I'm on the VA side of the DC area - maybe 25 miles out, and I use a pair of rabbit ears to the 300 ohm connection on my yamaha receiver - works great for most everything on the dial.
These days - there's just not as much interesting stuff on the air out there, and all the real esoteric stuff I like is on internet radio ... sigh
I live in a small town some 35 miles east of Cleveland. The area's FM and TV transmitters are about ten miles (more or less) further southwest of here, in a southwestern suburb. I get very good FM reception on every one of my FM receivers just using their built-in antennas; the only exception is the digital AM/FM tuner in my Aiwa bookshelf stereo system. Standard T-dipole antennas do not work well with this system, so I bought a Terk tower AM/FM antenna shortly after I moved here seven and a half years ago. Made all the difference in the world; my stereo system now brings in every Cleveland station in stereo, and when the band opens up in the summer, I get many stations from Detroit, Toledo, Ohio and southwestern Ontario, Canada.
BTW, I cannot use outdoor FM antennas of any kind because I live in an apartment building (lease restrictions).
I really don't listen much to over-the-air (OTA) FM these days either, preferring instead to listen to Internet radio and my own music collection. There is much more variety and, IMHO, better programming on the Internet stations; for example, I thought easy-listening (instrumentals, such as was once played over FM radio from the '60s until roughly 1990) was dead until I found The Breeze, an Internet easy-listening station from Crown Point, Indiana (
www.thebreez.com). This station is 24/7 easy listening, with no commercials and no talk except an occasional ad for the station itself.
If you want really good reception from low-power college and/or NPR stations, then by all means erect an outdoor antenna with a mast-mounted preamplifier on a rotor, if you can. However, with many NPR affiliates now streaming over the Internet (the Cleveland affiliate of NPR does just that, as well as another NPR station some 60 miles south of here), there isn't much sense anymore, IMHO, in spending a lot of money and going to a lot of trouble putting up an outdoor FM antenna. The Internet and web streaming have made most FM stations that can afford it available to anyone, anywhere, even if you are hundreds of miles from the station you want to hear, or cannot hear even local stations for any reason (e. g. obstructions, mountains, etc. between you and the station
or by virtue of sheer distance).
