I think you will have much better luck with a corner reflector or a pair of Yagi's stacked and phased properly. Nothing magic about a can antenna and it has no special directional properties beyond what a small Yagi can do.
I'll second the corner reflector. They're fairly easy to make. My quick and dirty corner reflector didn't do as well as my commercially built Yagi but it did a pretty could job of picking up the local public service network and fighting off simulcast distortion.