The FCC asked for several groups to assist people in the change over.
One of them was Amateur Radio through the ARRL.
Now it is not like we are expected to go into a strangers house to provide help.
However, just helping out your family and friends will be a big help for the industry and broadcasters.
Since my Father and Uncle both use an Antennas to receive their TV - I assisted them in getting converted over to DTV
Both of them live 48 and 51 air miles from New York City which is a long distance to get what will mostly be UHF broadcasts.
What follows below is how we did our conversions - You are on Your OWN with your installation.
You are Experimenting, and maybe working on ladders and roofs, etc - if this makes you uncomfortable or you do not know what your doing - Then Hire a Professional to do it for you ! DO NOT blame me if everything Does Not work for you - or Worse !
They both applied and received 2 coupons each for DTV boxes - which saved them about $40.00 a box
Just hooking up the DTV converters to their existing VHF/UHF antenna's did allow them to receive the "big three" channels 2 - 4 - 7 in our area.
One of the nice things about the DTV converter boxes is they have a way to read signal strength. So the signal strength was about 50%. I knew we could do better - so both of them spent a about $100.00 more each, for a Amplifier and an additional UHF antenna. In the pictures below you can see we mounted and hooked the additional UHF antenna up in parallel with the the existing antenna on the same mast.
We used 300 ohm twin lead between the antenna's and then it was 75 ohm coax down and into the house to the DTV box and TV.
FYI the mast is connected to a good ground rod with 8 ga wire.
We are also looking to purchase a coax type lighting arrester to put in before spring as well.
Now both of them receive about 35 channels. Some are Spanish and Korean also a couple of kiddie type shows. Overall they now have all the main Broadcast stations (2 - 4 - 5 - 7 - 9 - 11 and several NJN stations) and a few others they could not get before. The Signal strength is 80% + on the big broadcasters now - a huge improvement ! One station that is missing though is Channel 13 ? But they may not be broadcasting yet.
Some time in the near future I will get the complete list and post it here.
73 de N2SMV
