Since my TV antenna was damaged by an ice storm, I needed to build an HDTV antenna. While searching, I found some HDTV antenna builds that used coat hangers. Being 70 miles away from the HDTV stations, I definitely need my HDTV antenna to be outdoors. Coat hangers rust, and end up with bad connections which makes your HDTV antenna useless over time. In this post, I will show you how to build a HDTV antenna.
Additionally, the HDTV antenna builds I have seen don’t seem to have the long range that I need, such as the DB4. So I have come up with a modified version that works well in HDTV fringe areas. The photo on the left is my HDTV antenna that I built. I have also seen where people will take two HDTV DB4 antennas and gang them and then use a splitter / combiner to feed the HDTV antennas. Although this seems to work, my thinking is that adding a second antenna typically yields 3 db of gain. However a splitter / combiner has a 3 db insertion loss. Which is spelled out on the splitter’s package. It seems to me that you are losing what you have gained in ganging two DB4 antennas. My HDTV antenna build eliminates the need to use a splitter / combiner.
Its surprising the number of people that think that in order to get HDTV stations, you have to have cable. This is not true, as TV stations still transmit their signal in what is called Over the air – OTA. So if you live within say, 70 miles of a TV station, you might be able to receive HDTV over the air too, and eliminate your cable bill.