Mike left this note (bottom of this post) in an earlier post I had here about DTV and a design for a Fractal TV antenna.
I mentioned the Terk antenna that I bought, but maybe you want to hold off on that idea. This is a fine UHF antenna, but it looks like when the broadcasters free up the VHF channels that they are using for the analog channel they are sending out, they may go back to their original channel allocations in the VHF band. Especially, channels in the high VHF band (channels 7-13). This would make directional antennas like small yagis and the fractal antenna questionable. It could be that you could go back to your regular rabbit ears, if you end up with local broadcasters that are using VHF.
Click here for a good article that explains this.
You might want to hold off on buying or building that new antenna until you find out exactly what your local broadcasters are going to do. If you did buy the Terk antenna, I’m sure it will continue to provide good service as it does have VHF “ears”, but you might want to hold off. If most of the broadcasters switch to hi-VHF channels…. Normal rabbit ears might be enough. The fractal antennas or the yagi style antennas tuned for UHF wouldn’t be good.
In other news, Congress said no to an extension of the digital transition date on Wednesday, as House Republicans blocked a bill to extend the analog broadcasting cutoff date from Feb. 18 until June.
Frankly, I’m expecting that if the broadcasters are going to return to the upper VHF band after the Feb. 18 change, DTV should work pretty well with rabbit ears.
Either way, you better get down to the store and grab a converter box if you expect to watch TV off an antenna on Thursday. Even if you don’t have an HDTV, I think you’ll find it an improvement in your viewing experience.
Mike Johnson says:
January 31, 2009 at 6:19 pm (Edit)
As an earlier response said, this is a bow tie array, and is undoubtedly good for UHF. However, this will not work very well for VHF, mostly because the wavelength of VHF is much longer than that of UHF. Many TV stations in many areas of the country, will be transmitting DTV on VHF frequencies, if not already, after the transition. There is no such thing, per se, as an HDTV antenna. If you are receiving a good analog signal on your current antenna, on both VHF and UHF channels, you will get a great digital signal. A standard VHF/UHF color television antenna will suffice, be it set top, in the attic or rooftop. In some areas, attenuation may be necessary. Don’t forget to rescan after the transition. I like the video. It is well done.