HDTV Not

[billroper]

In my continuing efforts to get HDTV in, I picked up an "amplified" antenna at Home Depot. It works possibly less well than the antenna that I've already got and will be going back there tomorrow. I'm starting to think that a rooftop antenna will be required.

Comments

[rinioth.livejournal.com]

Speaking as a Radio Ham:

Have you looked at the cable that connects the antenna to the TV equipment? Most domestic antenna cable sucks bigtime and is likely to wipe out any improvement that better antennas give you. You may also find that your old antenna will work better if you clean up all the terminals, contact area and metal-to-metal joints on it. I'm presuming here that it is the correct antenna for the job (in terms of polarisation and frequency/band match).

Over here very few people have indoor antennas, most are fitted to the chimney stacks and have direct line of sight to the transmitter.

[billroper]

Thanks for the advice. I'm basically just using the very short run of cable that's built into the indoor antennas, so it doesn't have much room to attenuate the signal.

The real problem is that I'm just a bit too far from the broadcast towers to get reliable reception with an indoor antenna. A rooftop antenna will work, I'm pretty sure, but that's a bit of an installation problem. And I'll need to finish negotiations with daisy_knotwise before doing that. (Also, hire an installer. No way I'm going up on that ladder!)

[(Anonymous)]

There is no substitute for a full-sized antenna looking at the tower.

Do it right, put some metal in the air. Trust me on this.

Sam Winolj