"mfc" wrote in message
om...
Hi.

I am working on building a TV antenna to receive channel 5, and I was
wondering if plugging two 3 foot wires into a 2-way splitter would
essentially be the same thing as rabbit ears in terms of
functionality.

The splitter I am considering is on the right at:


http://www.radioshack.com/category.a...egory%5Fname=C
TLG%5F007%5F002%5F001%5F006&Page=1

Google on "wilkinson combiner"

These splitters are lossy. Loss is not what you want in an antenna.
The device that closest matches what you're thinking of, is called a balun.
(balanced to unbalanced transformer)
With a balun in hand, you can use two 1/4 wave wires with the balun in the
middle to form a dipole
ntenna.. --------------------B----------------------
You'll have a hard time finding a 1-1 ratio balun for TV though. Most are
4-1 so you want to do a folded dipole, which matches the resulting 300 ohm
impedance fairly well.. (75 * 4 = 300)

/-----------------------------------------\
\-------------------b---------------------/

Like that.

Again, google is your friend.
Antenna designs can be scaled by frequency.
A 300 MHz version of a 100 MHz antenna design, is 1/3 the size.