Antenna recommendation

If there is another good group to post, please let me know.

I usually do not give recommendations for a product unless it is a superior product.

For years I bought numerous TV antennas.

They all required rotating the antenna to receive many channels.

This antenna receives stations up to 60 miles away.

GE UltraPro Optima HD Antenna

I found one position that receives excellent signals for 90% of the stations in my area.

Hope everyone has a great day,

Andy

Reply to
Andy
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By definition antennas with much gain are directional. Lower gain can be had by making the directionality a function of elevation while still be omnidirectional in the horizontal plane. But to get more gain means it needs to point to the transmitter. However, no antenna is perfect. They have side lobes sometimes called "rabbit ears" (not to be confused with the V shaped dipoles that sit on top of the set). Likely you have the antenna aimed directly at the majority of your stations and are picking up the others off the rabbit ears. You got lucky.

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Rick C
Reply to
rickman

60 miles with an indoor antenna is a little difficult to believe.

Also, 90% of how many stations? TVfool.com shows that I can be expected to receive 12 stations with strong signals. The farthest is

46 miles. I'm blocked by a mountain to 5 stations leaving me with 7 stations. I can receive 100% of those 7 stations using a piece of wire crammed into the back of my TV.

Mind if I nit pick and split hairs? Thanks.

A directional antenna (reduced horizontal radiation angle) is just one way to get gain. Another way is to reduce the vertical radiation angle, which produces gain in a vertically polarized antenna without directionality. However, if you limit this to a horizontal polarized antenna, as found in most TV antennas, you're correct.

There are very few horizontally polarized omnidirectional antennas. The best that can be done are approximations, such as the these variations on a mushroom or flying saucer:

I would rephrase that to "To take advantage of the gain means it needs to point to the transmitter".

Mine are. Just ask me.

I've never heard of side lobes being called rabbit ears. The closest approximation is a "shoulder" which is a large side lobe or mangled main lobe:

There are some areas where almost all the TV stations are located on one mountain or tower. Smog Angeles is like that where most of the TV stations are on Mt Wilson which is line of sight to most of the LA Basin. I just ran a TVfool.com analysis on an old address of mine in West Smog Angeles. It showed 35 stations in green[1], all pointing at Mt Wilson with the same distance of 20.8 miles and same bearing.

[1] Listed as "An indoor "set-top" antenna is probably sufficient to pick up these channels".
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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

I forgot the URL:

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

The 60 mile claim is just marketing and means nothing.

See below.

I'm just talking in general. The point is that you can get gain by being more directional both in elevation (which is all good unless you are talking to satellites or planes) and in azimuth which is good until you need more than one direction at a time.

That's not what I was trying to say. I am saying that to get gain it has to be directional which means it has to be aimed.

Please show me the perfect TV antenna.

Maybe this is an old term that is no longer used. I was green behind the ear (not enough green yet for both ears) without even a degree in electronics working for a defense contractor. A bunch of guys were in a room working on a proposal (which at this company meant they were arguing a lot!). They kept yelling about the rabbit ears which meant nothing to me. Eventually someone explained to me they were talking about the side lobes which often were sharp patterns with significant gain and sometimes even more narrow focus than the main lobe. Because they were symmetrical they often looked like rabbit ears.

I've never lived anywhere that all the stations were even in one city. East coast tends to provide multiple cities in range sometimes in opposite directions. Here there are none, so at least there are the same quality of signals from all directions. Richmond is over 40 miles as the crow flies, so maybe I could pick up something, but it would need a major antenna and a mast of some sort.

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Rick C
Reply to
rickman

That's good. I wonder if your picking up any VHF high band with that. That band requires a large antenna to do well. You may or may not have those tv stations. I get one channel 13 but it has 4 feeds on that channel space.

Greg

Reply to
gregz

Many moons ago a mine in Yukon needed to improve the TV reception. They were getting only one channel that was being partially blocked by a nearby small hill. My mentor boss who was also a ham got me to install two antennae connected in parallel with a short piece of 300 Ohm cable. One antenna was pointed to the TV station and other to the mine receiving antenna. It worked perfectly.

Regards,

Boris Mohar

Got Knock? - see: Viatrack Printed Circuit Designs (among other things)

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void _-void-_ in the obvious place

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Reply to
Boris Mohar

Agreed. Narrow the vertical, horizontal, or both vertical and horizontal beamwidth and you get gain.

There are vertically polarized antennas that are omnidirectional and obtain gain by at the expense of vertical beamwidth.

Sure. It's called cable TV. Think of it as a virtual antenna. The "must carry" rule requires CATV to offer local channels to subscribers. Think of it as an isotropic point source radiator, of infinitesimal size, that sucks, no matter how you look at it.

If you must see my perfect antenna, be advised that as in the Emperor's New Clothes, only the worthy may see my model of perfection.

There's also a virtual receiver and antenna. One scheme put a rack of receivers and a pile of antennas in a good location, and sold a subscription service that let users stream TV video. Kinda like cable TV but using the internet for delivery. If you're located in a lousy location or want to watch broadcast TV in a remote city, that would have been ideal. I'm not sure if the service is still alive.

Side lobes are symmetrical in a yagi style antenna only if the feed element is symmetrical, as in a T match. If the feed is asymmetrical, such as a gamma match, or fed with a leaky balun, the side lobes can be somewhat unsymmetrical. For example: Notice a few side lobes that are not very symmetrical. There also seems to be a slight boresight error. Also see the ClearStream 2 and

4 patterns near the bottom of the page:

Googling for "side lobes" and "rabbit ears" returned nothing relevant. My guess(tm) is that it may have been a term used at your employers location, but didn't leak out into common usage. I can see why. Recycling terms and jargon in the same technical area (antennas) is guaranteed to create confusion. Zilch:

Obviously, you haven't lived in Smog Angeles.

The mountain antenna sites in the left coast also tend to be higher. It varies by location. In the San Francisco city area, most TV stations are concentrated on Mt Sutro. For the greater SF bay area, stations are scattered along a ridge of high mountains and hills surrounding the bay.

Locations of TV transmitters in Google Earth: Give it time to download the station data and location after loading into Google Earth.

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

You have completely lost context.

That sounds good, but the gain is far too low. I am getting much less than -10000 dBm signal here.

We're not worthy!

Sorry, they were declared illegal by SCOTUS, copyright violation you know. Seems the court felt all that electronics meant it wasn't just another antenna service.

I used TVfool and found I should be able to pick up some signals here. One station is line of sight if I use a 25 foot high antenna. Still, it's not worth it when I get all manner of shows on the Internet. Besides, who wants to watch shows by appointment? I get what I want, when I want by streaming. I can even use bittorrent to download shows to watch when the Internet is down or things that aren't available on the streaming sites. I was surprised to find a number of very old movies aren't available unless you buy them. "The Thin Man" stuff would be very entertaining. Even Amazon Prime doesn't have it unless you pay extra.

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Rick C
Reply to
rickman

I reported my results.

You do not have to believe what I said.

I have no motivation to fabricate or embellish my experience.

(I do not work for any antenna company.)

I do not live near any mountains. But my daughter in San Marcos, Texas does.

Have a great day.

Reply to
Andy

We've got a similar scheme that should be going into service soon, except it's at 11 GHz. Two dish antennas joined with a short chunk of heliax. For places where you don't have direct line of site, but a passive reflector doesn't work because you only need to bend the path a little bit (passive

Reply to
Ralph Barone

Any passive repeater system works OK only when it is close (hundred meters max) either to the Tx station or close to the user Rx station. The link path loss between original Tx station and repeater receiver as well as repeater Tx antenna and user Rx antenna (expressed in dB) is added together.

A passive repeater in the midpoint between Tx and Rx will suffer nearly twice path loss [in dB] compared to a direct LOS path between the Tx and user Rx stations.

Only with very short total path lengths, the mid-point repeater may be useful. One such case is a cellular tower a few hundred meters from an underground car park. A directional antenna above ground pointed at the cellular tower,, a coaxial cable into the underground car park with a reradiator antenna (or a leaky feeder) might work without amplification in neither direction.

Reply to
upsidedown

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