antenna for 60302...should be simple, right?

[mikejaz2]

I live in Oak Park, the first suburb straight west of Chicago. My situation should be pretty straightforward; I'm 9 miles away from downtown Chicago, where all the major transmitting antennas are located, and have a straight shot to the Sears Tower.

My problem: I'm 3 houses down from the CTA Green Line and Metra Commuter Rail's West line. Every time a train passes by (often), I get terrible multipath, the signal degrading into a mess of blocks, bad audio and finally, no picture at all (if the train's long enough). Additionally, I live on a beautiful tree-lined street...with all of these large trees between my antenna location (on a mast attached to the chimney of my two-storey home) and the transmitting antennas.

I own 2 HD sets - an HP Pavilion LC26000N on the first floor, and an HP PL5060N upstairs in the viewing room. I also plan to feed at least one converter box (yet to be bought) so I can continue to use an older analog VCR.

What suggestions might you have?

[tigerbangs]

What are you using for an antenna? It may be old, corroded, misaimed, have a broken or loose cable connection, or inadaquate for your needs...

[mikejaz2]

I was using the Radio Shack (model unknown) VHF-UHF-FM antenna I put up on the roof back in the early 90s. It's a fairly large multi-element array unit. It worked, but gave me the multipath problems I've described. I've disconnected it in favor of two small "rabbit ear" antennas. The simplest of these is a rabbit-ears and loop unit (model 15-1874) downstairs on the 26", which works pretty poorly; the other is a more complex rabbit ears with a tunable center loop (15-1868) upstairs on the 50", which seems to work better (though not on Channel 2, which uses the lowest-frequency carrier in the area).

As I said, any antenna works great...until the trains roll by. Then I get lousy to nonexistent reception.

[tigerbangs]

i suspect that your antenna on the roof has a bad cable connection, or a bad bauln transformer (300 ohm to 75 ohm transformer. If you installed it back in the 1990's, it's probably time to upgrade it anyway. If it isn't doing any better than rabbit ears, you have a serious problem with the antenna. I would get up on the roof when time and weather permits, and replace the RS antenna and all of the coaxial cable with new RG-6u coax with the best cable "F" fittings that you can buy, and use a Winegard HD-7696P VHF-high-band VHF +UHF antenna aimed downtown. Use a high quality 1 gHz or better splitter to divide the signal to the two tuners. That new antenna and the new coaxial cable should solve your issues once and for all.

http://www.winegard.com
http://www.pctinternational.com/channel ... lation.pdf

[mikejaz2]

The guy at my local electronics outlet (pro level, very reputable, been in the business longer than I have) said he thought the HD-7696P was too much antenna for my location (less than 10 miles from Sears Tower antennas), and he thought that the HD-7015 would be better. When I mentioned my train-induced multipath to him, however, he said he wanted to consult a guy at Wingard. That was a week ago, and so far nada, so I thought I'd beg your indulgence again. What's your opinion between those two antennas, and are they directional enough to reject the bounces off the trains?

[tigerbangs]

You want the most directional, multipath-reducing antenna that you can find, and the HD-7015 ain't it. Remember, the bigger the antenna, and the more elements that it has, the more directional it is. The HD-7015 is large because it gets low-band VHF, which you don't need after June 12, but it is less directional than the HD-7696P. IUf you didn't have the train to contend with, it might be an OK suggestion, but otherwise, mount the HD-7696P up as high as you can possibly stand it.

[mikejaz2]

Thanks, boss. Winegard Direct it is!

And after I get this all set up, I'll report back, as well as muse on why 90% of the people I talk to (including the majority of people involved in television production, outside of broadcast) don't know that you can get HD over the air...really!