T.V. reception
- Thread starter lee oakley
- Start date
As far as amplification goes, An amp should only be needed if you are running a long distance on your cable, or are splitting to multiple TVs. The signal will never be any better than what the antenna receives, the amp just helps to distribute it through more wire/splitters. if you have but one tv and you have less than 50' of wire you should skip the amp. Over driving the tuner in your TV with too much signal is worse than getting a poor signal to begin with. TV tuners are good at pulling crappy digital signal off the air. but can do nothing with high signal distortion/compression
An Omni will be fine for most anchorages, however be warned if you anchor in metropolitan areas with lots of tall buildings, you will get better results with a directional antenna. The Omni will pull in so many strong multipath reflections of the available signal bouncing off of the surrounding buildings, that your TV tuner will frequently unlock/relock/freeze while trying to lock to an out of phase reflection of the same channel. In the old analog days these out of phase signals would show up as ghosts on your TV screen. Now they just mess with a digital tuners ability to stay locked on a single channel. A directional antenna helps to reduce the multipath noise in crowded RF environments.
PS. I design fixed antenna systems and RF distributions as part of my daily job.
PS. I design fixed antenna systems and RF distributions as part of my daily job.
"Good advice always loses" out to the cheapest way possible. this is so true too many times... and its why we see so many dumpy/eyesore boats in the marinas, and in driveways on trailers....
I myself, learned the hard way that one will never be able to afford the do it the right way if they keep looking for the very cheapest way possible to do it.... because after the many attempts at taking short cuts, and failing to achieve the desired results, I had no money to do it the way it had to be done to get to where I wanted to go...... and when I finally came to the realization that I need to buy the right stuff for the job to get it right, it had cost me way more money than if I would of did it this way to begin with, and the time wasted....
after I learned how to spend the money wisely on the first attempt, and make a nice clean install, I found I had more money to spend on other things, and my projects began to look a little more professional
.... some people will never learn this...
Centerline, Two things the first is that I am not trying to take the cheap way on anything especialy my sailboat! However I am willing to take the low road on t.v. reception if it will function the same as something that will cost me 50 bucks more !!! Hence seeking the experience of people that have tried this product in real life!
so sorry if it looked like I was pointing fingers
... it wasnt meant that way. I was only adding to another reply...
but with that, if the 10 antennae works, your good.. if it doesnt, you will have spent that 10 on junk, and now you will have to spend another 20 to look for the next best antenna..... if it doesnt work, well.... there is still the 65 dollar antennae that has been tested by some of us here, that you may end up buying.... so the total cost of decent reception will work out to only 95 dollars.... so hopefully you get the point.
at what point does a person cut their losses and get the right stuff the first time?.... the answer is, when one learns the cheapest stuff on the market is NOT always the most affordable..
but keep in mind that none of these mini antennaes are ever going close to giving the same performance as the 20ft house roof top models
Lee,
Please report back to us with your feelings about it. And bring me some shrimp from Edisto. ;-)
Sure will Kermit that's one of the main reasons for retireing here! Love shrimp season #3 washtub and a 12 pack of beer !
I realize this may not be what you're looking for, and far be it for me to challenge the wisdom of folks who know more - probably a lot more - about the electromagnetic spectrum than I do, but I bought a $15 "indoor" digital TV antenna for us to use at home (in Long Beach, CA) and it works very well.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00INHG5QA
It works well enough that we use this in combination with a Channel Master and a 2 TB external hard drive, and we cut our cable. We do not miss cable at all and are saving money each month.
Despite its claim of being "multi-directional", I found that it really only works when the flat plane is oriented roughly perpendicular to the transmitters (on top of Mt. Wilson for most over-the-air stations in the L.A. area). However, it works magnificently 99% of the time. Weather does seem to impact it, for certain stations/channels.
Anyway the main thing that seems to affect the reception with our $15 (admittedly indoor) antenna is its installed height off the ground. I ended up placing it in an upstairs window, routing the cable to our TV downstairs.
I may, one day, buy a small TV for the boat, just to exclusively watch sports or whatever while at the dock. If/when I do, I will experiment a bit but plan on hoisting it, a-la-radar target, from one of our flag halyards. Ghetto-looking? Yes. Effective? That's all I care about.
YMMV.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00INHG5QA
It works well enough that we use this in combination with a Channel Master and a 2 TB external hard drive, and we cut our cable.
We do not miss cable at all and are saving money each month. Despite its claim of being "multi-directional", I found that it really only works when the flat plane is oriented roughly perpendicular to the transmitters (on top of Mt. Wilson for most over-the-air stations in the L.A. area). However, it works magnificently 99% of the time. Weather does seem to impact it, for certain stations/channels.
Anyway the main thing that seems to affect the reception with our $15 (admittedly indoor) antenna is its installed height off the ground. I ended up placing it in an upstairs window, routing the cable to our TV downstairs.
I may, one day, buy a small TV for the boat, just to exclusively watch sports or whatever while at the dock. If/when I do, I will experiment a bit but plan on hoisting it, a-la-radar target, from one of our flag halyards.
Ghetto-looking? Yes. Effective? That's all I care about. YMMV.
Good Kermit, if ya need peaches have 2 trees! Or my blueberry pie is killer and the berry grow in my backyard bushes are 8'ft tall!
This is generally true, especially the part where the quality of the signal cannot be improved over what the antenna receives but a good quality antenna will have an amplifier where the gain can be adjusted to optimize the strength of that signal with minimum distortion. Signal strength varies from station to station and for some stations the amplification can be turned off but for those weak ones having an amplifier might be the only way of pulling them in. I would agree that a cheap not adjustable amplifier would be worse than having nothing at all.
Over the last few years I have tried a few different type of TV antenna's the cheap and $$$$$
and some times the cheap work but the weather or different locations seem to make a difference for sure.
I did try the wallmart and radio shack ones but returned them and did have good reception
but not perfect with a Marine ant from WM and even my Glomex does not work all the time but most times it gives plenty of channels better than any others I tried.
The weather seems to be the thing that is a game changer but we like watching the news and local channels before going to sleep at night and we do have DVD as backup.
Some like to read and some like music or TV and what ever makes a happy crew is best thing to do and happy crew happy life.
Nick
and some times the cheap work but the weather or different locations seem to make a difference for sure.
I did try the wallmart and radio shack ones but returned them and did have good reception
but not perfect with a Marine ant from WM and even my Glomex does not work all the time but most times it gives plenty of channels better than any others I tried.
The weather seems to be the thing that is a game changer but we like watching the news and local channels before going to sleep at night and we do have DVD as backup.
Some like to read and some like music or TV and what ever makes a happy crew is best thing to do and happy crew happy life.
Nick
Togglswtch to you VHF Marine radio. Frequency is close. You may not get American idol but yo will definitely be entertained
We have a Majestic UFO omnidirectional with a 30 db amp at the antenna. Works well. Amp helps drive the signal through about 55 ft of coax. Made a mistake though and didn't realize that many 22 - inch and smaller flat screen TVs now use a external 12v power supply. Our RCA with built in DVD is 115v so I got a small inverter at best buy that's used to power laptops and power it that way... dedicated to the TV. The old Scan TV was SD, but took 12v. So I put the inverter on that dc breaker with proper fuse of course. Interesting how the technology moves so fast. The antenna goes to an A B switch so you can select either the cable TV from the dock pedestal or the antenna. In reality, while at the dock the WiFi is so good it's better to stream Netflix or similar. No cable TV offered at our marina.
Dan
Dan
He is saying to try your existing VHF radio antenna for your TV signal using a toggle switch to switch the antenna between the two devices.
o.k. still don't get the toggle switch once they are hooked up together if one is not in use then strength would not matter