This shows the variation of analogue signal quality with falling signal level for a 1993 vintage Sony SLV-E7 VCR used as the receiver. The receiver is running without any boosters. Improvements in receiver design mean a typical receiver of the last era of analogue transmission (2005-2010) could be expected to give similar results with an input about 3dB lower.
Analogue showed the variations in quality even in a single still, and would still operate under far poorer signal levels than digital, aking it better for showing the performance changes over such a wide and often out of spec range. Even when analogue terrestrial TV transmission is a distant memory, the principles still hold - it is the level of the aerial signal that determines the quality of the results. You can compare these results with another experiment that used boosters to keep the level going into the receiver at broadly the same level, eliminating the noise performance of the receiver. The comparison shows that boosters cannot compensate for a poor signal level from the aerial. A moderate gain booster would improve the noise figure of this receiver up to modern standards (this was the original purpose of a booster), but that is only really useful in the extreme low-level situations (like the lowest image here, with an input at 14dBuV) where even after the booster the picture borders on the unwatchable.
real aerial measurement of DTT performance with decreasing signal levels + adding booster
experiment demonstrating boosters don't compensate for aerial deficiencies
Improving noise figure with boosters
Selecting and siting your TV aerial
Why DTT is different from an analogue install
