Home made Digital TV Antenna

Most people who know me know that I don't watch much TV. TV is my ADD trigger or something. If there is a TV on, I can't help myself but to watch it. So, I keep making TVs into fishtanks or otherwise getting rid of them.

I do have 1 TV that I like (besides my fishtank TV). A friend from an old job gave it to me, thanks Trudi! It is a small, black and white 5 inch AM/FM/TV with AV in. It can run on internal batteries. I mean, it's the perfect emergency TV. Great for Hurricane Country. The best part, is it came with a schematic. I can fix the goofy thing if it ever died.

Well, come Feb of 2009, the antenna won't work anymore. So I picked up a Digital TV converter with analog pass through. The analog passthrough is important to me because I will be playing with enough old video stuff that not having it could be a pain.

Anyway. I hooked it up. No TV. Didn't surprise me, as I don't get regular TV clearly with the internal antenna.

A challenge.

So, I started looking online for quick and easy, DIY TV antennas.

I found one!

Coat Hanger HDTV Antenna: Better Than Store Bought! AMAZING! - The funniest bloopers are right here

It looked like a fairly good VHF UHF antenna.

I made one. It took me about an hour. I got to play with my torch. Any night is a good night when you get to play with fire, right? My soldering iron isn't hot enough to work well with the 12 gauge solid wire I used for the antenna.

I took a video with my Hi-Def video camera of my five inch TV getting High Definition Broadcast Digital Television. Kinda ironic, isn't it?



I get 10 stations for 25 channels? Is that how you say that? A lot of each station has multiple channels in them. The only really important channel I get is the Weather Channel.

A really good website to visit to see what you should expect for TV reception is TV Fool. I am getting about what it says that I should.

I am thinking I will make a 'cleaner' antenna. I want to get a matching transformer on this antenna to see if that works better. I will also be making a few other types over the winter I think. Just stuff to play around with.

I did notice that if I hook my converter box up to the antenna on the foot and a half cable I left myself, I don't get much for reception, but if I use the 40 foot cable I have, I get much better reception. I will need to investigate cable length for reception and such. I am guessing that the long cable is helping match the antenna to to the receiver. Just a hunc though.

Radioshack Pro-95 Radio Scanner

I have had a Radioshack Pro-95 handheld radio scanner for years now. In all this time, it has never been properly programmed. I have had some channels in it, but not anything really all that useful. I have ended up using it mostly for a weather radio and CB channel scanner. I do use it enough to justify the scanner antenna I have on my truck.

Last night, we had a trio of tornadoes blow through the area. Luckily, none touched down. When my cell let me know that there was bad weather in the area, I ran out to my truck and grabbed the scanner. I used it to listen to the weather.

Well, tonight, I sat down and made an effort at figuring out how to program this thing. I now have the local Elgin Motorola Trunked municipal, police, and fire radio frequencies in it. The cool thing is that it works!

Reading online, the radio got good reviews, the manual got terrible reviews. So I don't feel bad about not figuring it out in the past.

Now I am going to have to get a programming cable for it. I don't think I want to spend anymore time fighting with programming it using the radio itself. I want to use my keyboard!

I have the City's trunked system in the radio, I also want to put in the local utilities - phone, cable, railroad, but don't know how to. Gah! It can't be this hard. Maybe I need to curl up with the manual and read it again. NOT!

If you know of any good Elgin area radio frequencies to listen in on, let me know!