CB antenna into tv antenna

danristheman

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Original poster
Jan 25, 2011
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Can you receive OTA signal on a CB antenna. I seen something that you can connect your tv to a cb radio antenna. Anyone chime in on this?
 
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If you are close to a strong station, just about anything metal will work. :D
Anything at a distance the answer is no.
CB antennas are designed for a different frequency(~27MHz) than OTA TV.
CB Antennas are designed for 50 Ohm coax not 75.
CB Antennas are Vertically polarized(99% are anyway). Antennas on the TV tower are horizontally polarized.

Any of the the three things above will attenuate your signal, some way more so than others. Guess what happens when you add all three together?

....then add in the fact that most CB antennas are junk, as they try to make them as small as possible. Some so much so, that they are effectively a "radiating" dummy load of sorts.
 
Give it a try, you might pick up a local TV station at the lower end of the TV band but don't expect much. CB antennas are designed for the 27 MHz band, nowhere near where TV stations are located.

I tried my discone antenna for OTA and was surprised to get some TV channels with it. Let us know how you made out, knowledge is power.
 
I had a RS mobile CB antenna that was designed to supply the FM/AM radio as well. I also split that off to serve my scanner. :) But I'll bet the device to share the CB antenna with the TV was probably for the analogue days.
 
I had seen something for sale at a shop to connect cb antenna to a tv. When the antenna was connected to a side mirror on a semi.
 
I played with this a few years back. It is possible, but not very fruitful.

I used a Jo-Gun 6+6 Star Series (25ft boom) that I had customized the sloping elements to horizontal. (Verticals left as original). An antenna selector box gave me choice of vertical, horizontal, and combined. Used a 1-1.2 balun (IIRC) and Kenwood auto antenna tuner for matching. Built a simple shielded case that linked PL259 connector to RG6 connector.

Due to harmonic freqs, I was able to receive quite a bit of signals... but it never out-performed my old log-periodic tv antenna for daily tv viewing. :( I did pick up some extreme tv skip at times though. UHF gave better results than VHF IIRC. Not sure if I ever tried it except on analogue... but freq is freq. No such thing as an HDTV antenna. There will be no such thing as an ATSC 3.0 antenna either... but just wait for the atsc 3.0 advertising to begin.

It isn't hard to build your own tv antenna for UHF. (VHF is more complex due to size) Personally I prefer a Yagi, but the bowtie "whisker" type are easier to build. Many examples on Youtube. Can make the Whiskers with metal coat hangers... if you can find them anywhere.

Yeah...I was bored to do all that. lol

You'd be surprised what you can receive with an old metal box spring hung on a tree limb. lol. But I wouldn't want to depend on it....

Edit: My beautiful 'Whisker"antenna examples that I worked so hard on posted as a mess so I removed them.

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