hello I am Wanderer001 and this is my review of the Maho leaf 50 amplified
antenna this is a digital TV antenna similar to how rabbit ears were back in
the day this will allow you to pull down digital TV signal into your TV without
having to have a cable box or a cable subscription now the amount of channels
that you will get with this over a paid cable subscription is a severely less
but if you just watch the major networks FOX NBC pix11 those types of channels
this will be more than enough for you so what you're looking at here is the
antenna itself it is 11 and a half inches wide 9 inches high and has a
depth as you can see right there it just disappears with a depth of 0.04 so some
people say that this is as thin as a piece of paper it's not quite as thin as
a piece of paper might be a little difficult to see that it's probably as
thin as probably five or six sheets of paper I know that's splitting hairs but
it's just giving you a better idea of what how thick this really is but even
five sheets of paper is really thin and because I like to use everyday objects
to give you a size comparison well the only everyday object that I can think of
for size comparison for this particular item was a sheet of paper so this is
your standard sheet of paper which I'll try and bring down a little bit there
and obviously I'm using the black side so it's a little easier for you to see
the white outline and the black so again this is the closest representation of an
everyday object that I could think of for size of this also if you bring it up
here it's a little harder to tell because of the black and white coloring
but as I said before not quite as thin as a single sheet of paper but a couple
of sheets of or stack together would be a good
representation of how thick this antenna is so it is reversible meaning that
there's white on one side and black on another it is made of a plastic material
that is extraordinarily flexible even though it's supposed to sit flat on your
wall it is flexible so you know you have to worry about this getting hurt if it
happens to drop because I had this fall a couple of times when I was first
initially figuring out where to put it so as I said it is reversible to try and
match your decor but also paintable so if you don't have something that white
would look good with or black would look good with you can paint right over it
and still receive a signal in the upper corners might be a little hard to see
there's these holes which will allow you to tack it to the wall I'll show you in
a moment for mounting hardware with the Moho you get four of these stick back
disks which are as they call it hook and loop tape so it's really just velcro in
little circles that you stick in the four corners or you have these little
pushpins either black or white depending on which side of the moho you decide
to use now I just ended up using finishing nails because was not too sure
about well I didn't want to use the hook and loop tape and I didn't want to push
these little pins into it because they don't feel super sturdy just saying
sticky back or sticky tack is probably going to be your best bet when figuring
out the position of where the the moho should go my initial setup was probably
about and I know about 45 minutes of figuring out the exact placement of
where it should go so each time you move it you will have to rescan so having a
way to keep it on the wall is a good thing so back to the antenna itself as
you see there is a coax input at the bottom there and the clamp is a the same
color as a side it should be on now this is the the
what's a upgraded version but they mohu did a product revamp probably
about a year ago and consolidated and changed and one of the big things with
the old version because I've been eyeballing this for a while now was the
older version had a attached coax cable unless you went to the higher level
which then had a detachable coax but now with the Maho 50 you get a detachable
coax cable so we're going to put this down for a moment and show you some of
the things that come in the box speaking of coax cable you get 16 feet
of it included with the mohu leaf it is a good quality I haven't had to replace
it I haven't thought about replacing it but the beauty of it is if you think
this is not up to snuff then you can go out and get your own and just attach it
to the digital TV antenna in the box you also get the Moho amplifier so this is
the amplifier itself which plugs into the coax cable which is going to your
digital TV antenna here and then this part here which you can still see with
the tag on it goes directly into your TV now there is a power source power source
right here which can either be plugged into the back of your TV should you have
a USB port on it or it comes with this handy little wall wart which you can
then plug in now the cable cable here is much much longer so you actually have a
good length of wire here in order to attach it to a power area so you don't
have to worry about coming up short now the beauty of this digital TV antenna is
it is omnidirectional meaning if I have it this way or if I have it this way
it's going to pick up the same signals now because it is a over-the-air antenna
placement is important so you're going to have to play a little bit to figure
out exactly where this is going to pick up the best signals the particular range
on this antenna is 50 miles so again it's going to depend how close you are
to a tower to get the reception to this so what
to show you my initial setups of the moho leave 50 here and you will see me as
I've already done a couple times here but may it be edited out
I do call it a mahu leaf instead of a mohu leaf I'm not sure why I did
that but the video of me setting it up is actually a a while ago when I first
got it and first put it up so please excuse me calling it the Maho leaf
instead of the mohu leaf so this is the second time I scan up for channels with
the Maho leaf you'll notice that currently you can see that there is a
picture happening in the background that's because I apparently left it on a
channel that it did pick up I thought I put it to a channel that would have a
blue background but you'll notice here that the it's showing that its antenna
it's showing that it's 100% complete and it's showing 30 channels have been
picked up now the first time I did this it only picked up about 8 channels and
this is where you're going to have to play a lot with the location of the
antenna itself now you can kind of see like I said in the background there it's
coming in pretty clear so what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to take off
the menu here so you get an idea of just how clear the picture is now I'm trying
not to involve I'm trying to avoid copyright so I'm not going to show you
too long right now in fact what I'm going to do is pause it for a second and
change the channel to something a little less copyright warranted alright so
before I show you the placement of the antenna just notice that this particular
channel is it was picked up but it's kind of blurry part of that is right now
I'm not using the amplifier so what I'm going to do is while this channels kind
of fuzzy I'm going to go behind the TV plug the amplifier in and show you kind
of what that will look like to clean up the picture and then I'll show you the
placement of the antennas because I'm going to scan again because even though
it picked up 40 or I'm sorry 30 channels I should be able to pick up 47 channels
and really right now the only one that's coming in very strong is
channel 2 I should be able to pick up channel 5 and 11 where I am but right
now I'm going to plug in the amplifier and show you how it cleans this up ok so
after putting on the amplifier I am greeted with this particular
message or if I tilt the TV I get a little bit of a picture still kind of
blurry so the instructions say that what I should do is scan the system again
after inputting the amplifier so I will do a scan and let you know what it looks
like afterwards alright so just to show you how finicky the antenna itself can
be this is after the amplifier was installed it brought me back to channel
2 which I am getting in the background there you'll notice that it is not only
showing 24 as opposed to the 30 channels I got before but what I'm going to do is
I'm going to try and get back to that channel that was giving me issues before
and see how it does now if you'll notice this particular channel is coming in in
HD it's a 1080i HD so you can pick it up with the antenna it's just a matter of
finding the correct placement in your house so I'm going to go channel surf
and find that channel that was giving me issues before all right so the channel
that was giving the issues before it went away so I'm assuming it's probably
because it's a weak signal but you'll notice a ion here before I was getting
the standard def channel and it was kind of in with the signal strength this is
the high def 720p channel and it's coming in rather nice and again I'm
going to change it to something to avoid copyright so what do we actually do now
is grab the camcorder and show you the placement of the antenna previously so
don't mind the mess this is right above my entertainment center on the root beer
bottles and the initial placement was right here and that's what got me the 8
channels now behind that wall is my kitchen with the microwave and all that
what I did was shift it over a little bit to the left
so that's my dining room there and what I'm going to do is I'm going to extend
the coax as far as I can across this and see if I can hook it up close to that
outside wall there because the higher up it is and the closer to the outside wall
it is the better your signal strength so I'm going to reposition and rescan
alright so this is an example of having the amplifier on and in my houses case
like best placement I've got 100% completion and 46 channels as opposed to
the 30 channels I had before and as you can see it is defaulted back to ABC 2 in
the background there but this is the ABC 2 HD channel so what we're going to do
is we're going to channel surf a little bit ah and see now we get with this
particular placement channel for cozy TV we get channel 5 now which is playing
the soccer game so I'm going to change so I don't get copyright flag we get
movies we get standard def channel 5 and channel 9 standard def as well as
channel 9 in HD so really it's all about the placement of the antenna and I'm
just cycling through the channels so I have 46 channels now that is completely
over-the-air and I do know I turn that off up so just using the placement which
we're going to go up and around and like I said I had it moved over in this
direction and that's really blurry I need to have better like now the cable
is kind of drooping right now and the antenna is like in this half slouched
position that's because I was using sticky tack to figure out the correct
location and at least what I could say is with the Maho having a lot of cable
lengths that very generous cable like you can find that exterior wall that's
going to give you the best signal now again now that I figured out where the
best placement for this is I can use those peripherals that came with it to
tack it into place and again 46 channels of free TV you're not going to beat that
and you saw HD channels and they came in very clearly so as you saw the the
signal and channels that you get are very dependent on where you place this I
ended up you know putting on exterior wall my apartment is located on the
second floor of a complex and I made sure that it was an exterior facing wall
and I got a pretty good amount of channels what you make what you might
not have noticed is that was also during a rainy day so weather can affect the
the signal strength of this but you saw it was raining outside that was still a
pretty good signal now I haven't had a chance to test it in the snow yet I have
had it for a while now but you know not during the snowy months I have had it
and tested it overcast bright and sunny and as you saw
there raining it does dip in and out every now and then but again it's a
digital TV antenna I'm not paying for cable so it's a trade-off that I'm
willing to take what I did forget to mention with the amplifier here whether
it's plugged in and receiving a signal or not plug object if it's plugged in
and receiving a signal you're watching TV actively or whether TV is powered off
it still draws power of eight watts so that's just something to be aware of
it's plugged into the TV it will be drawing a little bit of vampire power
unless you cut the power completely to the TV so in order to determine if this
is something that's going to be good for you there's a couple things you need to
think about one the price the price of the the Mohu live here
ranges between seventy to forty dollars if you get it new
like I said I think I have been watching this for a while now and a while ago
Amazon had a really really good sale on new ones for $40 so I jump right on that
and I have been very happy with it but the price if you get it new might be a
little bit of a factor to hold you back I was concerned for paying $70 for a
piece of plastic that pulled down TV channels but 60 $60 I would say is a
fair price so if you can find at $60 it's well worth it another thing to
consider is again the range of your particular house from a antenna what
I'll do is either put it somewhere here or in the description area below a chant
a website that you can punch in your address or zip code and figure out you
know a rough estimate of how many channels you should get with something
like this it's the FCC's so it should be as up-to-date as possible and I would
say for when I did it it was fairly accurate so really if you're looking for
another piece to your cord-cutting arsenal I would highly suggest looking
at the Moho 50 amplified antenna here and really you can't can't go wrong with
the free TV so I have been Wander001 if you have any questions
or comments please leave them in the area below and thanks for watching