get some square frozen blocks in the picture, then you fall off the cliff.

An outdoor antenna with some elevation above the roof will receive signals further away than an antenna on the TV inside. Direction is important. It needs to point towards the transmitters. Depending on where you live, they may be mostly in the same place. Other places have them spread out in different locations. A rotatory device may be necessary, depending on the strength of the signals.

Hope this (non-technical) information helps. As my name implies, I work in the business.

Good Luck!

There's nothing particularly special about a “digital” antenna. The RF (radio frequency) is still RF.

Actually no. A 'digital antenna' means it has been optimized for good gain, a predictable pattern, and low vswr in the passband of interest specifically for the HDTV broadcast spectrum which in this case is roughly 400-700 Mhz, with a relatively constant feed-point impedance across that band that can matched to 75 ohm coax. It can be done in many ways, some better than others. Gray-Hoverman and it's variants is an interesting design, as are the fractal types, which includes those ubiquitous bow-ties embedded in black plastic as seen on tv (they work quite well actually).