On August 21, 2009 at 14:14, klaven00 said...
thanks for the comments..i actually did cris cross the wires although the pic shown doesn't do that
i'm sure your experimentation worked well for you but for some reason nothing is working on my samsung..
earlier today i attached my antenna on the roof..and still no signal..i must have spent hours auto programming and no change
the only thing wrong with my antenna that i could think of is the wires that form the V at all ends..a few of them are thick wire that i cut out manually they were insulated, and a the rest are the thinnest which were coat hanger..
i used a 32" piece of wood, the big washers that are nearly 2" in diameter, and tested it with both a very long and very short coaxial cable..
the wire work looks a little poor i'll admit..they aren't 100% stright..the thinnest wire bends on impact with anything it touches..
what i'm most curious of is how you land on the HD channels..do you just set the tv to "air" mode..or do you set auto program, and then the tv scans through and lands on the hD channels on its own?
appreciated as always
All of the wire ties should be the same diameter, the same length and the same metal, you need a piece of sand paper or emery cloth, and make sure the metal is nice and shiny where all wires connect together. Washers should be the ones, sized to fit the screws.
Although the instructions on making an antenna seem to elude that you can use anything lying around, if you want good results you need the proper materials, and that means a trip to Rona/Lowes/Home Depot, and it costs about $25. This all came about, 3-4 years ago, when the antennas cost $50-$100 minimum, now that we have Chinese Sweatshop antennas premade for $20, it doesn't make as much sense as it did 3-4 years ago. If you need to buy an oven rack for a reflector, it makes even less sense to roll your own. The Chinese ones will come with the reflector already.
The less material the signal needs to go through the better, the higher it is off the ground the better, the better aimed it is toward the signal source the better. You want the highest quality cable and the shorter the run the better.
Figure that to do this project properly will cost about $100, and take one full day, most people run into problems because they want to do it in 5 minutes for $5, which is why so many are not successful. The costs are a one time cost, cable or satellite you pay every month for ever more.
You need to verify that the TV has an ATSC tuner, set it to AIR and run a channel scan. You will pick up the analog and digital versions of all channels, except channel 19, which has no digital version at the moment. Because the process is somewhat fluid right now, plan on repeating the channel scan once a month or so.
