I'm not an engineer who specializes in antennas, but I looked at the Winegard Wingman today and am I disappointed in what I saw. The Winegard Wingman is made of plastic except for 6 metal "wings". There is no metal to metal contact with installed antenna at all. My experience has been antennas need metal to metal contact to make an improvement in signal strength. And this device doesn't have it. Am I missing something, and has anyone tried one and did it improve your reception?
I bought one last week from CW then went to Sam's and bought a new HD TV (is there any other kind?)as well. I installed the TV first in the camper and scanned the stations and got "0" channels, analog or digital, even bypassed the booster too. The nearest station is just 30 miles away, others are as least 50 miles.
I took the new Wingman out the box and though the same as you; it doesn't even bolt on, just plastic clips, how can this work? Installed in 5 minuets and back down to the camper and re-scanned again, to my surprise it found three analog channels and 4 digital and three of them are in HD. Wow, I wouldn't have believed it.
Like I told my camping buddy... "It's time to get with todays technology". For just $26 it was worth it even if it didn't work (remembering back on our childhood days when we would blow our allowance on a sideshow just for the fun of thinking we'd see more than we did).
Leewhiz wrote: I'm not an engineer who specializes in antennas, but I looked at the Winegard Wingman today and am I disappointed in what I saw. The Winegard Wingman is made of plastic except for 6 metal "wings". There is no metal to metal contact with installed antenna at all. My experience has been antennas need metal to metal contact to make an improvement in signal strength. And this device doesn't have it. Am I missing something, and has anyone tried one and did it improve your reception?
Although you don't specialize in antennas, you may find this post by SCVJeff, who used a spectrum analyzer to compare the Winegard batwind antenna, with and without the Wingman.
The directors that the Wingman adds turn the UHF dipole antenna in the Sensar housing into a much more directional Yagi antenna, with a higher gain than the dipole alone. The director elements do not need to be electrically connected to the dipole to function properly, and in fact would not work properly if they were.
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