HDTV Signals on the Wrong Antenna! (1 Viewer)

[DanielR]

I live in Albuquerque, NM and am 6.1 miles from the OTA HDTV broadcast antennas on the crest of the Sandia Mountains (my Zip code is 87109).

I generally get about 8 HDTV stations very well, but sometimes depending on weather and how the planets are aligned (?) I miss a few of them and have to adjust my indoor antenna. Some days I can't get one or two no matter what I do... so either they drop off the air or I am on the ragged edge and the weather gets me.

I have no tall buildings between my house and the crest... just a single story house next door and the wall of my house (both stucco). I know that the stucco wall has a chicken wire like mesh between the wall studs and the stucco, and I presume that has some affect on my signals.

The baffling thing to me is that I get the best reception with an old pair of rabbit ears that came on the back of a cheap TV set when I hooked up cable.

I thought that rabbit ears were VHF. The signals in my area for HDTV are being broadcast UHF. Why do I get these signals better with rabbit ears than a $39 active antenna that had both rabbit ears and a loop? With the latter, I had to move the antenna around a lot to get the channels that were all available from the rabbit ears with no adjustment? Was the active antenna more directional? Most of the signals are all the same direction, but with the rabbit ears I sometimes have to pull one of the ears down rather than leaving both up.

I am reluctant to go to a directional antenna, since it seems that I will have to keep redirecting it for each channel. Are there any well respected multi-directional antennas out there? It seems this RS Bowtie and the Zenith Silver Sensor are more directional....

 

[Allan Jayne]

What makes rabbit ears VHF is their length, not their shape.

Your active antenna with both rabbit ears and loop might have had only the loop connected to the UHF terminals and various idiosyncrasies such as the wire mesh in the walls could affect things unpredictably.

Are the rabbit ears adjustable in length? Try shortening them and see if the reception becomes even better.

Video hints:
http://members.aol.com/ajaynejr/video.htm