Hd antenna

[frank_drebin]

My son and I decided to build an HD antenna for their "playroom" tv. The other TVs are on dish but the upstairs tv was only for the xbox and movies. We built this for around $10. We hooked it up I'm the attic and dropped a line to the tv. We pulled in 64 total changes including 18 HD channels 15 HD radio stations. Not bad for a few coathangers and some duct.

 

[Class III]

Please post a description of what you used and how you used what you used. Up at my farm, the local cable company wants $6975 to run a cable about 1500 feet and sink seven poles even though there is power strung on poles from the blacktop to the house. The poles that the power is on are privately owned poles that I put up and the cable company said that since the poles are privately owned they can not hang their cable from them, only public owned poles or their poles. Dish and Direct are out of the question as they will not negotiate a contract term less than 12 months and I'm only there about every other weekend during non-deer or turkey season. How far are you from the broadcast towers?

Class III

 

[Babalooie]

I built one over a year ago. Worked fairly well most of the time. I used coat hangers, 2 yardsticks and some aluminum foil. Can't beat the price!!!!

 

[truckemup97]

Please post a description of what you used and how you used what you used.

Yes! Please! I need something for the truck, but I'm unwilling to spend the over $100 they want at Radio Shack. I've got tons of coat hangers out in the storage building.

 

[m1gunner]

Do a search on home made digital TV antenna, you will get many plans, complete with detailed drawings.

I made one a year ago and it works fine. I used the ground wire from some 12-2 wire I had laying around. Added an amp from an ole set top antenna, and pull in stations from 100 miles on a good day.

 

[frank_drebin]

Yeah, ours is made of wire coat hangers and a $5 piece of duct material from Home Depot. We have it aimed N towards Atlanta and can pick up all of the Atlanta stations perfectly. We get standard and HD versions of the major networks and a bunch of music video stations and other odds and ends like Qubo, ION and some pretty cool Sports Channels.

After you build the antenna go to this site and put in your address. It will show you which way to point your antenna for best reception and how far each station is. For me it seems to be 356deg so i may turn mine a bit.

 

[dickttx]

Class III, do you have DirecTV or Dish at your main home? If so, they will add your other home (motor home, travel trailer, cabin, etc.) for $5.00 per month. I didn't know that and tried to get along with an antenna for more than a year.

 

[Maximumbob54]

For anyone not wanting to build one, I paid fifty bucks for a DB2 from Antennas Direct and it is great. You can get them direct from them or webstores like Amazon. They make all kinds of antennas and models rated for certain goals. Antennapoint.com is a great way to figure what direction you want to face it when mounted.

 

[ohiobuckeye]

Regardless of the advertising hype, the digital signals are transmitted on the same over the air frequencies as before. Antennas are cut and sized to specific frequency bands and that has not changed with the move to digital TV...the quality of the modulating content within that frequency band is still determined by the signal level received by the antenna. The difference with digital is that as long as that signal level is above the minimum, you will get a quality picture and below the minimum, you get nothing. Before the switch to digital, you could still receive lesser quality noisy and snowy sound/picture in low signal areas. Digital is either good or nonexistant with a narrow band of in/out blocks of locked up frames when signal is at the good/bad breakover level. You could get lucky with home made antennas, but your best bet is to buy quality high gain antennas made by people who know what they are doing, and better yet, add a high gain antenna mounted broadband VHF/UHF preamp.....well worth the money. I never had much luck with VHF/UHF combo antenna, and always got much better results with separate UHF and VHF antennas through a dual input preamp. I live in a fringe area and still get all channels I had prior to the digital change, but many others in this area lost the lower signal stations. If you had good results prior to the digital move but lost a few channels, adding the preamp might retrieve them without replacing the antenna. There is no difference between the "digital" antenna and the "pre-digital" antenna, other than some slick advertising.

 

[frank_drebin]

You could get lucky with home made antennas, but your best bet is to buy quality high gain antennas made by people who know what they are doing, and better yet, add a high gain antenna mounted broadband VHF/UHF preamp.....well worth the money.

I don't think luck has anything to do with it. It's not rocket surgery....

This guy replaced his expensive Yagi antenna with a home made one and improved his signal significantly. My neighbor (at our boathouse) has a giant directional antenna that he paid an arm and a leg for and had it professionally installed. It pulls in 20 stations with great quality. After it got hit by a falling pine tree limb he built one like mine (I got the idea from him) and gets 40+ stations now.

 

[JohnnieB]

FWIW - The VHF and UHF antennae from yesteryear will pickup HDTV.
All that changed was the content of the RF signals, not the signals themselves, so the same antenna that picked up analog TV signals will pickup digital TV signals.

Same applies to antenna preamps, distribution amps and transmission lines. Of course, some of the old stuff was junk, but quality equipment for signal gathering from the analog era will work for HDTV, if you have a converter box or HDTV ready TV set.

I've got Cable TV, Internet and Phone, but I have an old turnstile type omnidirectional VHF antenna and preamp hanging from the peak of the roof in the attic that I use for FM radio reception and it brings in all of the VHF HDTV stations in the area when connected to a HDTV ready TV. I've got the same setup in UHF, but haven't hung it yet. (Repurposed equipment from medical telemetry antenna arrays discarded when Digital TV stole the bandwidth hospitals were using and they had to move to the WMTS band, replacing perfectly good and very expensive medical telemetry systems throughout the US of A. Ever wonder why health care is so high? )

I also have 500' of 26AWG varnish coated copper stapled to the underside of a pyramid roof for an omnidirectional longwire AM antenna and can pickup most of the clear channel AM stations east of the Mississippi approaching a 24/7 basis

--------------

Oooops, got sidetracked while typing this, others have already said some on the same things about the RF signals being the same.

However, here's a picture of what I want to build in the back 40, but SWAMBO won't let me because she thinks it would spoil the view.

 

[Babalooie]

In 1979 when I left the Air Force, the family and I stayed in the Pope AFB BOQ. The television had a really crappy antenna attached. I hooked up the wife's hair dryer to the antenna lead and got perfect reception. Another time, I used a Weller soldering gun as an antenna. I think the transformer coils were the reason they worked.

 

[JohnnieB]

.........I think the transformer coils were the reason they worked.

Right you are.

Both the electric motor in the hair dryer and the transformer in the soldering gun had several feet (hundreds maybe) of varnish coated copper wire in them. In fact the wire I used for my AM antenna came for an old solenoid. (The insulating coating is a polymer theses days, but us old guys still call it varnish, which is what was used originally)

Actually, anything that conducts electricity can be used as an antenna. Of course, it takes a little TLC and very steady hands to turn empty beer cans into a Hertzian monopole (vertical quarter-wave half-dipole using earth for a counterpoise), but I have done it, as well as using tie-down chains hanging from a weather balloon for a secure HF-SSB data link. But, I must admit, it was more enjoyable emptying the beer cans than pushing the chains.

 

[ohiobuckeye]

I don't think luck has anything to do with it. It's not rocket surgery....

This guy replaced his expensive Yagi antenna with a home made one and improved his signal significantly. My neighbor (at our boathouse) has a giant directional antenna that he paid an arm and a leg for and had it professionally installed. It pulls in 20 stations with great quality. After it got hit by a falling pine tree limb he built one like mine (I got the idea from him) and gets 40+ stations now.

Unless each element was measured and cut to a length that duplicates an existing antenna design, or carefully calculated per frequency and type antenna, luck will have everything to do with it. Each element of an antenna is cut to length for a specific frequency. Without calculating the precise length, or exactly duplicating an existing design, pure dumb luck is the only way a home brew antenna is going to work well, much less outperform a well designed and built commercial antenna. That said, there are commercially sold antenna that are junk, too. Many of those "giant" expensive yagi style are VHF/UHF combo antenna and I have yet to see a combo antenna that performs well in low signal areas and have also seen a few home built antenna that did poorly. Most folks seem to think the more metal you hang out there, the better the picture, and that ain't the way it works. The higher the frequency, the shorter the antenna elements. The antenna in the first picture is a UHF 4 stack bow tie style that works very well in this area. I used one for years and, after some storm damage, replaced it with a more expensive UHF corner reflector/yagi type, and gained nothing in signal level, even though the yagi was rated a slightly higher gain.
A carefully built home brew antenna could be made to outperform a commercially built, if it was cut to length for specific channels, like the cable companies used to do before satellite links. The commercial antenna are cut to optimize the signal across the entire band, which covers several hundred megahertz. If the channels you want happen to be in one segment of the band, the elements can be matched closer to the frequency range desired for better reception on those particular channels.

 

[ohiobuckeye]

............URL="http://uhfhdtvantenna.blogspot.com/"]This guy replaced his expensive Yagi antenna [/URL]with a home made one and improved his signal significantly.

Took a look at the link and I can certainly agree that his signal probably did improve! Not sure what the monstrosity he replaced might have been, but it wasn't a yagi. Looked more like some wild variation of a folded dipole he had stuck in the attic before he built the bow tie replacement. There were some curved omni directional folded dipoles that folks once used as external FM radio antennas, and they would work(sort of) for TV, if there was a strong enough signal. The FM radio band is mixed into the middle of the VHF TV band. Remember the classified pages of magazines that were were once full of ads selling wild looking antenna that were supposed to double and triple your reception? These antenna did not work very well for much of anything, so I'm sure his home brew bow tie definitely gave better results....especially since he indicates he mounted it on a rotor. The bow ties are very directional. Also, it's most likely he got his home brew antenna dimensions from an existing commercial antenna and avoided any flirtation with pure dumb luck. Duplicating his measurements would also account for your own good results.

 

[mountaingun629]

JohnnyB -
Your elephant cage antenna looks like the direction finder antennas the NSA used. It would take a LOT of space to set one of those up, and quite spendy!

Myron

 

[JohnnieB]

Myron,

Forty years ago, when I was working on them, I did hear rumors they were used for things other than keeping pachyderms from trampling the farmer's crops.

They came in different flavors, but the AN/FLR-9V shown covered a little over 37 acres, not counting the buried portions. However, for HDTV you'd only need the innermost circle of antennae so 10 acres would probably be enough. Cost? Expensive when built, but sold off as scrap-metal when decommissioned.

 

[frank_drebin]

Took a look at the link and I can certainly agree that his signal probably did improve! Not sure what the monstrosity he replaced might have been, but it wasn't a yagi. Looked more like some wild variation of a folded dipole he had stuck in the attic before he built the bow tie replacement. There were some curved omni directional folded dipoles that folks once used as external FM radio antennas, and they would work(sort of) for TV, if there was a strong enough signal. The FM radio band is mixed into the middle of the VHF TV band. Remember the classified pages of magazines that were were once full of ads selling wild looking antenna that were supposed to double and triple your reception? These antenna did not work very well for much of anything, so I'm sure his home brew bow tie definitely gave better results....especially since he indicates he mounted it on a rotor. The bow ties are very directional. Also, it's most likely he got his home brew antenna dimensions from an existing commercial antenna and avoided any flirtation with pure dumb luck. Duplicating his measurements would also account for your own good results.

I have the dumb part down pat.