Old antenna for new tv

That works fine. On the same pole I think they should be at least 5 foot apart vertically. Also the wires coming to the splitter from the antennas should be the same length.

Reply to
Tony
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The old style antenna will work (with HD and digital) just as good today as it did 50 years ago. Actually they seem to work much better with the switch to digital. The ones the link points to... well they might work, but none of the ones I tried (and returned)worked well. Now an old fashioned type with a pre-amp out near the antenna and possibly another amp near the TV, that will work better that that *gimmick* one at the link.

Reply to
Tony

Thanks. They're not going to be on a pole but in the attic, which is about 7 feet high in the center and 6 inches high at front and back edge.

Any advice about placement in that case??

I figured the big one meant to get DC stations south of here would be south of the omnidirectional, meant to get stations east and if I'm lucky north of here. Is 5 or 10 feet between them enough?

I figured I'd hang the antennas from the rafters and have room to put light-weight boxes underneath.

Reply to
mm

I Googled a bit and that seemed about right. It does seem to cover a lot for one page! I'll have to read it now myself!

Those are some answers!

Without the amp. Probably just a couple dB on VHF.

Jeff

Reply to
Jeff Thies

On 9/1/2010 10:05 PM, Jdog wrote:

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Antennas, the 20/80% rule applies. You can get a lot of results with not to much work when it comes to antennas. In your case a lot depends on what channels you are going to want. UHF antennas are the ones with the short elements. VHF is the long ones. Work backwards, find where the signal you want to catch is coming from and the strength and then you get the antenna that will do the job. The wiring from the antenna to the TV is also very important and the number of splitters on the line. Catch the signal and get it to the TV is what it's all about. The antenna you found is actually rated quite good but it is UHF only, I read somewhere it was made for the Australian market and now it's imported to the US. If you go this way they are a lot cheaper on e-bay. There must be 100 dealers selling them. There are a lot of how to do clips on youtube. If the signal is strong enough in your area you can make your own. I recently dropped DISH and now use OTA and the cable modem to stream to the TV. The towers are 70 miles from my house. I get about 30 channels OTA and watch CNBS, Bloomberg, CNN and a few others with live streaming. Here ya go, one of the better sites I found when I was putting up my antenna, which is a beat up old one my neighbor gave me but it gets the job done. Most maybe all digital TV's have a signal strength meter use that to aim the antenna.

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and must reading for the home TV antenna enthusiast, links to tower locations and signal strength from them.
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Reply to
FatterDumber& Happier Moe

Two antennas made it theoretically possible to switch back and forth via a timer, but that was an incredibly complicated solution compared to spending another $200 on a second DVR and having a two completely separate recording "chains." It's turned out to be very useful for the sweeps when the only three interesting programs broadcast all year are telecasted on the same day and time.

I've done similar things (multi aerial receiver for household X-10 RF controls signals), but in this case, the antennas are at opposite ends of the house (Washington signals are strongest on the south side, Balto on the north) so there didn't seem to be any point to combining the signal. I suppose it might not be a bad idea to see what happens if I combine them. Hmmmm . . .

It's pretty annoying. It's like microwave ovens. My old reliable Litton had nothing but a mechanical spring timer that lasted over 20 years with only a broken door latch. The replacement has a super-fancy multi-function "cooking system" (aka "timer") that locked up tight the first time we used it. Sometimes newer is not better.

That's good detective work. I had a similar experience the other night and discovered Wikipedia has a lot of synopses for old TV shows with pretty detailed commentary. I like to watch Hitchcock just to look for actors who made it to the big time later on. HD OTA is great because I am getting to watch old movies that used to be available only on AMC or TCM. That and the Outer Limits where you can see a futuristic looking video-telephone device equipped with a rotary dial!!!!! There's nothing as funny as old science fiction where they either got it half wrong or all wrong. I remember when computers were represented by huge arrays of flashing lights.

There are so many things that turned out to be better for the sellers than the buyers. Hell, I like HD for movie viewing, but I don't want to see the news anchor's nose hairs or acne scars. What ticks me off most is the aspect ratio issue. I was watching something on Comcast's analog net and it was a conversation between two people, neither of whom were on the screen in

4: 3.

I've got almost a dozen different devices with ATSC (HD capable) tuners, from USB cards to DVR to LCD TVs of differing sizes. The variation in the number of channels each different device sees when scanning from the same antenna is pretty darn wild. The best tuner is in my LCD TV, which sucks, because I can't record from it! The worst is a Samsung DVD recorder, the best a Panasonic DVD recorder (although the DVD part crapped out one week after the warranty did after burning less than 25 disks so it's useless). On the other hand, my older Panasonic DVR with DVD recorder has burned over

500.

There aren't many DVRs left on the market. I was told is was because TIVO sues them out of production, but I can't say for sure. But both the Panasonic DVR and the Polaroid have commercial skip buttons (Panny is 1 min, Polly is 30 sec). Neither is available new anymore, although I believe Philips and ChannelMaster are making consumer HD DVRs. My units aren't HD, but in HQ mode, I really don't notice the difference. OTA HD still has a lot of SD content.

-- Bobby G.

Reply to
Robert Green

On 9/2/2010 5:44 AM, Robert Green wrote: Later this year, I am going to mount a

We also opt for over-the-air reception. We are lucky. At our location (north of Wheaton, MD) all the DC transmitters are within about 15 degrees of each other, except for Chan 22, which is about 90 degrees further east. We opted for a fixed mast on a chimney mount with a high gain, directional, unamplified VHF/UHF antenna. Although the antenna is directional, we get

4,5,7,9,20,26,30,32,50 and 66 reliably without needing a rotor. Since we often want to watch a DC station while recording 22, or vice versa, a rotor would not have been a good solution for us. Our installer agreed to try mounting an unamplified 8 bow tie UHF antenna on the same mast, pointed at 22, using a reverse splitter to merge the signals from both antennas into the single feed wire. Although you can find many web sites that say phase distortion makes that type of setup unworkable, it works like a charm for us even though we passively split the download 3 ways. You might want to try it before you invest $$$ in a rotor.

Us too. It can be totally clear, sun shining, no breeze and no sound of airplanes, yet suddenly the signal strength starts fluctuating wildly and we get drop outs or even short episodes of "no signal" blank screens. Since it most often happens at about the same time of day for a particular station, I suspect it may be aircraft activity from BWI and/or national relatively close to the transmitting tower and too far from the house to hear anything. Of course there's lots of helicopter traffic in the close-in DC area. As you say, it usually happens at a critical moment in whatever program is in progress!

Reply to
Peter

I'll guess that you had to chase the tuning up the band because the superregenerative oscillator in the Hallicrafters was drifting as the tubes warmed up the resistors and capacitors in the circuit. I don't know enough to even guess how you were picking up an FM audio signal on an AM receiver unless the transmitter was broadcasting some sort of spurious subharmonic that was amplitude modulated or unless the FM signal and the IF section of the receiver created a beat frequency (analagous to tuning in a single side band audio signal).

Reply to
Peter

Dang, we've got enough DC area posters here to form a local chapter of AHR. I've been in a few other newsgroups that have "met up" with each other, and it's always interesting to put a face to the name. Channel 22 is really the red-headed step child of the DC area, existing out in left field. A friend that lives in Wheaton gets WTOP radio on her phone lines, the towers are so close by. (-:

I've found it's hardly ever a good solution and it's why I'm working with the two aerial/two DVR system that's working fairly well. But since we're in a small valley, I suspect that the extra 10 or 15 feet I'd gain with a chimney mounted antenna would eliminate a lot of the dropouts. I am surprised you get reception with an amp. How long is the run of cable from the aerial to the TV set?

Since that same technology works well to give my whole house good X-10 (the home automation stuff) RF coverage. I got an amplifier, a five way splitter-combiner and mounted five small aerials at each corner of the house with one in the middle. They're not even really aerials, just sections of RG6QS peeled back to reveal the central wire stripped to a length that's allegedly a multiple of the RF wave). Ever since I installed them, I get full coverage from my home automation system throughout the house and several hundred feet away from it. I was also warned about phase distortion, I've seen no evidence of it. In a plaster/lathe house, one aerial just doesn't cut it. Now I have only one "slightly" dead spot right near the furnace underneath the spot where all the ducts diverge. I see no reason why the same technique would not work on the TV antennas. It would certainly be easy enough to try. I guess it's time to get the coax and tools out. I miss not having 22 - ComcASSt dropped it (and WHUT - 19) from their ever-shrinking basic cable lineup. I read somewhere that DC is one of the few places where they have delayed the digital switchover because residents here poll as very price sensitive and likely to leave ComcASSt if force to upgrade to digital.

I also live next to the only multistory building for miles and there's quite an issue with multipath distortion. While it's not so easy to spot with a digital tuner, when I had analog, and a plane flew overhead (we're on the approach to both BWI and Andrews AFB) you could see a second image appear, shift left, then right, then slowly vanish. I only wish digital did something like that and not the "picture gone" or "sound gone" problems I see. Another slight annoyance is that channel surfing is much, much slower as most of the tuners I have take a second or two to "lock" in the channel.

-- Bobby G.

Reply to
Robert Green

Sorry, I don't. I'd try it out at least 10' but I'm just guessing. May even have to mount one higher than the other, but again, I'm not sure. Keep in mind your roof does block some of the signals and it will work better outside. I don't know what would happen with a steel roof!?

Reply to
Tony

I'm sorry if I gave you the impression that I have an amp in my antenna circuit. I thought I would need one, but I don't. I've got the high gain (but unamplified) VHF/UHF joined with the 8 bow-tie array through a reverse splitter feeding a 3 way splitter that serves my master bedroom, den, and kitchen nook. The longest run is to the kitchen nook, probably about 75-100 feet. Except when the gremlins are active, almost all the stations max out the signal strength bar graph on the TVs or are only 1 bar less. I suspect that an amplified splitter might have over-driven the RF front end of the tuners.

Reply to
Peter

My mistake. I meant to write "withOUT an amp." D'oh! I am still surprised you get that strong a signal WITHOUT an amp. My location is at the base of a hill so I suspect that's why without an amp, only get two channels (5 and

14) and even those show only half of the max signal strength. Wheaton's much higher up and closer to the Wisconsin Av. tower complex. That's got to help with getting a strong signal.

On the other hand, where I live, if you're riding a bicycle, you can coast almost a mile from the top of the hill down to my house. It's not good for TV reception and every 10 years or so, there's a rainfall that comes and overflows all the storm drains and flows past my house and into the lowest area around - the park behind my house. The folks who have lived here since they were kids tell me the land behind my house was a local natural spring. The drainage culvert at the low end of the park is several feet across and during the real frog strangling rain we had a few months ago even it turned out not to be wide enough to carry off all the water.

I have it better than my neighbor whose house is right at the T intersection of the major uphill pointing road. She's gotten several feet of water in her basement, even with an oversize sump-pump. Mother Nature can deliver a hell of a lot more water than any sump pump likely to be found in a home. It comes pouring up the basement floor drain (non-sanitary, thank god, so it's only street water, not sewer water) like Old Faithful. I've put in three sump pumps (one's a 12V emergency system) and that barely copes with the flooding of the 100 years storms that seem to be coming every 10 years now. )-:

I was considering putting a waterproof submarine-type hatch over the floor drain but a knowledgeable neighbor said that could cause the entire foundation to lift or crack. Not sure if it's true, but I am sure I don't want to find out. Now that they've relined our storm and sanitary sewer lines, it seems that storm drain flooding has increased. But it could easily be that the severity of the storms and the inches per hour have increased. Soon, I'll be checking Ebay for used mining pumps . . .

From aerials to floods. How's that for thread drift?

-- Bobby G.

Reply to
Robert Green

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