In my previous post, I discussed how to gather the necessary information for installing an over-the-air TV antenna. To sum up, you need to know where the broadcast towers are and what frequency they broadcast on. In my case, I needed a rooftop VHF/UHF combo antenna, and I needed to point it just east of due north.
In this post, I’ll talk about the equipment I bought and how I actually installed it.
I got pretty much everything from RadioShack. I have given RadioShack a lot of shit in the past for being a crappy consumer electronics store, but they were the only store around that had everything I needed, including the antenna and mounting hardware. Home Depot and Lowe’s had none of it.
Equipment
The antenna I decided on was the Antennacraft HBU33. I could have gone with any number of brands, but RadioShack had this one. It is a high-VHF (channels 7-13) and UHF (channels 14 and up) combo antenna, and it’s supposed to have a range of about 60 miles. These specs fit my situation, since I’m about 45 miles away from the towers, and, despite the fact that most channels are on UHF, there are still two on high-VHF.
Depending on your own situation, you might be able to get a UHF-only antenna. They are smaller and supposedly more effective than a combo antenna. Also, if you are close enough to the towers, an indoor antenna is the easiest solution.
I also bought a tripod mount and 5 foot mast, also from RadioShack. There are several options available for mounting the antenna, such as an eave mount or a simpler mount, but a tripod mount was the easiest way to go for my situation.
The rest of the stuff I needed was some coaxial cable, grounding wire, and a grounding block. Luckily, I already had two satellite dishes on my roof with connected coaxial, and the cables already had some grounding wire attached to it.
As I wrote about in my previous post, AntennaWeb told me I would need a pre-amplifier. I decided to go without the pre-amp for now, since the antenna’s supposed range was about 60 miles. (I’ll talk about this more in a future post, but I might install a pre-amp sometime soon.)
After gathering everything together, I was ready to go.
Installation
You can choose to do this later on, but I assembled my antenna first. Mine mostly involved snapping the elements into place.
For installing everything, I got Joe to help me out, since at the time he did that kind of thing for a living.
The first thing we did was bolt the legs of the tripod to the roof. The tripod came with all the necessary hardware. It also came with sticky putty pads to put on the bottom of the feet. These ensure that a good seal is made around the bolts so as to prevent your roof from leaking.
After securing the tripod, the next step was to place the mast into the tripod. The mast rests on an L-plate at the bottom of the tripod and is secured by bolts. (I would take pictures, but it’s December and I’m not getting on my roof.) After that we attached the antenna to the mast using the supplied U bolt.
Since these long range TV antennas are highly directional, it was important that we pointed the thing in the right direction. With the help of Joe’s iPhone and the signal strength meter he borrowed from work, we got it where it needed to be.
At this point, everything was in place, and the last thing to do was connect the antenna to my house’s coaxial network. I grabbed the coaxial off of the satellite dishes and connected it to the supplied 300-ohm to 75-ohm impedance matching transformer.
An important step we made sure not to overlook is to properly ground the connection. A grounding wire needs to be run from the base of the antenna mast to a grounding rod. Also, the coaxial coming from the antenna needs to be attached to a grounding block, which is then attached to the grounding rod using more grounding wire. We did all this, and it should prevent a lightning strike from taking out my TV.
Since I use a cable modem for my internet needs, there was already a feed coming into the coaxial network. For now, I just wanted one room to receive the antenna feed. After some trial and error, we found which cable to connect to.
Then we went inside, used my TV‘s built-in tuner to scan for available signals, and sat back and enjoyed HD over-the-air TV, FOR FREE.
Tune in next time, and I’ll wrap up with a discussion of the results, along with ideas for future improvements.
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