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I made my own HDTV antenna.

Over Thanksgiving I decided to hook up our living room TV to the antenna on the roof. For a long time it was just using Roku and that works for most everything, but I wanted to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade on NBC so I thought I’d get it hooked up. Turn out, I couldn’t.

Cable Mess

After an hour of trying different cables and re-scanning the TV, I realized that I have no idea how the previous owners have things hooked up. I have about a dozen cables in the downstairs and no matter which one I tried, none of them sent the antenna signal to the TV even though I know which cable belongs to the antenna and it works great for the TV downstairs. So I made my own antenna.

Homemade TV Antenna

Turns out it was surprisingly easy. I used a coat hanger, a small piece of old wood, two screws, and a 75 to 300 Ohm Matching Transformer which is just an old TV cable adapter which I just happened to have lying around.

I pretty much followed the Instructables instructions through step 6. The only changes I made were that I used two random screws (no idea what size they were) one coat hanger (as it was long enough) and I didn’t trim my coat hangers down to 8 inches.

It took me about 10 minutes to build and works remarkably well. I’m very surprised and happy with the cheap antenna.

 


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