Turning a satellite dish into a TV antenna.

The latter, pretty much.

The clip-on antenna (a Terk TV44) looks like a simple folded dipole, with a small amplifier in its central module. It's a low-to-no-gain antenna, almost certainly has a poor directional pattern, and placing it right next to the metal dish is going to make the gain pattern even worse. The dish provides no gain for this clip-on antenna.

The reviews at NewEgg are not positive.

This sort of arrangement *may* work out tolerably if you've got strong local stations, with a fairly clear line of sight to the station transmitting antennas, and few signal reflections from nearby buildings.

Its performance on distant, or otherwise difficult TV stations is likely to be very poor.

You could probably do better with a simple twinlead "floppy dipole" stapled to a piece of 1-by-2 wood, if you could mount the latter up on the roof. A real, directional roof antenna (e.g. a log-periodic), well mounted, and aimed towards the TV station in question, will give much better performance.

The dish does nothing except maybe block the signal. The link to the TERK TV44 is broken, but this one works: It's nothing more than a folded dipole, diplexer, and a distribution amp. If you're in a strong signal area, and the major TV stations are perpendicular to the dipole, it should receive something. Otherwise, you could do as well with a TV/SAT diplexer: with the satellite LNB connected to the sat port, and whatever you can find for a TV antenna in the TV port. The major advantage of the TERK device is that it's fairly aesthetic and will not attract the attention of the CC&R enforcement vigilantes.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

Thanks. That's what I thought.

A decent yagi antenna designed for the terrestrial DTV frequencies will work a lot better than hacking around with an old satellite dish.

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Regards, 
Martin Brown

Disconnect the LNB, pull the cables out through the arm it was mounted on and hook them to the antenna you _clip to the rim of the dish_?

Why not leave the cables in place and clip the antenna to where the LNB was, at the focus of the damned dish? Oh, wait, because that tiny dish will have crappy gain at TV wavelengths!

for US$70 I can do better with some leftover plumbing hardware and a few sticks...

Mark L. Fergerson

The dish is too small to function as an effective reflector at VHF/UHF.

I'm sure this is more trouble than it's worth. Get a proper directional external antenna installed, and solve any signal issues once and for all.

Sylvia.

That dish is far too small, a much more appropriate would be some old

2-3 m diameter C-band satellite dish.

In the middle of the UHF TV band, the wavelength is 0.5 m, so that would be 3-6 wavelengths. A dish is preferable, when the diameter is at least 10 wavelengths with gains over 27 dB. That C-band dish would give about 20 dB gain at UHF TV-frequencies, which should be achievable with a long yagi with much less wind load.

OTOH, making a broadband high gain yagi is hard, while installing a small broadband antenna e.g. log-periodic into the dish focus will give a broadband system quite easily. However, installing a few meter diameter on the roof at the end of a mast and pointing the dish to the horizon, can be a bit hard :-).

37.html

h does nothing.

Thanks. I don't receive any TV stations where I'm located, so no TV antenna going to do me any good. I have a DISH HD satellite dish on the roof that I don't use. I was looking into pointing it at a Free to Air satellite http ://

when I stumbled on to this TV antenna with ref lector thing and thought 'that doesn't work'. But I wanted to check myself, so I posted here.

How does it work?