"MTV" wrote in message
...
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.

Anybody know the dimensions of such an antenna, probabaly in the
frequency range of 400-800 Mhz ?

-Bill

You could just cut off the long VHF elements and use them, cut to UHF
size, to extend and increase the number of director elements.

MTV

Yes. I have a seven foot TV parabola on my roof, but my next-best antenna
is an absolute piece of junk, literally. My neighbor was throwing out an
all-channel antenna that was blown down in a storm and badly damaged. I
clipped the connections between the UHF & VHF sections and hacksawed off the
mostly undamaged UHF section (12 directors, I think). With a section of
pipe rudely jammed into the boom as a counterweight, I'm pulling in stations
125 miles away almost as well as with the parabola.

Turning other people's discards into functional devices is an art. (I'm the
guy who worked Hawaii on 20m with 100 Watts into an extension ladder. ...
and no, I wasn't feeding it with ladder line.)

"Sal"
(KD6VKW)