OT- DTV Antenna?

You could use a combiner or a splitter backwards but they cost you some signal strength. It's the easiest thing to try.

I have a rotator and also a second coax from another antenna leading to a patch panel on the electronics rack. The coax and several other wires come in through a waterproof outdoor electric outlet box with

3/4" plastic threaded pipe passing through the wall. I put a blank cover plate on the box and drilled the bottom for the coax feedthrus. The outdoor coax terminates in push-on F connectors that I unplug and bag before thunderstorms, although the mast is grounded.

It can be done BUT - if you're not very close to the stations [< 50 miles LOS] I wouldn't waste either the money or the time.

DTV signals have less range than Analog provides and - in fringe areas - suffer far more than Analog from any kind of disturbance.

Part of the reason is that only channels 8-13 remain at their current VHF frequencies while the rest become UHF and if you have troubles receiving over-the-air UHF Analog signals you'll have real problems with the DTV signals.

If you're close enough to the transmitter(s) then you might even want to consider an omni-directional antenna and save yourself a bit of expense.

a cheap antenna is less directional - try just pointing it half way in between - I use an antenna but I am in a strong signal area and most signals come from a few mountains to the east of me.

you can also just parallel the 300 ohm outputs of two antennas (that will give you 75 ohms) - it will probably work pretty well - it's not the proper theoretic answer, but it's quick, cheap and generally effective

A combiner is possible, in theory. Central antenna systems on apartment houses use these, but they are going to be expensive, and have to be hand-adjusted to set the right frequencies to mix. But, run two cables down to by the TV and use a selector switch. That will be cheap.

The problem with a simple combiner is that the off-axis antenna still picks up the freq of the station it is not pointed at, and whenever a plane goes by, it reflects a portion of the signal into that antenna, with several miles of path delay. That is caused multipath. If you just mix this with the direct antenna, you will get a mess, I think.

Jon

Go to antennaweb.org and plug in your zip code. They will tell you whether you will need a directional antenna. It looks like St. Louis dtv will all be in the uhf . If you're getting stuff from Monkey's Eyebrow, I don't know. I didn't check. I am not an expert, but everything I have read says that using two antennas is just a mess unless you separate them completely.

Paul K. Dickman

Yes. I have plenty of signal strength to spare, so the loss through a combiner (a splitter connected backwards) isn't a problem. I use directional antennas mainly to reject multipath distortion. Take a look at

to get an idea of directions and signal strengths for stations around you.

If you live close enough to the stations, try rabbit ears. If you get occasional drop-outs due to multipath, you may need to step up to a directional antenna or two if your stations are separated by a significant angle. The increase in gain with a good directional antenna will help overcome the loss in a combiner. If you are a do it yourselfer, you might want to take a crack at building your own UHF antenna(s):

They sell omni-directional antenna for HD. I have one on my plasma for when the storms get bad or the dish software sucks. We just went through a week or so of bad versions to download. I can only get 1 station, but heck - better than not. It uses the antenna port that isn't normally used on a digital TV.

Many large antenna have a frontal lobe that is strong and rear pointing weaker receiving lobes. The lobes indicate signal gain. So a single one pointing to the far antenna and the back side points to the local strong one.

The one you have might be just fine.

Yea - on the local stations. We should have Houston, but get Tyler. There is a local station in town but we don't get it. The Tyler station owns it...

We live just beyond good Radar coverage as well.

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