old tv antenna good for sw?
 

its just up there on the side of the house... i have cable and never took down
the antenna... can i just plug the receiver into the wall jack or will i do
serious damage?

On 30 Oct 2004 22:58:34 GMT, (DanielLAlvarez)
wrote:

its just up there on the side of the house... i have cable and never took down
the antenna... can i just plug the receiver into the wall jack or will i do
serious damage?

No damage ....... unless it's hooked up to your radio when lightning
hits it. If you don't have an external shortwave antenna you may
notice some improvement over your current situation - though it is
hardly what I'd call a "prime choice" for shortwave.

Howard

"DanielLAlvarez" wrote in message
...
| its just up there on the side of the house... i have cable and never took
down
| the antenna... can i just plug the receiver into the wall jack or will i
do
| serious damage?

My advice would be to give it a shot.
I've used old 300 ohm downlead wire
(which was just sort of "hanging" from
a 70 - foot tower), fed into my old Yaesu
FRG-7 with excellent results!

73,

--
Steve Lawrence
KAØPMD
Burnsville, Minnesota

"If a man wants his dreams to come true then he must wake up."
- Anonymous


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It'll be better than nothing but it's designed for vhf/uhf...way too small for
hf...good luck..

Steve
knwd ts4fity
80 meter full wave loop

its just up there on the side of the house... i have cable and never took
down
the antenna... can i just plug the receiver into the wall jack or will i do
serious damage?

Remember that the antenna is horizontally polarized. If you get good
results then leave it be. If you want better reception then turn the
antenna 90 degrees for vertical polarization which is what all commercial
vhf and up communications is.

Good Luck

"DanielLAlvarez" wrote in message
...
its just up there on the side of the house... i have cable and never took
down
the antenna... can i just plug the receiver into the wall jack or will i
do
serious damage?

dennis wrote:

Remember that the antenna is horizontally polarized.

I don't know if the polarization makes much difference. There was talk
about that here some years ago. I don't remember the details, but the
distances the signal travels had something to do with it. The
propagation bounces diminish the effect?




mike

dennis wrote:
Remember that the antenna is horizontally polarized. If you get good
results then leave it be. If you want better reception then turn the
antenna 90 degrees for vertical polarization which is what all commercial
vhf and up communications is.

I'm not so sure it's horizontally polarized for shortwave!

(in any case the polarization of shortwave signals tends to be rather
indeterminate after bouncing around in the ionosphere)
--
Doug Smith W9WI
Pleasant View (Nashville), TN EM66
http://www.w9wi.com

DanielLAlvarez wrote:
its just up there on the side of the house... i have cable and never took down
the antenna... can i just plug the receiver into the wall jack or will i do
serious damage?

It won't do any damage.

It won't be the most effective shortwave antenna in the world but it
might be better than the built-in antenna on your radio. Try it!

-- Try connecting the inner conductor and the outer conductor of the
feedline together, and connecting *both* to the center conductor of the
antenna jack on the receiver. It's likely to pick up a lot more signal
- though it's also likely to pick up a lot more noise. If the signal
increases more than the noise then you're in businessgrin.

-- If you have a "booster" on the TV antenna, you'll need to remove it
before the antenna will do much good on SW. However, if you tie the
inner and outer conductors of the feedline together it might still work
well with the booster in place.

(you should remove the booster anyway. Sometimes unused boosters will
"oscillate", radiating a strong signal that interferes with other
people's TVs)
--
Doug Smith W9WI
Pleasant View (Nashville), TN EM66
http://www.w9wi.com

"dennis" ) writes:
Remember that the antenna is horizontally polarized. If you get good
results then leave it be. If you want better reception then turn the
antenna 90 degrees for vertical polarization which is what all commercial
vhf and up communications is.

Good Luck

That's not going to have any relevance, since the antenna is way too small
at shortwave. The only way it's going to be useful is as a random length
of wire, including the feed cable, and the short (for shortwave) lenghts of
wire that are "horizontally polarized" won't have one bit of impact.

Micahel


"DanielLAlvarez" wrote in message
...
its just up there on the side of the house... i have cable and never took
down
the antenna... can i just plug the receiver into the wall jack or will i
do
serious damage?

its just up there on the side of the house... i have cable and never took
down
the antenna... can i just plug the receiver into the wall jack or will i
do
serious damage?

Depending on the quality of the TV antenna it may be better than you think.
On some antennas the elements are just straight wires, but on some antennas
they are wires that are bent back over themselves. You can unbend those
wires and make the elements twice as long as they were.