TV Rabbit Ears Are Back: In High-Def, build your own, cheap
The antenna, that relic of the pre-cable age, gets an afterlife thanks to high-definition TV.
This a great thread with pics and a bunch of different designs to build your own DIY HDTV antenna on the cheap. Stick this baby in the attic and away you go. http://www.lumenlab.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=9613&st=0
Good tutorial, you don’t need a lot of technical expertise to build one.
This is my favorite design, made from dollar store components.
Looks almost professional enough to pass the “wife-test” and better for outdoor use than the cardboard and tinfoil reflectors. But if it is in your attic, who cares, use chicken wire.
This site will show what stations are nearby.
http://www.antennaweb.org/aw/Address.aspx
In Pocatello Idaho, (83201) I can easily get KPVI-DT NBC, channel 6-1 and 6-2 but I have trouble getting digital versions of CBS, ABC, and PBS without a large antenna or careful positioning because the transmitters are on the East Butte, about 45 miles away, West of Idaho Falls. A DB2 antenna like this was not able to consistantly bring in the signal, but I was not using an amplifier and I was using a ATI PCHDTV tuner card in a computer. You might want to look at the larger DB4 or DB8 designs, especially if used indoors.
The bowtie design of the DB2-8 is good for the entire UHF spectrum, but won’t work well if the station broadcasts in VHF frequencies.
April 28th, 2008 at 6:30 pm
Wouldn’t this antenna work better if it were center fed and cross polarized? Don’t take me wrong..It is a very nice looking design, but if you look at almost all stacked arrays of this type, they are almost always center fed. I built one very similar to yours, but I used a small metal frame bolted to the rear of the mast and standard window screen as a reflector. It has as much gain as some commercial antennas I have tried, as well as excellent rear rejection from very strong signals.
August 2nd, 2008 at 10:25 am
Bob,
That sounds like a very nice design. Good idea. I have seen a lot of antennas that were center fed and cross polarized and it wouldn’t be interesting to compare.