That Nice homemade antenna in the pic with all the snow works fine. I built one about 4 years ago and put it on a antenna pole on my house. It works great and I would pick up about 8 more stations if I had a rotar and even more if I add a decent amp.
Digital is no different than analog in that they are both line of sight just like the radio. All that means is that the signal will not follow the curve of the earth nor pass through massive objects. That is why TV with an antenna in NYC is kinda bad.
The old analog TV did not care about signal strength, it just gave you what it had. As the signal got weaker the picture go fuzzy until you could not make it out anymore. Digital either has all the dig9ital info it needs or it does not. If the signal strength dies off to the point the data loses anything. Poof, no signal. Actually if you had a tester you would see the signal was there just missing packets of data and digital needs all them ones and zeros.
For me I am not worried about TV on the road because so much of it sucks I seldom watch it. I have cable and I watch maybe 4 channels. Science, history, FOOD, and any decent movie that any channel shows but they are few. I like sci-fi but most TV today is wrestling and reality shows and I hate both. I will however have my netbook, a TV as a monitor, and a hard drive with tons of movies. I am slowly ripping my DVD's to digital. When done with just what I have now it will be just over 2 TB of movies. But at least if I get rained in I can watch a movie I like or work on writing on one of my 2 books.
I would have the option of running up a small antenna in case I needed to check weather or something.
If you really want TV ( for the kids ) make one of those antennas and you will be fine. 8 coat hanger wires ( stripped of lacquer or rubber at the connecting points), a 3 foot board, 8 screws with washers. 2 soda straws and a barrel adapter. ( That barrel thing TVs came with in a plastic bag for years with 2 wire connectors on one end and a cable screw on connector on the other.) There are tons of sites out there with the exact measurements and directions for it all.
A pic of mine on a PVC pipe. ( not recommended as screwing into the curve and keeping the whiskers flat is a pain.
). I recently copied all our DVDs to a new media home server. Then we got a WD TV live box with a USB hard drive that lives in the trailer. I converted the DVD format to an Apple format and copied them to the hard drive. Then I set up the Home Server to convert any new additions to our DVD library to an Apple format and copy them over the WIFI to the trailer. Our library is automatically updated with any new additions and now we take *all* our DVDs with us . The WD TV Live streams the movies to the DVD player in the trailer via a composite connection. The USB drive is also a WIFI hot spot that can stream up to 3 simultaneous movies via to the Ipad or our Iphones. We now have a DVD on demand library of several hundred DVDs and growing. We don't use digital TV anymore and life is good. Wanna watch a Thin Man movie anyone? How about a Thin Man marathon and we'll watch all of them? 
Smaller than a breadbox. 
