DFW (Dallas-Fort Worth) Area
WFAA Channel 8
OTA TV Antenna
Page 3

Page 1 - Problem Definition, Background & Research

Page 2 - Calculations & Construction

TESTING

After my H20 DirecTV system was installed, I wanted to see if I could pull in WFAA off the air without any antenna - and guess what? With no antenna attached, I could not get a signal at all - go figure. :-)

So I plugged my contraption into the off air antenna port on the back of the receiver and hung the antenna from the front of my fireplace mantle. Was just testing and got 44-46% signal strength with the antenna facing at about 85° - almost due East.

The www.antennaweb.org site says I am about 28 miles from the transmitters located on Cedar Hill and that I need a large pre-amplified antenna aimed at 76°-78° to pick up TV signals broadcast over the air.

Here you can see the copper antenna on the mantle (about 5' up from the floor), and if you look closely, you can see a 44% signal strength on the HDTV monitor.

 

I ran a piece of RG-6 out the wall and up to the backside of my chimney - that's still pointing at about 85° but now it's 14'-15' above ground. I mounted the antenna there using cable clamps, like this

CONCLUSIONS

Now my signal strength for WFAA 8-1 fluctuates between 80-88%. Works for me - certainly good enough to get an HD signal for the SuperBowl and the other programs we watch on WFAA - at least until Belo gets their act together with DirecTV and those signals come in off the satellite.

Comments? Questions? Shoot 'em to me here and I'll try to answer them.

OTHER RESOURCES

Cheap and Easy TV Antenna - this guy uses the same basic design principles while using simple 300 ohm, twin lead wire. I mentioned earlier that we used to make these when we sold those huge C Band satellite dishes. Quite the opposite of the Dallas-Fort Worth area where most stations broadcast from Cedar Hill, each station's transmission tower in that area was in a different location, so we used twin lead to build the antenna, and thumb-tacked each channel to its own 1"x2" board so that we could point them in different directions.