Recent content by dish_in_the_sky

I'm working on one... I too found the double bay Gray-Hoverman antenna design. I'm making mine out of 12 AWG copper wire for the driven elements and chicken wire for the screen. With three small kids and some house remodeling, it's going slow, but I'll get there. I already have a...

AC wiring antenna 1. This is similar to a random-length wire antenna of many wavelengths. It's performance is very unpredictable and may be affected by people walking around the room or by other moving objects or pets. 2. Do consider safety. A wire stuck in the coaxial jack and wrapped...

Antennas, preamp gain and picture distortion Antennas: Other posters here are correct. Use the best antenna you can. ALL TV antennas are HD-compatible. More antenna is preferable to a preamp or an amplified antenna. Good high-gain antennas are large, period. However, UHF antennas are...

Try a 2- 4- or 8-bay antenna, or Hoverman (Google Gray-Hoverman for details) These antennas have screens on the back. If the metal is behind the screen, or parallel to it if the antenna is facing away from it, then the metal will not seriously affect reception. However, nearby metal can...

Revisiting the coax I believe our friend was right when he bailed on this idea. It's solvable, but not easily and not cheaply. Ladder line: How do you control losses when the spacers get wet in the rain? About any line used, but especially coax: Animals may chew on it! It seems I...

This is possible, but expensive. Use RG-11 cable, 1 CM-7777 preamp (2-2.7 dB NF) ~$60 at the antenna, and 5 MCM Electronics 5-950 MHz 10 dB (4 dB NF) ~$15 ea. in-line amps (DC passive) every 400 feet down the line. You might get 800' from the CM7777 to the 1st line amp. You'll need ~15V at...

Enjoy and good luck! There's MANY variables involved when trying to get distant OTA stations. No guarantees. Enjoy watching... that's what it's for. Good luck getting NBC.

Glad to be of help... Let me know what I missed so I can do better next time. I'm an RF engineer, no experience in receivers, but read up on OTA TV DXing. Any advice from those more knowledgeable is appreciated and I will use it to give better advice, as well as use it for my own project...

Weak signal reception He's right... Get the best antenna, high, in the clear line-of-sight path to the station, good preamp and coax. Now comes the fine-tuning: 1. The preamp must be at the antenna, with as little loss between the antenna connection and preamp as possible. Even 1/2...

Anybody got a crane???? You'll need one to install it! And a VERY beefy roof!:D

Vareiable propagation on fringe Channel 6 Ch 6 is at ~80 MHz. Digital receoption has a "cliff effect" which may mean your signal strength only changes by 1 dB in your situation to have the effect yopu observe. Here are several possibilities for your situation, both tropospheric...

OTA reception... I'd recomment getting the antenna outside, above the roof. You'll lose significant signal (3-15 dB) in an attic. The wide variation in loss is due to many variables involved, from multipath to frequency-dependent RF loos to detuning wires, etc fount in an attic, to water...

CCTV4 still up on G3... as of Apr 25th.... Wife's happy! Husband's happy :-) One day at a time... FTA is never guaranteed. One of these days I'll replace the intermittent LNBF.:cool:

Antennas can be combined ONLY under LIMITED conditions: For ALL frequencies of interest, they must match in phase and amplitude. This is done by people who know radio frequency engineering well, and will hurt performance if you don't kno what you're doing. This makes your attempt very...

HD PQ vs signal strength Above a certain bit error rate (BER) threshold, there is almost NO EFFECT on PQ from increasing the signal quality (which reduces the BER.) At or near that threshold, small changes in BER can have noticeable effects on PQ. In practice, this BER threshold VARIES...