I am in the mountains surrounded by tall trees and receive all my stations in the 60 to 90 mile range.
I am however running an extreme fringe uhf only antenna rig with a low noise on antenna pre amp.
I tested reception with an old garage sale fish bone a tenna, but when I found over a dozen watchable channels I broke down and spent a few days researching antennas.
Settled on a resonant yagi about 5 foot long because of its flat spectrum response across all channels. At fringe every dB counts.
Note that high dolloar does not translate to better reception. The best antenna was one third the price.i highly recommend Solid Signal antennas, they are well made and smoke the competition at dB per dollar.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00CX700EY/ref=ya_aw_od_pi?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Yes, only 39 bucks, ones almost as good go for over a hundred bucks.
I am in similar conditions and have actually tried all this, preamps and all. I have probably spent at least 2k over the last few years trying. I am 50 miles away from the nearest multi-frequency TV repeater. But I have mountains between there and here and just can’t get a signal strong enough to lock.
I now realize I am just in a very bad spot and not going to get digital. But I was getting analog from 150 miles away with a well tuned antenna before they went digital. Little snowy at times but it was watchable and didn’t drop the lock like digital does when weak because of rain etc.
But speaking of analog to digital, I really miss the days of free big dish satellite. They went digital with that too and ruined a good thing. lol I have looked into the new digital “free to air” satellite boxes but haven’t ran across anyone who has used one to find out more.
They are only about $150 bucks and will pull all the satellite feeds and apparently there are still a lot that are not scrambled (they have a feature for scrambled too) . I still have my big dish set up and can utilize it to track with, just have to change the LNB. But I want to talk to someone first to get some experiences.
http://www.starlink-dss.com/fta-receivers/