Built a couple that way myself when I was a kid. It was what I could afford.
ahh, yes, and you still can't beat the price for experimenting. Found twinlead for ten cents a foot at local hardware store.
This is all greek to me
Well Jamie I am a fish equally out of water in your knowledge area. I had an unusual high school course in electronics that shaped my life mainly due to the wonderful teacher we had - an old retired Merchant Marine radioman. He got us boys to the point we could build a radio from vacuum tubes (this was early sixties)... i'd have never made it through engineering school without the foundation he built.
I never learned a thing about finance or business - i'm a "Trustee from the Toolroom" type.
If you're interested, the basic antenna is simpler than you'd expect from the looks of that site.
step 1: find the frequency of interest...
go to antennaweb.org and find the digital tv stations in your area
go to this site to find frequency of each station
http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/catv-ch.htmlstep 2:
figure the half-wavelength as follows:
halfwavelength = speed of light / frequency / 2
which is real easy in meters it's [300 / (number of megacycles)] / 2
now convert to inches, multiply by 39.37 of course
example:
channel 35 is 597 megacycles
channel 36 is 603 megacycles
an antenna for 600 megacycles, to keep arithmetic easy , would be
halfwavelength = 300 / 600 /2 = 0.25 meter
halfwavelength in inches is then 0.25 X 39.37 = 9.84 just shy of ten inches......
so you'd cut a piece of twinlead that long....
at one end skin a little bit, maybe a quarter inch, and twist the bare wires together,,,
repeat at other end,
now at the MIDPOINT cut ust ONE of the conductors and again skin a quarter inch or so of both new "ends",,
now get one of those antenna matching transformers (twin lead to coaxial) (Junkshops have them for typically a quarter, or about three bucks at Radio Shack. You probably got one with yourt last TV set. )
Connect the transformer twinlead wire ends to the midpoint of your antenna......
twist the bare wires together and if you're equiped to apply a drop of solder do so, else secure with GorillaGlue or Epoxy to a small piece of plastic for strength... I mount mine on a 3/8 inch dowel , sorta like a divinning rod....
and now you have a "poor Man's Tuned Antenna" with Coax terminal...... hook a co-ax cable to your DTV converter box and walk around the room and see where you get best signal strength. My converter box has a button to show signal strength..
Note antenna can be any ODD number of half wavelengths long, like 1, 3 or 5 etc, so if you built it for 200 mhz it'd also work at 600. We lucked out in Idaho, have stations around 180 and 540 megahertz (3::1 ratio) so one antenna gets 'em all.
You see these sold in hi-fi stores for around ten bucks, tuned to middle of FM band about 60 inches. At ten cents a foot that's under a dollar's worth of material.
You can add more wires in front of and behind the loop to get slightly better performance , that's what that antenna site figures for you the length and spacing of extra elements. They need not be loops... but we noticed little difference in signal strength and use just the one twinlead loop.
have fun,
a.........
Cogito ergo doleo.
