I have an old antenna in the attic. When i moved into my house i hooked it up to the tv. It works ok. Some channels dont come in perfect some of the time. I've tried adjusting it w/ no luck. I see these new style antennas for sale on line.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX SPAM?
Antennas come in all flavors. The technology is old.
I'm suspicious of the stats for the "new", 35 dB is very high. Built in preamp?
Check what kind of antenna you need:
We don't know what the old style is that you refer to. You don't describe it.
Take a look at
One thing the one in the ad has is a rotor. I have had one with a rotor and I found it a pain in the neck. I just picked the best overall direction and I stayed with that. IF the rotors gave good feedback, so I could tell which way they were pointed for a station that gave the best signal, that would be one thing, but they give estmates at best, afaict. Your ad doesn't go into that so it's no better than the others, I would think.
They don't call their antenna a digital antenna. I'll give them credit for that (or they're repeating what is on the box and they got these antennas out of a warehouse where they have been for 5 or more years.) There is nothing different about a digital and an analog antenna. However becuase of the deficiencies of digital, one may need a better antenna.
I used to use a 6 foot piece of single strand wire, and I got all the local digital stations, but I wanted to get the DC station, 40 miles away, so I bought the biggest 7 to 86 antenna I thought would fit in my attic.
It's pointed at DC and it too gets Baltimore but with the same interruptions at times.
I plan to buy a second omnidirectional one, and use a splitter (combiner) to connect both to my DVDR, etc. Also probably an amplifier, although solid signal sells so many I don't know which one. I haven't found a good web page about that so I have been meaning to call them for advice.
Even better than antennaweb imo is TVfool.com It will tell you all the stations in your area, what channel they are broadcasting on, from what direction and from how far away. Few tv stations use channels 2 to 6, even if you tune your tv to 2 or 6, they are really on another frequency. In all but a very few areas of the US there is at least one major station that uses at least one channel 7 to 13, so you will need high-VHF. If you don't have even one channel bellow 14, you can get a UHF only antenna.
If you don't need channels 2 to 6, you don't need an antenna with the really big elements. I think the longest on mine are 3 or 4 feet, because I have no stations below channel 7.
I just noticed the dimensions.
Dimensions: 22.8" x 17.7" x 25.8"
I'm not sure which dimension refers to what, but all but one of the elements are smaller than the maximum in the same direction. They are folded over, but I'm not sure that's good. Let's assume it's not bad. It still leaves those elements at about 3/2 the dimension, ad most 38", and 5 of the 6 of them are the same size. (or 7. One or two things are reflectors)
The antennas they have been selling for 60 years have elements of different lengths because there are channels of different wavelengths.
The better antenanas have more elements, each of a different length.
Let's assume it could be bad to have the element folded over. It could be because the same tv signal will induce a current in one direction in one half of the element and in the opposite direction in the ohter half of the element. Or maybe not, but it seems that way to me.
Ah, but it probably has an amplifier. It's much better to have a strong signal from the antenna, than a weak signal that is amplified. Amplifiers are recommended when there is a long distance from the antenna to the tv. Of course maybe that used to be more true, because the antenna would amplify the "noise" too. Now most noise is filtered out in the process of digital detection. Maybe. I'm no techie.
That said, I'm dissatisfied with my big antenna and I'm going to buy an amplifier on the hopesw that it will help.
The first week the antenna was in the attic, I got channel 26, and channels 30.1 to 30.5. Teh channels 30 are even farther from me than DC, but I hven't gotten them again except in the middle of the night. So I do have a signal but maybe it is too weak.
"Any Color Code - This large directional antenna can be used in any color code specified on AntennaWeb.org "
Yeah, you can use it, but will it work? I wish they had phrased this differently, or maybe they knew exactdly what they were doing and phrased it just so so they couldn't be charged with lying.
I forget what the 7th color is but if this antenna will bring in signals from that range, I'll eat my hat.
This is all they say about tmiles.
"This long range digital outdoor HD TV antenna has been known to pick up stations that are around 150 miles away. We have had customers call and tell us how happy they were with their antenna because they were able to pick up stations up to 150 miles away. We have even had customers tell us they were able to pick up US broadcasts from Canada. So we are very confident that this antenna will work for you."
Baloney. Because of the curvature of the earth, no one can get tv from
150 miles away unles somewhere there is a transmitting antenna many times higher than any near you. They amaybe talking about people who live 150 miles from the CN Tower, which is the 3rd highest tower (that is, including tall buildings) in the world, 1815 feet. Do you live within 150 miles of Toronto? If not, forget it.It's getting late for me, butyou can check this out.
I'm in the same area and in the same boat and live in the shadow of a hill that obscures the line of sight with the big TV antenna complex near the Sears near Tenleytown. The problem I had with the rotor is that my DVR has no way to rotate the aerial to the proper direction for the channel I want to record. Since I have two DVRs, I ended up putting two antennas in the attic: one optimized for DC and the other for Baltimore. I segregate my recording based on that. Stations coming from Baltimore go to DVR one, stations from Washington, DVR two. Later this year, I am going to mount a tall mast on the chimney and put up the rotor again, with the largest aerial I can find to pull in the stations like 22 that broadcast from Annapolis, 90 degrees away from Baltimore or Washington and some other transmitters that aren't located with the other major towers. )-:
I still get dropouts, though, from overhead planes, rain clouds and elves. (IOU, I am not sure what causes them, but I do know they proliferate at the ends of programs where they're saying "Of course, the killer had to be - silence, splotches, more silence and finally the picture returns). As fuzzy as analog was, I don't remember losing key parts of the transmission they way I do with digital. I've also discovered that there's an incredible variation in tuners. The Polaroid DVR doesn't get half the channels that a new, no name 7" portable can pull in off the same aerial. Probably a 7 year difference in date of manufacture, though. I have noticed that even my friends with FIOS have problems in rainstorms because the weather affects the satellite transmissions from orbit to the FIOS dishes.
Still, I'm happy with basic cable, OTA HD and Netflix. And having a DVR with a commercial skip button. I don't think I could watch TV anymore without one.
-- Bobby G.
I also need to replace what is left of my rooftop antenna, but have been procrastinating it for several years, since it would involve crawlspace time replacing cable runs. So when BigLots had the powered indoor antennas on sale for 20 bucks, I figured 'what the hell', and actually have had surprisingly good results with it. I can't get all the stations I want to get, but I can get the big 4 networks reliably, with a little trial and error turning the camera tripod I have the antenna sitting on.
(No, no SWMBO lives here. Why do you ask?)
f different wavelengths.
That's a LPDA (log periodic dipole array).
A popular choice for UHF are bow tie.
This antenna has large diameter closed loop elements which leads to a wide frequency range.
That won't work well on VHF as the elements, particularly in the low range are small compared with the wavelength. Ditto on the reflector which becomes smaller than a wavelength.
That is my take also.
Note if you take the number of elements and do a rough gain calculation, the numbers don't add up to all antenna gain. My rough guess is about 8 dB or so.
Might need to get it out of the attic.
Jeff (used to hold a ham license, still remember something.... or part of something!)
IF IT IS A ROOF TOP OR EXTERIOR MODEL YOU CAN JUST ADD AN INLINE SIGNAL BOOSTER TO YOUR EXISTING ANTENNA THE MORE DB GAIN THE BETTER AN ANTENNA ROTOR PLUS THE AMP WILL KICK BUT BECAUSE YOU CAN ROTATE THE ARRAY AND HONE IN THE SIGNAL
INTERIOR RABBIT EARS WITH OUT AMPLIFICATION ARE INSUFFICIENT THOUGH SOMEWHAT EFFECTIVE DEPENDING ON SIGNAL STRENGTH IN YOUR AREA AND HOME
IAP
It all depends on your situation. If that one is expensive it probably isn't worth it. I have 2 antennas in the attic. I have a largish yagi that pulls in the main local channels just great. They are all in about the same direction. But it does a poor job on channels to the side. So I made up one with a folded dipole vhf antenna and a bowtie uhf antenna. I mounted them in the attic with the folded dipole pointed at the main stations and the bowtie pointed at 90 degrees, so it could pick up the college station at Claremore. That is about 35 miles away, and it comes in fine. I do get an occasional drop out, which I suspect is a plane flying through the pattern. The folded dipole pointed at the major channels gets a good signal, but has more drop outs. I suspect that is because the signal path is right over a busy freeway, and trucks stick up high enough to cause reflections. You may have some or all of these conditions.
I have cable so I didn't really need these, but I wanted to be able to get the signal off the air for bad times when the cable might be down (bad weather and such). Then I wanted the Claremore station because at the time they were showing Classic Arts Showcase 24 hours a day on the sub channel.
Bill
Not necessarily true. If you live on a hilltop 300' higher than the average terrain around you, you have greatly increased your line of sight distance to the horizon. Therefore you could pick up stations your friends below you could not receive. That is why these antenna range sales pitches do not tell you what the conditions were.
Baltimore or Washington.
They never do, do they?
Very clever. I haven't tried this yet but someone on sci.electronics;.repair said one could use a splitter (combiner, same thing) to connect both antennas together, implying that there would be no problem interactino. No one contradicted him but I never asked further. I figured I would try it, so there wasn't much point to discussing it. But I havent' got the omni-directional antenna yet. Still, I do have that 6 or 8 foot wire.
Dropout is the word! Mine are all elves. I've never seen a reason.
I've been pretty lucky. It usually comes back when they're on the same jeopardy clue, or it drops out during commericals or during part of the news I'm not interested in.
But a week ago, I missed the last 5 minutes of Alfred Hitchcock. I went to zap2it.com , but it only gave a generic description, good for all episodes. I was going to search on the description.
So I looked for alfred hitchock full episodes and got several hits. I thought I would have to start watching each, but they each had one still shot from the given show, and mine had the back of a nurse's head with a guy facing her whom I actually recognized from the show. I rarely recognize anyone. So it took only a couple minutes to find the show, and I let it play in the background until I got to the last 5 minutes. It ended just like I remembered from 45 years ago!
Right. The arrogance with which they asserted that it woudl be better than analog.
Very interesting. Thanks. I noticed this years ago with analog tvs, and also with radios, that famous brand doesn't make much difference
I didn't know they made those. A year or two before the switch, a friend gave me a VCR with commerical skip, but it turned out the whole machine didn't work. I wonder if I was supposed to know that. Anyhoe I didnt' get it fixed before the switch. I still plan to connect a VCR to watch movies I bought for a dollar and never watched, and things I recorded, but there's no rush.
Everyone says that, but I just don't want to do it. Plus I'm very close to having all I can reasonably expect. There are a cou amplifier or the
I had a novice license for a year in 1960, but didn't have to know much to get that. I was trying to learn what I need for a general license, but couldn't get my code speed up anyhow, so I didn't work much on the theory.
But about 4 years ago I got a license, general I think. No more code requirement, and the tech stuff is mostly about antennas and safety, I guess since few people build their own oscillators anymore.
Okay. My error. But you could get the same results in this unusual situation with any good antenna, maybe any antenna at all.
While we're talking about stuff like this.
Long ago when I was in high school I had a Hallicrafters reciever, 4 bands from ?? the table radio band up to shortwave.
And I was listening to the sound from one of the tv stations (even the radio was AM and tv sound is supposed to be FM, but it matched the sound coming from our tv on one channel) and every couple minutes I would have to tune the radio higher. This went on for 40 minutes or more, with me eventually tuning the radio much higher than it was, so high I went off the end of the band.
I think there was a higher band so I started at the low end of that, but couldn't find the same station.
What the heck was going on?
I have to take time to read this. It looks complicated.
It is, however, the first thing I've read that at all addresses what I asked about elsewhere, about waves received by elements that bend and go in the oppoosite directino, about the waves cancelling each other out.
Well, actually they refer to this in a much different context, iiuc, but I'm please that it says anything at all. I only have a little bit of theory and a tiny bit of practice, and when I get an idea, I'm glad to see it's not crazy.
Nonessential reading: Question: How does the energy collected by the directors get to the cable? Answer: It is re-radiated to the driven element as normal radio waves.
Question: Why don?t the re-radiated waves go backward or laterally? Answer: Because all the directors cancel each other in those directions.
Question: Why don?t these re-radiated waves prevent the diffraction of incident waves inward toward the boom? Answer: Because the phase of the re-radiated waves has been changed by about 90 degrees, so they neither subtract nor add to the incident waves.
Question: How did the director currents get changed by 90 degrees? Short answer: The element lengths control this. The director currents are shifted -90 degrees while the reflector current is shifted +90 degrees.
Long answer: This graph shows how the current induced in a rod is affected by the length of the rod. The phase changes quickly with a small change in element ....
Not sure what you mean here. Are you talking about the antenna the OP brought up. It does have an amp after all.
If you're not talking about that, pelase explain a little.
Could you have been picking up the IF harmonics from the TV itself? Did your reception go away when the TV was off?
TDD
Would the IF increase in frequency like that, maybe as the tv got warmer. But before you answer look at my next answer.
I think the tv wasn't on when I started. My older brother never watched tv and I don't think my mother or I was until the signal sounded like a tv show and I turned the tv on.
Maybe one of our next-door neigbhors' tvs? The lots were 100 feet wide so his tv was 100 feet away more or less. The tv was in t he middle of the house, about 40 feet from one property line and 60 feet from the other.
Here're my three cents - until you read a review of that antenna where someone puts it through its paces against a better known model, and shows that it does a good job, you should probably avoid it.
Here's a place that has been in business quite a while, and provides good customer support. They also put up a decent amount of technical info about most of their antennas, and have fair shipping prices. I bought a Winegard 9095 ($69 plus ship) from them a while back, and was able to pull in stations from Cincinnati and Columbus here in Dayton, as well as a few from Indiana. Pretty cool pulling in twenty some stations. That was with an amplifier, though, and a lot depends on your tuner. I was getting about 8 fewer stations with another digital tuner.
specs:
BTW, the Channel Master 4251 parabolic antenna is widely viewed as the best UHF antenna ever made. They sold for between $150-$200 new, and were discontinued in 2001. Some info:
I agree - those numbers seem so high that I'm guessing it is just "technospeak" to reel people in, and not realistic. What you need is a graph showing the actual dB gain at various channels. Good manufacturers make those available, so that people can see the actual gain and decide if an antenna is right for them.
Regarding not being able to get a TV station from 150 miles away - it really depends. I live near Dayton, Ohio. While a few years back I had my antenna mounted up above the roof, for the past year or so I had it mounted off the lattice on our front porch. Yes, it was about 10' off the ground. I was able to occasionally pull in stations 50 miles away. One day, in the middle of the night, I was getting in a station from Louisville, Ky. That's right about 150 miles, and it was crystal clear. When I was a kid living near Lima, OH, my dad could use the antenna rotor and pull in a station from Toronto a lot of nights.
Harmonic signals can be weird and caused by lots of unexpected things. The Navy sometimes has problems when a bit of corrosion between two pieces of metal turns into a semiconductor junction and because of all the high power transmitters on board, that corroded metal can turn into a transmitter when the RF from the intentional transmissions hit it. I was repairing a two way radio some years ago when a transistor exhibited some very odd characteristics. It would work fine for DC and audio frequencies but when hit with RF it acted like an inductor and caused interference on other radios. I replaced it with a new one and the two way set worked fine. I've walked around transmitter sites with a field strength meter plus portable receiver and seen some very strange signals pop up when the transmitter was operating.
TDD
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.