I also posted this in the Sat/cable forum:

Here's the situation:

My brother lives on the water in a very flat area with an airport about a mile away as the crow flies. There are a few trees around, but it is pretty open otherwise.

He needs an antenna to get SD channels from three different directions. I was looking at a Rotator system with IR from Channelmaster to handle this (CM9521A).

He would like to pick up UHF/VHF channels up to 70 miles away ( info From CEA site ) but can get networks at 10-30 miles also.

We want to mount the antenna to the chimney if possible. The area he lives in gets very gusty at times. It is usualy a little windy.

I looked at CM antennas and can't decide on which one to get. I know bigger is better but we want to keep the installation to one day and keep the antenna from blowing over.

I have Satellite experience and I am a custom installer, but this will be my first antenna install.

Any recommendations on antennas, grounding, amplifiers , mounts, companies, etc. is greatly appreciated.

70 miles is a pretty good stretch from a low land (taken from the water front comment).
Since you are on the low lands, pick the largest of the recommended antennas on antennaweb.org or maybe even the next arger model from the manufacturer you choose. Channel Master is a good choice all around, but I choose to use Winegard antennas and preamps and Channel Master rotators.

You don't want to hang a huge antenna on a chimney mount if high winds are the norm. A tower ups the price by a lot, but it's the right way to get this done. Many of the sat distributors sell Rohn towers or the equivelant, call the sat distributors that you have worked with and look at how high you can go with your budget and the house you have to tie into.

Using guy wires makes the whole thing even more complicated, as neighborhood kids mowing lawns have a bad habit of walking into them at face/neck height, and that hurts. If it is required, do it and put in some planter beds to keep people from walking under the low end.

If you have a 2 story or taller peak to tie to, you can get some decent elevation w/out guy wires, and it will support a big antenna and a rotator a whole lot better than a chimney mount or a pole that may not have been intended for the purpose.

If the antenna you choose doesn't already have one installed, you will want to use a 75 ohm transformer right at the antenna lead, or use a mast mounted preamp that accepts the 300 ohm connection and outputs 75 ohm on a weather resistant F connector. The point is, you do not want to run 300 ohm lead and then be forced to use mast standoffs and all that. Go with coax, RG-6 dual or quad shield with good compression connectors and the weatherproof O-ring jam nut things. If you don't have those, at least wrap the connection with the gooey coax wrap tape. Here is a good description from a marine electronics site.
[Link: marine-electronics.net]

I don't mean to demean your experience, you may have done this all day every day. On the other hand, if your experience was a lot of $99 three room system jobs or whatever else they give away these days, then this may not have been standard practice on each job.
If you put up a tower, you do NOT want to go back up there unless you HAVE to, so over engineering is a good practice.

Use a grounding block at the entry point to the house and tie into the distribution. This is easy if you can go in near the electrical service and tie into the existing ground.

If you are on Long Island, you can try LNL on Robbins Lane in Syosset. They usually have everything antenna related in stock, and can talk about it too...

One disadvantage to the rotor system that you must make your client aware of is the reality that all tv's in the house will be effected by the direction of the antenna. If I've got ten tv's, they all better want to watch the same channel group as what the rotor has decided.

Another alternative is to stack antennas and combine them, with different sized and appropriately tuned antennas pointed in the correct direction. That's the best way to do it if the customer wants uniform results.

He says he doesn't have much experience with antennas, so I doubt he has any with towers - I would strongly recommend NOT doing this yourself. The potential for damage and/or lawsuits is great. Most places require a building permit before you can put a tower up and some places require certain licensing to get that permit on a tower.

A tower does sound like your best bet for what your wanting to do - get the antenna up high, support multi-antennas if needed or rotor if desired. And Rohn makes antennas that are free standing (no guy wire to a certain height). But you need to contract this out to a tower company if you go this route.

I also would not recommend attaching to the chimney - the size antenna your GOING to NEED will be too large in a winding area to risk attaching to a chimney (Most chimneys weren't meant to be a structural support)

This will require some kind of bandpass and mixing equipment, which is not all that expensive. Repost if this would be your solution and we can get into it in detail.

On any channel, if you combine the outputs of two antennas, you may mess up the good output of one antenna by adding a ghosty output from another antenna. This means you want a filter on each antenna to only allow out of it the signal(s) you want. Tuned antennas will partly solve this problem, but even tuned antennas have bandwidth and may pick up garbage that interferes with a clean signal from another antenna.

And yes, that is not even getting into it in detail.

yup, what he said.

If your vendor understands multiple antennas, he should (I hope) understand the concepts Ernie has outlined.

Don't just run a backwards splitter.

Excellent point on the stack suggestion...
There was no cable TV available to my neighborhood when I grew up, and satellite was out of the reach of my family in the early days.

We had a roof mounted antenna on a tripod with a rotor system, and this was when rotors were hard wired and totally manual and little pieces of tape marked your spots on the dial, well before the days of CM's IR controlled model.

I can personally vouch that it is a massive pain when you are in another room from the person controlling the antenna direction.
Also, I have become a "flipper" and even if I programmed macros for station icons for the rotor to change as I flipped, I know it would drive me nuts to have to wait for the antenna to catch up every time I flipped.

It is a gamble to erect a tower these days when you ever know if cable or sat may just offer a competitive package for all of the locals in HD mext month... But in addition to knowing that you have the ability to get smaller stations that may or may not have deals with the sat and cable giants, you have a nice place to mount an FM antenna, and you will be shocked at how much more enjoyable radio can be with a nice tuner and good signal (content is another matter...)

A tower seems a little extreme...and permanent. I am considering a smaller antenna.Maybe somethimg to pick up around 50 miles.

What are your thoughts on how to mount the antenna to the roof? I figured the chimney would be best,until reading the responses. How good are the tripod mounts?

There is only one TV in the house so it doesn't matter that the antenna will be rotating. I think it's better than combining two antennas.

Will an amp help the incomming signal or amplify the bad? I am planning on using RG-6 Quad from the antenna to the TV.

Rick, I have never installed a $99 dish system. No, I don't feel demeaned. I do high end installs where it may take all day to run the wires for a dish INSIDE the house and that's OK with our customers. I have put antennas in the attics of every house audio system I've done for FM.

We have an antenna in my Brothers attic and the reception is pretty good but he has to manually turn the thing to get in some channels and that is a PITA for him.

I want to do the proper research before I install cause this is definitely going to be a one time job.

Thank's for your responses

One piece of advice - don't do what I did a couple of months back and bolt down the tripod without checking if it's fully extended...:-o

Bolt the three legs into studs, if possible.

I would use a mast mounted preamp to compensate for the long run of coax from the antenna to the distribution, and amplify there as well if you do not already have a distribution amp in place.


Understood, TV reception is a dying art and you may not want to make it a primary portion of your business, but's it's good to have the skills in your bag of tricks when needed.


I would still consider a mast or smaller tower alongside the house, anchored to the eaves or gable of the roofline.

Winegard also makes a gable end mount for a mast that would be the equivelant of a tripod placement, except maybe easier to secure.

If you go with the tripod, get it plumb straddling the peak and install blocking between the trusses to lag into where you can't get directly into a truss. All 3 legs need to be lagged securely, especially with the size of antenna you will be using.


That's what this is for... keep contributing.

Heh, speaking of timing, on the very day I had my new tower and antennas erected, the cable company upgraded the cable on the street to support HDTV (wasn't supposed to happen for months).