Technical > Home Improvement > Hopeless or possible? HDTV OTA

I think you can probably bring that station down with the a-fore-mentioned high gain antenna TheTechGuru posted.

BUT - if you try to use this combination for any of your closer stations, you're going to overload the front end of your tuner section and probably won't have much to work with to get a station (too much signal is just as bad as not enough).

@Jack - Water and land have very different signal propagation characteristics - the two really can't be compared.

If you wanna get really freaky:

Find a preamp with 300-ohm input. Then get some of the old school twin lead cable to run from the antenna to the pre-amp. Skip the balun all together. Switch to 75-ohm coax after the preamp on the mast.

Twin lead has some of the best signal interference rejection out there.

You *have* to use stand offs though. The cable can't come anywhere near your mast.

Careful with the extra antennas. Those can induce multipath issues. But most modern tuners are pretty well equipped to handle that kind of thing now.

Well, from all the info from you guys, what I might do is buy the 91XG for the far away stations, and a cheaper smaller UHF/VHF antenna for the local stations. They are basicall 90 degrees apart in direction, so instead of buying a motor, I'd just install two antennas pointed in two directions, and the signal strenght issue would be resolved.

I'm going to shop for where to buy them at the best price, and start reading up on baluns, pre-amps, and combining the two antennas.

If you wanna get really freaky:

Find a preamp with 300-ohm input. Then get some of the old school twin lead cable to run from the antenna to the pre-amp. Skip the balun all together. Switch to 75-ohm coax after the preamp on the mast.

Twin lead has some of the best signal interference rejection out there.

You *have* to use stand offs though. The cable can't come anywhere near your mast.

Careful with the extra antennas. Those can induce multipath issues. But most modern tuners are pretty well equipped to handle that kind of thing now.

That is almost exactly what I have done (two antennas at 90 degree angle to each other). Ideally those antennas should be spaced 2 * wavelength apart to prevent them from effecting each other in unpredictable ways.

That is usually not a problem for the short wavelength of UHF but the wavelength for VHF band III (VHF-Hi) is up to 1.7 meters (VHF band I or VHF-Lo would be up to 6 meters!).

I solved this by having one antenna on a roof antenna mast while the other antenna is on a chimney mount.

Don't sweat it too much if you can't separate them that far, just know that for best results you maintain some distance between them.

The other advise I read while planning my setup was to keep the length of the antenna cable from each antenna to the splitter/combiner exactly the same length (to keep signals arriving on both antennas in phase).

What are you receiving on VHF?

Buy both and return one?

TechGuru recommended directionals yagis.
Leibold recommended multi elements.

trees DO matter !

I get better signal in the winter months (no leaves in the trees).

While I don't advocate cutting down the tree I do agree on avoiding the tree in the straight line between antenna and transmitter. Consider a different location for the antenna mast or using a taller one.