"Jeff Liebermann" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 15 Feb 2009 21:59:13 -0800 (PST), Bill Bowden
wrote:

Anybody have a good antenna design for the new UHF digital TV
stations?

I get reasonable results from my old VHF/UHF antenna (55% signal
strength) , but it's big and ugly, and I want to replace it with a
smaller, more efficient UHF design (maybe a Yagi) I can construct at
home.

Rule of thumb: The bigger and uglier the antenna, the better it works.

Anybody know the dimensions of such an antenna,

Various commercial digital TV antennas:
http://www.hdtvprimer.com/ANTENNAS/comparing.html
with Eznec NEC2 files at:
http://www.hdtvprimer.com/SIMS/

probabaly in the
frequency range of 400-800 Mhz ?

There are going to be some DTV stations in the VHF range. You might
want to check the new channels for your area:
http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-07-138A2.xls
List of frequencies:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_A...ion_frequencie
s
Note that the upper end of the UHF TV band will be channel 51 at
698Mhz.


Many good all-channel antennas exist but the absolute best-performing
antennas are limited to covering one band, sometimes just a portion of one
band. (This idea started a lot of do-it-yourself antenna projects.)

If you determine that you have some stations on VHF and some on UHF,
consider having more than one antenna. In a home where I lived in the
pre-cable days, I had four different antennas.

Of note: The bigger the antenna, the more likely it will be highly
directional. If you expect to receive weak stations from more than one
direction, you'll probably need either a rotator or more than one antenna.
It's probably better to connect multiple antennas through an A/B switch,
rather than combining them.