Over-the-Air Antennas: Which are the Best?

This is very topical for me: just discontinued our cable about a month back. I've subscribed to cable since the '70's. Thought it would be a bigger deal, a withdrawal. What with streaming stuff from my pc, youtube, apple tv, Netflix and so on, it was sort of a non event. We'd been watching cable less and less.

That said, I missed the news. And then there was the cable rep's final words: "are you going to miss hockey?...". That was a low blow. Anyway, about week after cutting the cord I started getting a little itchy, looked up DIY aerial info. Here's a good site for that:

Home : DIY TV Antennas

I made the Grey-Hoverman antenna in the above. I recovered a few miles of our coax cable running 'round the house, and tried positioning it higher and higher. But ultimately found I couldn't beat the initial position, just propped up on a tower speaker and leaned against a wall, directly adjacent to our tv, go figure.

Orientation was quite important, virtually all our tunable stations are coming from nearby Mt Seymour, all the same direction. One other is from up the valley, coincidentally 180 deg away, which worked out perfect.

I was completely blown away by the quality: the signal is high def digital, better than cable since it is uncompressed. The one thing I miss is our PVR time shifting, and obviously the myriad of specialty channels, but maybe that's a blessing in disguise. We're pulling in 8 channels, but one's in French (and good programming too, maybe polish up on high school French), there's 2 more that are sort of sister stations, a multi-cultural mix, and one of those is a pretty spotty reception. But the rest are solid, high def signals, excellent.

And Saturday night, watched the Canucks in High Def.

Here's a link to general Over the Air tv info:

Guide to Vancouver Life without Cable TV

And (linked above), here's an indispensable site for finding out what signals are in your area:

TV Fool

And here's the Grey-Hoverman antenna I made up. It's an adaption of the one in the first link above. I had some scrap aluminum rods from some old vertical venetian blinds. Was meaning to take it to the recyclers, but it came in handy. The hardwood center piece was from a crappy old upholstered couch I demolished some years back. And the zip ties and the resister thingy were kicking around in my electrical carton.



The cross piece is recessed in, to keep from skewing the rods. The space between the rods is quite critical, according to the instruction. I just lucked out with that 1.5" wide piece of hardwood. Also, I dimpled the hardwood along the edges, where the rods land, to keep them stabilized. There's short runs of appliance wire from the middle of the rods to the screws. I did trim the zip ties later.

You might want to try the rudimentary "coat hanger" aerial in the first DIY antenna link, first. It's very quick to make, and will be an eye opener. For me it pulled in about 3 channels, then the one above yielded eight. You just run coax from that resister thingy to the set.

 

Haven't tried an HD antenna yet, but I probably just go to Amazon to see reviews

 

Can you use an outdoor antenna?

I cut cable 29 years ago, after the promised expansion to more than a half dozen channels was delayed indefinitely, the useful Canadian channel was replaced by garbage from Tacoma, and a retroactive rate increase was applied. For the rest of the analog era, I used just a standard FM dipole or indoor UHF loop or bowtie.

Now I use outdoor UHF multibay bowties. No amplification, but separate antennas for the TV and PVR to avoid splitter loss on the weakest channels. Samples here for 2-bay and 4-bay (mine are older models predating the 'digital' label price hikes). 8-bay and 16-bay are available for deep fringe areas, but don't seem to add much more gain. 4-bay has been sufficient for my dad's fringe area for a weak but direct line-of-sight translator station and some stronger but slightly over the horizon stations.

One important local station stayed on the VHF band, but is close enough that my UHF-only antennas still get enough signal.

To check what stations you should be receiving, at what signal strengths or how much antenna gain is needed, check out these sites: TV Fool and AntennaWeb.

 

If a homeowners association or condo rules or local government or landlord tells you that you can't, the FCC says that they are wrong. Restrictions have to be reasonable, and not completely prevent you from mounting one outside.

These antennas can also be mounted inside an attic or other space.

I believe the homebrew device pictured in Mendel's post is really a bowtie variant, flat enough to be mounted on an inside wall. Other DIY variants can be found on the web.

 

Any "outdoor" antenna can still be used indoors. In the living space (funky but who cares) or in an attic if practical. I hooked ours up to a LONG coax cable and wandered around various upstairs bedrooms with no improvement, often worse. Maybe due to longer coax??

Here's where it ended up, tv's in lower right third of pic, very convenient.

(Hmm, ability to post pics with iphone appears to be broken. Bear with me...)

Ok, here we go, I hope:

 

Long line means more signal loss in the line, which may interfere with finding the best location. And some types of coax are lossier than others, e.g. RG-59 has more loss than RG-6.

 

The diy one is what I use mounted and aimed in the attic. My old boy scout compass came in handy for aiming using one of the sites listed above. Perfect ota reception from Knoxville 25 miles away.

 

Can't you get a free-to-air PVR? They're very common here and in Britain, and the cheapest ones only cost about $100 (although one with a comprehensible user interface will cost a fair bit more).

Ummm.............. Does this mean something different in Canada to what it means in Australia?



Anyway, other than sharing your "specialty" viewing habits (I'm surprised you're able to type, given the risk of carpal tunnel syndrome inherent in specialty TV viewing), you put a lot of effort into writing that post. It was incredibly informative and useful. Thank you.

 

I use the Windows Media Center that came with Win7 on a separate laptop, and a USB tuner stick. Never having had a Tivo or cable PVR, I don't know what features I may be missing.

If you have an old antenna that works, then there is no need to 'upgrade' to a digital or HD antenna. With respect to receiving the over-the-air radio signal, there is no electrical difference, only a pricing and marketing difference.

Separate from the analog-digital non-difference, some old installations with VHF-only or mixed VHF-UHF antennas might benefit from switching to a UHF-only antenna. Most (but not all) VHF transmitters shifted to UHF during the digital conversion.

 

I use an old, old, old outdoor antenna on my Chimney. It's big and the birds like it. It points NNE, and can receive 45 stations up to 50+ miles away, and most come in at 720p/1080i.

My house sits at over 630 feet above sea level, which is much higher than all of the major broadcasting stations I pick up.

 

fuzzy, I've heard about using win media centre as a pvr, was leaning towards that. Got stalled researching the tuner needed, plus that the PC is kitty corner across the house, lol. For the amount of over the air viewing we're doing, might just let go.

Idly wonder if I could wifi the signal back and forth, doing that already with air video an iTunes.

 

Here are several thoughts from ex-EE:
- the higher above ground is your antenna, the more power you will receive
- antenna size and construction will depend on the frequency band, so start with finding out on what frequencies is your broadcast
- but losses in a long cable can be substantial, in this case you need antenna with electronic amplifier which is at the far end of the cable. Cable itself can be used to supply power to amplifier.
- directional antennas will have a highest gain, omnidirectional - the lowest. There is no way around that.
- indoor antenna with short cable and electronic amplifier is only beneficial if it's transistor has lower noise characteristics than the first transistor in the TV set, and those are usually pretty good.
- move the antenna position around to find the best signal - position is sometimes critical
Good luck
Alex

 

I have the Hauppauge 950Q, single channel. But there are numerous other products. At times a 2 channel receiver would be helpful.

If you can transfer programs from the PC to the TV over wifi, then consider making a second antenna to mount at the PC, and install the tuner there.

For the amplifier, he means that it must be at or near the antenna end of the cable, not the tuner end.

As for local broadcast frequencies, these can be found at TV Fool. But in many well served markets, the channels will be well scattered across the full modern TV UHF band (trimmed down from the original UHF span, because the highest channels were taken for other uses), so the standard dimensions should be adequate. The only folks likely to benefit from fine tuning to a specific frequency are those in deep fringe locations trying to catch a single weak station, or a few closely spaced stations.

 

No diff for HD?
Holy crap, I just threw out my rabbit ears last week!

Another "hybrid" option you might consider is basic cable...at least on my cable, the local stations come thru as HD even on non-HD service,

 

You can do much better than rabbit ears, regardless of old analog or new digital standards.

 

Lots of people I know have DVB set-top boxes with built-in PVRs which are very simple to use, have twin tuners (which allow you to record two things at once), and usually have built-in signal amplifiers. In Sydney (lots of hills, lots of sandstone, lots of multi-storey buildings), they all work perfectly well with internal or external antennae. Prices in Australia range from about US$ 80 to US$ 400 or so; I'd assume they'd be cheaper in America, as everything is.

Is this not a thing in America?

 

^^^I do not know too many acronyms