During the thanksgiving week, I did some clean up on my mom's house's master TV antenna system. She is located in Oradell NJ, about 14 miles north of NYC's Empire State Building (where NYCs OTA TV signals are transmitted). We have two antennas, your usual Radio Shack VHF antenna for VHF work, and I also have an antenna intended for the 440MHz ham radio band pointing towards Long Island, so we can get channel 21. We also can get channel 55, which IIRC is from the eastern end of Long Island. To merge the tow antennas, I used a special "splitter" sold by radio shack, which has one port for VHF and a 2nd port for UHF. Idea being that it rejects any VHF riding into the UHF port, and UHF into the VHF port. Cuts down on ghosting, which can screw up DTV reception if the converter box's echo canceler can't deal with it. This VHF-UHF combiner then feeds a 4 way splitter to feed 4 sets all over the house. Of course, the set closest to this master splitter is the one that gets channel 21 and 55, as long runs of coax attenuation kills weak UHF. We have on VHF channels 7, 11, 13 and a low power DTV station on channel 2 (WKOB), virtual channel 42 (the RTV station I posted about last week). My old Samsung ATSC HDTV receiver box doesn't get this channel, but the newer boxes and the flat panel my brother bought last summer does get it.
I originally put the 440MHz ham antenna to get TV signals from the Alpine radio tower (the one Armstrong used to transmit FM from way back when) after 911 happened. The bow tie isn't being used right now.
11-29-2010, 01:22 PM
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