"DTV" Without Digital Box?

[ethyoung]

I've got a question about a TV I just inherited. The manual claims that it supports digital (ATSC) signals, but I have yet to get it to work in its digital mode. I've tried connecting through the cable box with coax and straight to the wall with coax. I've gotten it to work with s-video, but I need the s-video port on the TV for another component. Plus, by using the s-video, it's not actually functioning in its ATSC mode, which is what I want it to do. It looks fine through the s-video, but I really want to see if I can get this "DTV" function to work as it says it should.
Is the TV unable to decode the digital signal without the digital box (Insight Digital, btw), or am I doing something wrong? If it helps, the TV is a Sylvania 6427GFF. For some reason, the TV is no longer listed on the Sylvania website, though extremely similar models are.
Thanks in advance if anyone feels like taking this one on!

[gadgetguy]

An ATSC tuner is designed to work with Over The Air digital signals, not Digital Cable. You need to get an external antenna and direct it towards a local digital broadcast.

[ethyoung]

How powerful does the antenna need to be, and how common are digital broadcasts?
I'm guessing this is pretty pointless.

[yoda313]

No its not pointless. It just means for over the air signals you won't need a seperate tuner for that tv in the future. At least for my hdtv capture card a simple plain old no frills powered antennae works just great. Make sure its a powered on though - I didn't get much from a unamplified antennae.

I don't have a hdtv or sdtv with a digital tuner but I do have a hdtv capture. My guess with your digital tuner built in is that all of your local o-t-a signals should come in perfectly over just about any antennae (powered is better like I mentioned). You won't get highdef if its not a true hdtv but you will get much nicer aerial signals with the digital tuner.

That is my educated guess here.

[ethyoung]

As soon as my wife is done watching Food Network (grrr...), I'm hooking up my old rabbit ears to see what I can do with this thing. Thanks to antennaweb.org, I've found the appropriate direction, so I should be good to go!
Thanks for your help, guys!