Antennas location comparison for receiving DTV ? FM ?

[eccerr0r]

Anyone had experience with "attic" vs "rooftop" vs "rabbit ears" vs "folded dipole in house" antennas?

How much of an improvement would it seem going from one to another? For the attic and rooftop antennas, does having motorized rotation help a lot?

Homemade antennas?

I have a plywood/asphalt roof and wonder if an attic antenna would do wonders, for AM? FM? or DTV?

[bluto]

Re: Antennas location comparison for receiving DTV ? FM ?

I have recently mastered the DIY antenna dance for my MATV home setup. It is no longer a master antenna, but an antenna farm in my attic! Previously I had a single Monoprice HDA-5700 amplified antenna running into a 8 way amplified splitter and daisy chained into another 8 way amplified splitter. This fed my two TiVos, various TVs and two FM tuners in the house. That was the old setup...

The new setup: 3 Gray-Hoverman DIY antennas (1st picture). I made three of these using 10 GA copper wire and a 300ohm to 75ohm matching transformer to connect the feed line.

http://www.diytvantennas.com/sbgh.php (link down, so I am posting the plan picture)

I found that I got better performance with an antenna connected connected directly to each of my two TiVo's tuners. If I tried using one antenna and running it through the amplifier, the amplification noise would kill the signal for some of the LP channels in my area. But by giving each TiVo a straight shot to its own antenna, I could pull in the most channels. The third antenna feeds just one of the original 8 way splitters to feed the rest of the TVs in the house.

The third picture is the FM loop antenna that I made. Information on that is here:

https://fmdxing.wordpress.com/2014/0...-for-about-20/

I made the FM antenna loop with a 10' piece of 1/4" copper tubing connected to a random coil of RG-59 that I had laying around that had a solid copper center conductor and copper braid. I drilled a small hole through each end of the copper tubing. Per the instructions, the center conductor is soldered to one end of the tubing and the braid is soldered to the other end. I use a 2-way splitter to connect the antenna to my whole house FM tuner and my home theater receiver.

In the pictures you can see all the cables i ran from my basement to the attic. When I put those in, I was able to retrofit 6 1-inch smurf tubes from basement to attic and had two of them as unused spares. This made dropping in a couple more coax lines to the attic a breeze.

Overall, I couldn't be happier with the performance of my home-made antennas. It was a fun project in which I was able to use up some of the random bits of wire that I had been hoarding. I hope this helps you!

[eccerr0r]

Re: Antennas location comparison for receiving DTV ? FM ?

Interesting. Looks like that may have to be an option.

I was wondering about those multi-pole Yagi rooftop antennas, comparing rooftop vs under roof and how much attenuation difference can be seen. At least it looks like that I might have to get rid of the splitters if possible.

Currently I'm trying to run a DTV converter box and my HTPC that has two capture cards. The two capture cards seems to have different sensitivities and MythTV seems to randomly pick between the cards, sometimes picking the weaker card/antenna when the stronger card is available. Ideally both can pick up signals more strongly...

[bluto]

Re: Antennas location comparison for receiving DTV ? FM ?

I suppose it mainly depends on your location. If you are in a suburban area and have no trouble getting the main networks and are mainly trying to improve reception on weaker or outlying channels, then more, cheaper antennas in the attic/fewer splitters is IMHO the better approach.

If you are in a rural setting and struggling to get the main networks, then a good rooftop antenna and possibly a rotator is probably in order.

[eccerr0r]

Re: Antennas location comparison for receiving DTV ? FM ?

As probably can be inferred, I'm trying to get out of a rooftop installation. And yes I'm somewhat in a rural setting so to speak, though it is a suburb, I'm a bit too far away from most networks. The strongest network station is actually on a repeater, else everything is very weak. Thes stations are however mainly in the same direction so likely a rotator isn't absolutely necessary.