I haven’t had a subscription service for mass-market television in more than a decade. Some of the cable and satellite bills people pay every month astound me and I laugh quietly to myself when I read that ‘cord cutting’ is all the new rage. Who knew one of the pillars of my hermit lifestyle would become hipster chic, eh? That doesn’t mean I don’t have entertainment on my screen mind you, it’s just that I haven’t suffered the rapidly declining quality of broadcast television in ages. If there’s a rare show that interests me (Gardener’s World, Grand Designs, etc.), I use this new thing called “the internet” to stream it into my living room.
Most of my news comes online via traditional ‘print’ media providers, most of which have been forced to go digital in the past decade. Not a horrible thing but I do worry that both the quality and depth of those organizations is being attacked from all sides by social media and the ten-second attention span of the digital generations. The CBC’s tendency of late to resort to compilations of short tweets as real news is disturbing to say the least. I use a blocking program in my browser that stops any marketing pings back to the likes of the Facebook and Twitter mother ships which has the curious side effect of showing me only the parts of a story that were actually written rather than copied, pasted, or linked in from outside sources. Oftentimes I see two or three sentences stuck in between swaths of blank ‘link not allowed’ sections – those companies don’t share unless you give them your digital footprint.
Still, the largest players on international news circuits have been able to transition to the digital era without sacking all of their writers and they remain reasonable albeit frequently biased sources for now. I use the National Post for general news here in Canada and often check BBC News on the international front. The Guardian (UK) has good lifestyle reporting (i.e. food & dining columns) in between the liberal ranting. None of these organizations, however, is really going to tell me what’s happening at the local community centre or around the Maritime provinces with any regularity. I think in an odd way that’s led me to be a bit more isolated from the local happenings than need be. Here it seems people still love their homespun local nightly television news.
So this week I set out to find some free television. I’m not so interested in the local goat exhibition or heated debate about traffic signs on Main street (both actual stories) that I want to pay for television again but it would be nice to get the weather forecast or know the farm up the road is having its first wine tasting next weekend. Lucky for me all three national Canadian networks make their new digital signals available over-the-air for free (OTA) if only I can pluck them from the distant skies and route them to the television tuner parked in my computer.
Unlike the days of old where you had to hold a pair of rabbit ears in one hand and do complicated yoga poses to get a snowy picture if you were lucky, the government mandated transition to digital signals a few years ago have made airwaves reception an all-or-nothing proposition. With digital you either get the image or not. It will be perfectly clear high-definition or nothing at all with the only rare middle ground being an unwatchable stuttering series of images if you happen to be right at the signal threshold. In my case one of the three stations showed up perfectly with just a simple ‘coat hanger’ antenna that I threw together in minutes. To get the other two stations parked more than fifty miles away I was going to have to put on my hacker hat.
The net is filled with homemade HDTV antenna designs but the version I settled on as an upgrade from the coat hanger is called a Gray-Hoverman design. Mr. Hoverman came up with his blueprints when television was newly minted in the late 1950s. A dedicated following of hackers and hobbyists has re-emerged since the transition to digital signals has made antenna farming popular again, especially in urban centres that have a multitude of towers broadcasting plenty of free channels within easy reach, i.e. less than 25 miles distant. Out here in the sticks we have fewer options but those same antenna designs can still pluck video magic out of the air for free at double that distance.
He shows how to make both ‘single bay’ and ‘stacked bay’ models but I suspect the latter is only needed if you’re really in the middle of nowhere desperately trying to grab signals from 75 miles out through dense forests or over local foothills. For my limited purposes I used only the single bay contraption you see above. Here’s the parts list I scavenged from my nerd stash at 3am:
Ten feet of solid-core 10awg bare copper wire
Six screws with matching washers
A hunk of wood at least four inches wide and two feet long
One standard coaxial cable (shielded, RG-6) to reach from antenna to tuner
The rack from one turkey roasting pan (Thanksgiving is Monday here)
One 75-300ohm impedance matching transformer (aka. “balun”)
Miscellaneous rubber bands, plastic clips, & zip ties
I had all these bits laying around but if you were to procure them at your local open-air hacker bazaar, the whole list should be less than ten bucks. The balun – which is a portmanteau of “balanced” & “unbalanced” from the signal loads you’re manipulating – will cost you $5 at the local hardware store when you need one but I’ve literally accumulated a box full of them over the years since they’re often included with other electronics. Ask your geek friends and they probably have a spare they’d love to give you in exchange for a casual pizza date.
The copper wire is most of the rest of that budget and if you’re making several of these, go online (eBay, Amazon, et. al.) and save yourself a bundle while waiting for Chinese shipping. They can sell you both the wire and the baluns in bulk. If you don’t happen to have a cheap wire turkey rack handy, the dollar store will have something similar (e.g. a baker’s rack, metal screening). The key there seems to be that it’s a nice symmetrical grid to act as a signal reflector. Even chicken wire would work from what I read but more expert builders dive into the science that dictates two ‘half reflectors’ with a gap in between. In my case I just grabbed what was (literally) within reach and held it up to the array twisting and turning until my signal meter was happy. Experimentation for the win. Television signals don’t care about it being pretty although your neighbours might.
I won’t bore you with all the other build details since discussions and diagrams abound everywhere on the internet but do remember that relatively accurate measuring is important. In our local reception landscape 2mm probably won’t hurt but 10mm in the wrong spot might just throw off the balance. Different shapes mean different frequencies and that determines which bits of ether are trapped out of thin air to be turned into your evening news.
For locals that want more precise build details and reception particulars in our specific region, I’ve added a “reception report” to this forum of fellow antenna geeks. Great info and more antenna designs than you could possibly want live over there.
Update: I’ve discovered a new design that’s even easier to build and works slightly better. Details can be found in this post.
