Episode: 1280
Title: HPR1280: Homemade Antennas for OTA Hi-Def TV
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1280/hpr1280.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 22:51:19

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This is John Culp in Louisiana and in this episode I'm going to talk about home made antennas
for watching TV.
I got into making antennas four or five years ago and it was because we got a new TV.
What we had done a few years before we got the new TV, we had actually cut the cable which
is something that a lot of people are talking about nowadays.
We cut off Cox cable because they had messed with the channel lineup and pushed all the
good channels up into the higher numbers where we would have to pay a higher rate every
month to be able to access the channels we like so we thought, forget it.
We're not going to do it anymore, we just stopped having cable.
And under the old analog broadcasts we simply got bad reception for many of the channels.
Some of them came in okay but most of them were not very good.
Well when the transmission of TV signals changed over to digital and we got an HTTV I was amazed
at how good the quality was of the reception.
Basically either you get everything or you get nothing with digital TV.
If you get a signal at all usually you can see it perfectly but once it drops out you
get like a blue screen.
So it's either all or nothing there was never any fuzziness really.
Sometimes you get little squares where the signal is kind of breaking up but if you get
a good signal you can get great TV.
Now the problem I had was the antenna that I had was a store bought one that was actually
a powered FM slash TV antenna and it would get some channels but not all of them.
I started looking around for other antennas and reading reviews of them on Amazon and things
like this and basically it looked like every antenna somebody said it worked great and
somebody said it was terrible and that you shouldn't waste your money on it.
And in one of those customer reviews a guy mentioned that the so-called coat hanger antenna
actually worked better than any of the ones he had bought before.
Now I had never heard of the coat hanger antenna and so I looked up coat hanger antenna and
very quickly found a video on YouTube where a guy showed you how you could make your own
antenna using just a bunch of coat hangers and a board and some fasteners.
And so I thought we'll shoot I'm not going to spend any more money on one of these store
bought antennas if they're all going to have the same failings.
So I tried the coat hanger antenna and it worked pretty well.
It worked about as well as the store bought one and it depended on where I put it in the
room like if I could put it close to the window it would work better and put it up higher
it would work better and so forth.
So the next thing I did to try to improve the reception was put the thing up in the attic
because everyone says one of the main principles of getting good reception with an antenna is
the higher it is the better reception you're going to get.
So I think I already had a cable from the previous owner of the house he had run antenna
cables up to the attic or something anyway I got a cable to run up to the attic and I
mounted the antenna up there and plugged it into my TV and it was much better.
It still wasn't perfect but it was much better.
So I started researching a bit more and found another design for the antenna.
By the way the coat hanger antenna is done in what's called a bow tie design where essentially
you have a set of eight whiskers, normally the antenna geeks call them whiskers where they're
like v-shaped pieces of wire that are mounted in a certain pattern and then they've got
other pieces of wire that connect them all together and crossover and stuff.
And to those you have to attach a little doodead called a ballon B-A-L-U-N I'm going to
put a link in the show notes to show you what that is but it's also called a UHF-VHF matching
transformer and that is the thing that you plug your coax cable into.
You attach the two little ends of the ballon to the two long pieces of wire on your antenna
and that's what gives you the reception.
So I started searching around for ways to improve the reception of the antennas and I found
a great website where the guys were talking about a completely different design of antenna
that was called the Gray Hoverman antenna.
It's named after some guys I guess, Gray and Hoverman I think I will link to the page
in the show notes, excuse me.
But the Gray Hoverman antenna designs were made way back in the 50s and 60s I think and
some antenna enthusiasts have revived that the designs and actually licensed them with
a GPLV3 license so that the open source nut in me liked that a lot and so I tried the
Gray Hoverman and it was great.
It's a really good strong reception for the channels in the middle range of the American
spectrum.
I apologize, I really don't know how this stuff would work in other countries but over
here the Gray Hoverman design was very strong for channels say 13 and above all the
way up into the 50s and 60s.
But it didn't get one of the main channels we have here, our CBS affiliate is channel
10 and that kind of fell out of the spectrum of the antenna so I still looked further to
try and find a solution to that.
And the way I finally got channel 10 and the other channels was to go back to the bow
tie design but use better materials and a slightly different specs on the whiskers.
I used instead of code hangers, I used copper wire and copper is a much better conductor
anyway and I guess the thicker the better but I found the best wire in terms of shapeability
and durability, the compromise between those two factors was number 8 copper wire.
I've used number 6 as well but it's a little bit harder to work with because it's thicker.
Number 8 copper is great for making these antennas.
So I use number 8 copper wire for all of the pieces.
Now this requires you to go into your pocket a little bit.
With the code hanger antenna you can probably just go in your closet and find some hangers
and make your antenna almost for nothing.
For the copper I had to go to the home improvement store and pay, I don't know, 60 cents
a foot or something like that but still the entire antenna and that one with the 10 inch
whiskers I think it required about 20 feet of copper.
And so you're looking at a $10 to $15 investment on the antenna which is still less than most
of the antennas cost if you buy them at the store.
But I made the 10 inch whiskers, I used good copper wire and I mounted them to a board and
this time I mounted the antenna on the outside of my house.
What I did was I took the cable that had been cut from cocks and rerouted it going to
the other end of the house where I knew it would be facing the antennas, sorry the transmitters
for our area.
By the way when you're doing this you really need to check a website called tvfool.com because
they have great information about where the transmitters are in your area so that you
know which direction to point your antenna.
So I rerouted the cable from cocks to the other end of the house and mounted my new antenna
under the soffit there and was amazed at the quality of reception I got.
So it's great I get all of the channels except one from that antenna.
So we've got most of our transmitters are in one area around here and then there's a
single channel the NBC affiliate that's in the complete opposite direction almost 50 miles
away.
So that channel I could not pick up with the antenna on the side of the house.
So what I did was I made a gray hoverman antenna and stuck it in the attic facing directly
at the one transmitter that I was not picking up with the other antenna and then I used
a joiner or you could call it a splitter I guess they can serve either purpose but I used
a splitter or a joiner and ran each of the antennas into that and then so on one side
of the splitter there are two inputs where I think what most people do with this is they'll
take their single cable signal and split it to two different TVs but what I did was took
two antenna signals and joined them to go to one TV signal.
So I joined the two TVs antennas and then plugged the single cable out of that into the
TV and now I get all of the channels.
So that's my solution.
Now one other thing that I've done to make the TV more accessible because we only have
a single TV in the house and most of the time my kids are watching it if anyone is watching
it and they don't watch much over the air TV they mostly watch Netflix.
We do have a Netflix subscription and we have a Roku that streams that to the TV.
I watch over the air stuff for sports on the weekends and the spouse and I like to watch
a couple of shows on public television but we don't use a whole lot of over the air TV.
But since there is only one TV and if the kids are watching something at the same time
I want to watch a sporting event or something that's going on I got a network TV tuner.
I looked into all kinds of tuners for computers and you can get these help page USB tuners
you can get PCI slot tuner cards and things like that and I looked at all of those but I was
not sure whether they were going to be Linux compatible and I found in the process of searching
that you can get a network TV tuner and I got one called the HD home run and it's been
great.
I've got a dedicated antenna in the attic that is feeding the HD home run and it is plugged
into a cat5 connection it's on the hard wire connection on my network and so what this
means is that any computer on your network can watch live over the air TV from that network
tuner and it's pretty cool I can watch it on my laptop while the kids are watching whatever
they're watching on the main TV I can just watch over the air TV on the laptop or any
other thing.
The Silicon dust company that makes the HD home run has source code for the Linux configuration
setup.
There's a couple of little things that you can use to configure the tuner for Linux and
those packages are available from the manufacturer's website and you can also get at least
some of it in the Debian repository and with the HD home run you can also use XBMC or
Myth TV or things like that so it's really really great.
So if you wanted to make your own TV tuner antenna then you really don't need all that
much stuff you need enough wire to make the elements whichever style you want to make.
The gray hoverman requires about 10 feet of copper wire the bow tie style requires a little
bit more depending on how long you make the whiskers.
7 inches is the recommended length on many websites I made mine 10 inches on the one
that does the best for me.
You also need the UHF matching transformer called the ballon you need some fasteners to fasten
the elements to a board and you need a board to mount it on and maybe most important you
need a good place to put it.
If you have your own home then you can probably get it into the attic or somewhere up high.
Some of the guys who are real enthusiasts for homemade antennas will have these massive
towers out in their yard where they will hoist their antennas way way up high to get really
good reception.
I don't have anything like that I'm pretty low budget.
Let's see.
I think that's about all I wanted to say about it.
I definitely encourage you to try this out if you like the shows that are on your local
over-the-air channels and have always just watched those channels on cable and are thinking
about cutting the cable subscription.
This is maybe something that could help you decide and besides that it's really fun.
It's fun to make one of these antennas because it really is almost foolproof that they're
so easy to make and they always work at least a little bit and then you can adjust them.
My laptop just talked to me over there using bladder sorry for that interruption there.
You can adjust the performance of that based on what kind of materials you use and the
placement of the thing.
Anyway, have fun with it.
Have good hacking fun and I will talk to you later about something else.
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