Help selecting antenna, options?

gallwapa · 7-Jul-2010, 8:09 AM

http://www.tvfool.com/?option=com_wr...9fbe2ea0e4372c

I currently use cable and haven't used antenna's before. I have newly run RG6 runs from a wiring closet to my television. Currently, I have 1 splitter in place (though I would like to hook up cable modem, HTPC, and 2 TV's. Currently I have cable modem and HTPC hooked up. The HTPC contains a hauppauge 2250, which contains a built-in splitter)

I'd like to get ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CW, and FOX. Optional but desired channel would be KONG then anything else goes.

With cable, I'm sick of my bill, and I'm sick of drops on cable (Comcast has been out and re-run my drop, re terminated the wires in the house which were factory installed, then replaced the wires themselves). Money is limited, so at this point if I can simply replace cable that would be great, then adding anything necessary to put the additional TV tuners online would be fantastic.

My attic space is limited in height, only providing crawling space.

Here is a photosynth of my back yard to view obstructions nearby (trees, etc)

The house is South and the TV stations are North (approximately). The large tree to the south has been cut down.

Thanks for all your help!

Dave Loudin · 7-Jul-2010, 1:44 PM

Remembering that +10 NM is the design goal (since all your paths are line-of-sight), you have a lot of margin to work with. Your top stations come from three directions, NW (322 degrees), due North, and NE (34). Getting one antenna to catch them all is tricky, as most commercial designs optimize for gain, not wide beamwidth. (Yes, the two concepts are mutually exclusive.)

For an outside installation, I'm torn between two recommendations. The first is the RCA ANT-751 - it is a lower-gain design and should have a wider beamwidth. My hunch is you could point it towards almost due north and get the first 14 stations in your list (all the green ones.) I haven't seen any pattern measurements for this antenna, so I can't say with 100% confidence that this will work. To be more specific, I don't know if this antenna still has zero to slightly negative gain 30 degrees from the peak gain direction.

Based on your preferences, you can live without the stations to the NE. A 98% guarenteed to work solution would be a Winegard HD7694P or an AntennaCraft HBU-33 aimed at 340 degrees. You would get all the stations in green from the northeast and north.

I'm not sure what you mean about combining the cable modem with your antenna system. You can't combine the two, since you don't know what RF frequencies (TV channels) the cable company is using for the internet connection, and you can't be sure that their filtering is good enough to avoid interfering with other channels. You can feed your TVs and the HTPC using via a distribution amplifier fed by the antenna.

gallwapa · 7-Jul-2010, 2:26 PM

Sorry I know I can't combine the cable modem with the system - I was just including all current setup to be thorough :-) Thanks for the recommendations.

gallwapa · 8-Jul-2010, 6:59 AM

Is there anything that might work well with an attic antenna? I'm willing to crawl up there and set it up, but it can't require anything more than 3ft or so high.

For S&G's today I constructed one of the youtube coat hanger antennas and got a decent result...with it near the north window I was able to get every channel with about 30-50% signal strength...I was messing around with it and before I decide to haul it up in the attic I'd ask to see if there was something more suitable.