OTA Antenna Build

Since I got rid of my cable a couple of years ago, I've been enjoying free over-the-air (OTA) television. Definitely one of the benefits to living in a city versus the small rural area I grew up in! Slowly more and more OTA channels have been showing up but with the digital transition that happened on August 31, now all the channels that I get are digital.

Because my television is older and doesn't have a built-in digital tuner, I've been using a set of old-school rabbit ears to grab the analog channels and then an antenna I bought from Monoprice to grab the digital channels. Once everything went to digital, I wanted to go to a single antenna and connect it to my external tuner.

After reading information on-line and talking to James and Roo, I decided to take a bit of time and built a simple antenna of my own. Being located in Barrhaven (south Ottawa) I was already pretty lucky in that my location allowed me to receive all the local channels already available, so the antenna build was more for fun than hoping to get more channels out of it.

For resources I read through Roo's blog, got some building tips from here (although he did a bowtie), and got the specs from here. I built the GH one, no reflectors, and the specs from the GH4 table.

My material list:

- I went Home Depot and grabbed a 1x6 board from their pile of scrap wood ($0.79).

- got a length of household electrical wire from a friend who happened to be doing some electrical work. I stripped the wire and then used the method of attaching it to a drill to straighten it out.

- bought an matching transformer from The Source.

- used some screws I had around the garage

- bought some washers from Home Depot

- got 2 electrical conduit brackets from a friend (also available at Home Depot)

Basic build ideas:

- I measured out the exact locations for the bends and hammered nails into my workbench. Then I used those to help form the wire into the right shape.

- Attached the copper wire to the 1x6 using the screws and washers.

- Attached the matching transformer to the copper wire.

- Attached a Channel Master 7777 Pre-Amp to the bottom of the board.

- Used the conduit bracket as a holder for the rabbit ears.

- Wired the new antenna and the rabbit ears to the CM7777.

- Nailed a spare 2x4 block to the bottom. This would help with mounting it in the attic.

I placed the antenna in the attic and put it flush against a joist, and clamped it there using a cheap C-clamp from Home Depot. The 2x4 block keeps it from slipping left/right. I am lucky in my location in that I am located almost directly between the 2 main towers and the joists in my attic run perpendicular, so I didn't have to do anything fancy as far as building a rotating mechanism.

Here are some photos of the antenna. Note that this was before I used the drill method to straighten the wires so the final product looks a lot better.

Unfortunately when I had my house built, at the time I didn't think it was worth the $200 that the builder wanted to charge to run a conduit from the basement to the attic so I had to come up with another way to run the wire. Luckily I was able to scan a lot of house construction photos and find a cold-air return duct which was accessible and didn't have too many turns in it, before it hit the basement. So from the attic I ran a coax cable to the basement where all my home wires are. Although they say you should plug the power to the CM7777 as close to the tv as possible, I put it here in the basement because I wanted to get as strong as a signal as possible to multiple tvs. (I have one in the basement by the treadmill, was thinking about running a line to my home computer to experiment with recording shows, etc)

Honestly I wasn't expecting much for new channels, etc but I was pleasantly surprised when I did a new channel scan and 3 PBS channels from the US showed up! Here is a list of all the channels I get: CBC English, CBC French, GlobalTV, CTV, CTV2 (formally AChannel), Omni 1, Omni 2, CityTV, CHCH, TVO (TV Ontario), CTS (Crossroads Television), 2 French stations, and the 3 PBS stations.

So overall I'm pretty happy with the results. The antenna build was quick and cheap. The added extra pre-amp wasn't cheap, but it definitely improves the results over the long wire run. Running the wires from the attic to the basement was a pain in the butt, but not horrible. And now I get all the channels perfectly along with some new US ones.

Art in the House

Recently I decided that I needed more artwork in my house and was looking for something unique. At the office we have artwork in the halls and one particular piece is fractal art done by Phil Northover (Steve's brother) and it caught my eye.

So I contacted Phil and took at look at the different images available on his web site and decided on a couple of ones that I really liked. Together with the help of Phil and Jeem I got 3 prints done. (2 smaller ones and a large one) I took the prints to Display Laminating here in Ottawa to be laminated and mounted.

The final results were fantastic! I am extremely happy with how they turned out. Here is a photo of the larger one which is in my living room.



And what are the odds that 2 out of the 3 images that I selected (out of a gallery of over 50) were the same ones that the guys chose for the front and back covers of the new Butterflies and Zebras CD??

Thanks to Phil and Jeem for helping me put it all together!