[ale] HDTV antenna for urban areas

[Bob Toxen]

1. What's the price of each component?

2. Can an existing analog antenna and amp be used?

3. Am I likely to get a clean signal if I only get a poor analog
   signal where I am?

The idea is can I use my existing analog equipment that I gave up on
due to poor signal and insufficient interest for another solution for
analog?

[Yeah, I got a $50 converter at Target with a $40 taxpayer-supplied
rebate.]

thx,
Bob
[Who kicked out the cable company 9 years ago.]

"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond where
the shadows lie...and the Eye is everwatching"
-- The Silicon Valley Tarot Henrique Holschuh with ... by Bob
On Tue, Jun 02, 2009 at 09:48:37PM -0400, Daniel Howard wrote:
> As a small token of my appreciation to the list, and since some folks
> have posted recently about setting up off air HDTV reception with the
> transition date looming, I thought you guys would enjoy some solutions
> I've run across for dealing with the extensive multipath you get in
> dense urban areas for HDTV reception.  Enjoy, Daniel
> 
> 1.  My solution: I have two RadioShack large aperture/gain antennas in
> my attic, each with a low noise amp at the antenna output, and I have an
> A/B switch in my TV room such that when I see multipath interfering with
> reception on one antenna, I switch to the other.  The antennas have to
> be at least 10 lambda apart however since their gain is so high, and at
> VHF frequencies for Channel 11 (around 200 MHz), this is about 48 ft.,
> Using a spectrum analyzer revealed the multipath was spatially
> decorrelated between the two antennas in my attic even though they were
> only 40 ft. apart.
> 
> I had to use this solution because I'm in a valley topographically with
> buildings and land blocking my direct line of sight to the antenna
> towers.
> 
> 2.  If you have line of sight to the towers (use www.antennaweb.org),
> but have lots of big buildings around you, you just need a really
> directional antenna, here's what my friend at GaTech used.  Make sure to
> click page two at the bottom of the web site for the second, more robust
> and easier to manufacture solution that he came up with, brilliant IMHO.
> 
> http://www.prism.gatech.edu/~wn17/
> 
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