Saltwater buck
SE Tx
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What can I do to help my TV antenna? I leave my camper in one spot all through hunting season, in the hill country of Texas. I get ok service now, but it's in and out. Thanks
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wmoses
Houston, Texas, USA
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What antenna system do you have? If you have a Winegard, there is an add-on called a Wingman that may work and improve your reception.
http://winegard.com/wingman/
Regards,
Wayne
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Old-Biscuit
Across the USA
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Joined: 06/20/2009
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Height........
Buy an outdoor antenna, attach it to long pole, hook up coax cable to sat or cable connector on trailer. Swap distribution box to sat or cable leave TV on antenna and rescan.
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prichardson
Lafayette, La
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Welcome to the digital world. Either of the above may help. The outdoor plus an amplifier may help. With digital TV you no longer have a fringe area where you get a weak fuzzy signal; you have good reception or nothing as you have found out.
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Gdetrailer
PA
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Welcome to the new and improved digital world of over the air tv.
Digital is all or nothing, unlike analog which could tolerate weak signals and noise.
Digital does not do well with anything in the path in between you and the station, buildings, trees, mountains, ant hills all will interfere with it.
Best thing is get your antenna up high, bigger antenna is better, a good antenna preamp, RG-6 wire at the min and keep the wire as short as possible. Antenna rotator is a must.
You will need to turn antenna, scan, then turn and scan again to get all stations.
If you have ANY passive splitters get rid of them, they are all loss. For multiple TVs you need to buy a AMPLIFIED coupler, these give gain for each port instead of 3.5 DB loss which you get with passive splitters.
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Earthroamer82
Virginia Beach, VA
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You can also download a free App for your phone that will show you the best direction to point your antenna. The one I use is called simply enough antenna helper.
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macason
Miami
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Go to the government FCC site www.dtv.gov and on the rt. side of the page is RECEPTION MAPS. A map and list of stations will pop up. I usually look at my campground receipt and enter in the zip code. The green sites are usually 100% good. The next ones down are also 70% good if you have a clear sight line (not in a deep forest or up against tall buildings). I added the $26 UHF directors to my batwing antenna and I'm usually good up to 50 miles on both uhf and vhf signals. What is important is to click on the station names and the signal strength and direction to the towers will open up and the map will show a visual line to the tower. With DTV most stations are now grouped together unless you are located between markets. I take my compass or iphone outside and locate the direction to the antenna towers. Remember that the long VHF batwing (dipole) receives equally well in front and back directions. The small UHF (yagi) antenna with the directors has true gain in only the direction of the small antennas. The uhf stations will come in great but remember that the increased gain will also cause a narrow beam width and a few degrees off will cause the degradation of the stations signal. Moving the antenna in little movements while watching the tv will clear then up quickly. Without the directors for UHF stations you will probably lose the ability to recieve many stations. The longest part of the set up is going to the FCC web site and locating the beam headings. One or two trips outside to check that I have the turned the antenna in the right direction and I'm done.
* This post was
edited 01/03/12 10:59am by an administrator/moderator *
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RoyB
King George, VA
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got to LOWES and buy their best and biggest HOUSE antenna which runs around $90.
It will fold-out to make a rather large footprint. Use the wide beam element setting first to pick up digital antenna signals. Once you find out where the TV signals are then you can set the antenna for narrow beam element position and possible get a stronger Tv signal after you zero in on it..
Adapt that to a RG 6 cable using a xfmr and connect the other end of the RG6 cable to your anmplified anttena panel (the one with a smal push button switch and a red or green light comes on when you push in the pushbutton switch.
This antenna will outperform any RV OTA antenna you can fine. It is just to be to transport with the RVs on the move but in your case it will work like gang busters.
Get the large LOWES antenna on the highest PVC or antenna metal pole and point the antenna to a town that is transmitting at digital TV signal... from the MENU of the HDTV set select sTuner Mode set for ANETNNA.
Then select Auto search to ON.
The HDTV will start scaninng for analog channels which it should not find any. Then it will start scanning for digital channels.
If you dont see any channel number popping in on the screen for the first 15% of scanning stop the scan and move the Lowes antenna to another knwn city or town that has digital TV transmitters.
Start the scan auto search over again.
My auto search takeas about 5-minutes to complete a total scan.
We usually pick up 6-36 digital stations just about anywhere we go...
Just like at home you have to scan in the channel before you can view them
Once you figure out where all the TV signals are being transmitted from - remember that direction.
Good luck
I am breaking one of my golden rules here where I only describe things in the 'This is what I did to make it work..." Please think in the "this is what RoyB did to make it work" I got carried away here but can re-write it if you like... I ran one of these large foot print antenna for about two years and finally totally destroyed it by taking it down and transporting every other weekend in my OFF-ROAD 14RT POPUP.
My Posts are IMHO based on my experiences - PM me
Roy and Carolyn
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Saltwater buck
SE Tx
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All great ideas. I've explored some.....so if I have a wingard on it already, I can just add the wingman? I might try this.
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Saltwater buck
SE Tx
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macason wrote:Go to the government FCC site www.dtv.gov and on the rt. side of the page is RECEPTION MAPS. A map and list of stations will pop up. I usually look at my campground receipt and enter in the zip code. The green sites are usually 100% good. The next ones down are also 70% good if you have a clear sight line (not in a deep forest or up against tall buildings).
Great map, thanks alot!
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