I was given an old antenna this weekend at a housewarming party at our new lake house which is in the CEA "blue" zone for TV rerception.One guest said it was a Yagi. It has 2 elliptical (about 60" by 4" shape) side pieces about
2 feet apart on about a 30" main strut.There are also a few 12" single tubes along the strut.When placed in my attic and connected via cable I get perfect Channel 13;good 6,8;fair 12,poor 32,38 and only a faint 4.With rotation,I can get any of them,including 4 to move up to E-Good.Can I buy another antenna and use some type of cable splitter or must I spring for the $70 RShack rotor? I am NOT using an amplifier.Thanks
What is the RShack rotor? I assume this is a device that will turn the antenna based on the channel selected?
Anyway, I find it interesting that the hig UHF channels are poor. Are these channels broadcast from different locations? Here in DFW we have most if not all the local channels broadcast from the same or similar location, and the higher the number the better the reception. Somebody explained it to me from a power and frequency perspective at one time, and I understood it for about
10 minutes before my poor brain gave up.
Two things now, since it is early in the morning and I am generally spewing gibberish. First, go to
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and use this as a tool to see how and what you should get for reception and what kind of antenna should work best for you. It is a vendor site, but I found it informative back when I was trying to work out the local channels dilemma. You can add your address (or just zip code) to get some good info on reception in your area. Second, I see no reason you cannot use two antennas, but I believe your splitter would still be manual. I know there are diplexer's to merge and split satellite and antenna feeds, but don't know about two antenna feeds. However, once you spend all this money for another antenna and splitters/diplexers, perhaps that 70 dollar rotor is not such a bad thing.
Please let us know how this works for you. I have a small low voltage and structured wiring company in the Dallas area (shameless plug;
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and anything like this is a learning experience and tool for me.
In the old days of television, people often had one antenna unit per channel and switched between them, so switches certainly used to exist. I don't know if they shared the same cable, I kind of doubt it. You say "buy another antenna", which assumes you can get one which works as well as the one you have now and only needs to be pointed in one other direction. Is it true that you only need one other direction?
If so, then I can see advantages to getting a second antenna and a switch--for one thing, I can imagine that you can't actually swing your antenna 360 degrees in the attic, and if that is the case you would make a mistake with the rotor sooner or later.
But you won't save a lot of money compared to $70 with the new antenna and switch. In your situation, I would get a rotor if there was room to swing the antenna.
If the transmitters are clustered into one, two, or three (or even four, five, or six) locations you certainly can use separate antennas *with one pointed correctly for each cluster* and combine them. That eliminates the need for the rotor (and rotor wiring) and will also let you watch different channels on different sets if you so wish.
Not exactly, the control is wholly separate from the TV, so if you are watching a channel in one direction, and wish to watch another channel in another direction, you have to adjust the rotator control as well as the TV channel. If you are a sharp nut, you could figure out a way to adjust the rotor based on channels.
Use a coaxial splitter and a two 300 ohm balanced to 75ohm unbalanced transformers (if needed) to combine two antennas.
Ghosting can be a problem if the two antennas are located in different areas of the attic. The best location would be mount one on top of the other with as much vertical separation as possible.
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