Strictly speaking this isn’t amateur radio. But it is RF, there are electromagnetic waves, there’s an antenna, there is transmission line, there are amplifiers and there are receivers, one of which is in the ham shack. And it was a fun little project so I figure it’s worth writing about.
A few years ago we ditched our satellite TV service. Paying that kind of cash and never finding anything to watch did it for us. We only kept it as long as we did so we could watch Formula 1 racing. We can stream that for cheap so it was goodbye to the satellite dish and hello to terrestrial broadcast television. Just like the old days.
Did I mention that we live in a valley? As my friend Sid asked “Why does a radio geek live in a valley? Shouldn’t you live on a hill?” Shut up, Sid. The valley added a challenge to the goal of OTA TV reception.
The old satellite dish was removed and discarded. It seemed a shame to toss out perfectly good RF gear but I couldn’t think of a use for it (nor it’s LNA’s) other than maybe a bird bath. And I no longer have enough space to allow me to say “I will keep that just in case…”.
On it’s abandoned mount I installed a small Yagi suitable for modern VHF/UHF TV reception. The gain of this antenna is not specified in the manual, sadly. But going by the number of elements on each band I estimated that it had both sufficient gain and broad enough lobes to handle what I was going to ask of it.
Antenna
In 2009 here in Canada television broadcasting underwent some major changes. Analog broadcasting was done away with and going forward only digital broadcasting would be permitted using the ATSC format. The low-VHF TV band was also done away with.
Antenna-wise that was good news as antennas for just high-VHF and UHF are smaller. Like this one:
Low Noise Amplifier
Because my QTH is located in a fairly deep river valley I needed some gain. A LNA (Low Noise Amplifier) up at the antenna was going to be needed. Some shopping led to a good option. It’s not the best LNA in the world but it get the job done nicely.
Distribution amplifier
The LNA feeds down some RG-6 to the basement where I installed a distribution amplifier to feed the two TV tuners we have. It feeds the big TV in the home theatre and an ATSC tuner in the ham shack which connects to a 32″monitor via an HDMI switch.
ATSC tuner
This is the ATSC tuner I use to catch digital TV broadcasts. It was cheap and it works fine. It even has an RSSI indication, just like a real radio! I have a nice 34″ Samsung monitor in the ham shack for computer use so all I needed was the ATSC tuner above and an HDMI switch to be able to have TV in the ham shack.
With 35 dB of system gain we get reliable TV reception from the local broadcasters in the area. It’s actually ended up being more gain than was needed so the AGCs in the receivers are getting a workout!
We’ve come full circle in our house. We both grew up with over-the-air TV, then we moved to cable TV, then to satellite TV and now we’re back to OTA. Everything old is new again.
We can have 200 channels of rubbish for $75/month or 7 channels of rubbish for $0/month. The choice was clear. I just wanted local and national news. Problem solved.