The Fugue

I had one of these antennas:

Not top of the line, I know, but it did have an amplifier and it did cost probably $30 when I bought it. And it's pretty much worthless. We got the PBS station in town but rarely could we pick up any of the El Paso stations.

Now that we're on the DTV bandwagon, I set out to improve the antenna situation. Antennaweb told me that I should be able to pick up almost all of the stations with a "yellow" antenna—a small multidirectional antenna (actually one station called for a medium directional w/pre-amp, and antennaweb doesn't realize some of those stations are broadcasting digital on UHF channels for now). In other words, it should be easy to get those stations. So I did a little searching and researching. All the digital stations here are UHF, so all I really needed was a UHF antenna.

I decided to make me a simple loop antenna—the same design as the UHF component on the one I already had. I fired up a wavelength calculator and figured out that the center of bandwidth for the channels I was interested in (15,16,17,18,23, I found that with the help of HDHomeRun's Channel Page, although my strongest station was mysteriously absent there) was almost exactly 2 feet (Here is an excellent TV Frequencies Table. Remember λ=c/f=3e4/MHz.). So I cut a coat hanger at 2 feet, shaped it into a circle, and soldered on a female coax connector. There are pictures here.

I found that it didn't work much better than the other one in the same position, but as I moved it around and found a good position I got a satisfactory signal. So, to be rigorous, I tried the other antenna in that position. It was pitiful. So I was still justified.

I ended up hanging it on a nail on the wall, where it gets satisfactory to excellent reception for every station. Total cost: under $5.

If you need a directional antenna in your area, you might still be able to do this, and add a reflector (cardboard with aluminum foil) ¼ wavelength on the far side. I held a piece of foil behind it and it improved the signal strength quite a bit. Just how to rig that up is your problem, but I suppose some pieces of 2x6 and some nails and washers (and electrical tape for insulation) would do the job.

Speaking of electrical tape, if you look at those photos you'll see that there is a bunch of electrical tape scraps on my loop. That's just because I reused the hanger from my coat hanger dipole when constructing it. Which is an excellent VHF antenna, if your stations are VHF.