Hi - Sorry, not very tech literate, and I could really use some help. We cut the cable, and are trying to do OTA stations in San Diego. Here is my map -
http://www.tvfool.com/?option=com_wr...c08da0dd0922db
We are on the second floor of a steel-beamed building. I think we only have one real option, being in an apartment, for antenna placement and that is the window in our end bedroom, and that faces north. We have no south or east exposures, and only a very small window between us an another building to our immediate west. We have two antennas at present, both indoor. One is a Terk, which is the only one of the two that works in our Living Room. It pulls in all the local channels and but will not pull in the CW station (6.1) which the kid wants to watch. It also won't pull in the UCSD TV station (35) that is supposed to be only 2 miles SW from us. The other is a little portable antenna, an August DTA180, that we have had really good luck with when we taped it horizontally on the glass of the bedroom window, touching the frame. We pulled in 14 channels, no CW. And no UCSD TV. I bought an RCA signal booster (1450R) at Walmart and we immediately went up to 38 channels. Several of them are in Spanish and so of no use to us. For a while we were picking up the Movie Channel, plus ION and QUBO, out of Los Angeles. Tonight we pulled in four PBS stations from Riverside, along with a handful of religious stations from that same area in Spanish. And a jewelry shopping channel from God-knows-where. But no local CW. For a little while around sundown we pulled in the CW (KTLA) from Los Angeles, but we've lost it (and most of the others from up north) again a bit later in the evening.
I do not have the option of mounting an antenna outside. I do have the large picture window facing north that there are no restrictions on, other than I need to be able to close the blinds for privacy's sake as it looks directly down a busy residential area. The Trek does no better than the little antenna in there, surprisingly. We have fiddled with all the orientations and heights to tape the antenna and found a "sweet spot", but still no CW or UCSD.
I do have a north-facing balcony, but it is recessed into the building, has another building due north of it, and the only way to get reception is to hang the little antenna off into space off the railing. Which, on a nice day is great but we can't have the cord snaking out through the sliding glass doors on cold/rainy days - and the reception wasn't a lot better than where it is in the bedroom window - which looks due north (almost) up an open street. There is a balcony directly above ours, so I can't put anything on a mast out there, either. I bought the little antenna thinking the downspouts on our building were a metal the magnet could latch onto - no luck. Tried placing the antenna with part of it touching the downspout, no luck. (Hey, if it had worked that was a multi-storey downspout!)
I am wondering if there isn't some antenna you can recommend that we can put in that window, and hook up to the amp as needed, that would get us those LA stations/Riverside stations again? If we can't get San Diego's CW, which broadcasts from Tijuanna due south of us, we're fine with the Los Angeles version. I am guessing that the bottom of the window is at least 18 feet off the ground, and the top would be 25ft.
Again, technologically illiterate (and not rich), so any advice you have is definitely welcome! The kid would thank you, too.
The best I could do with an outside unit was to put it on a pole and put the pole in a bucket of rocks on the balcony, but then we'd be back to the problem of having to snake co-ax into the house through a sliding door. Fine during the summer, not so fine during the winter/rainy season. And the only directions I could point it without immediately being blocked by a building would be N, NW, NE, and the nearby buildings are...well, nearby. The bedroom window looks down a long drive (1/8th of a mile?) before the next complex interferes with line-of-sight. There are some very tall buildings (as in 20 to 40 stories) about a half mile away NW and also NE.
