Quote:
Originally Posted by tylercc
so I finally got a chance to put in the homemade antenna, and I am more than shocked at the reception I am getting on most of the channels. I thank you all for your help, and have one last question. So I know that if I use an amplifier with the one antenna I have now I will most likely lose some of the closer stations. I am wondering what would happen if I had two antennas one with a amplifier and one with out, would I still lose the closer stations? Would it fix the skipping that is on one or two channels? The two antennas would be hooked up to the same tv through the cable. thanks again
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Adding two antennas on a single downlead may work, or it may not. Whatever you have on the two antennas, you will have the sum of that on the single lead. If one antenna is noisy or has bad multipath on one channel but the other antenna receives that station clearly, you will have the combination on the single downlead, not the better of the two. If the two signals are out of phase, they will interfere. If they are in-phase, they will add. Any noise or interference on either antenna will always be present. Unless you build an antenna that is specifically designed as an array, the results will be unpredictable.
This does not hold for combining UHF and VHF, because they are on widely separated frequencies and do not add. The tuner will filter out the frequency that it is receiving, and discard the rest.
What you can do reliably is to put each antenna on a separate lead, and switch between them. A/B switches are available, or you can use a tuner for each lead and switch between those. You can get really fancy with many antennas, tuners, a HTPC that can time shift your programs and record from multiple tuners at once, and so forth.