67. I made a TV antenna

Update:

I planned on working on the deck outside Charlie's room today, but the rain from last night, the threat of rain today, and nap schedules made it not as possible.  Instead, I spent time going between the attic and the basement running wires through the house in order to try my antenna out up in the basement.  Guess what...We got 30 channels!  That's way better than the 1 we got from the other antenna and the 0 we got from having the antenna I made in the living room.  After Charlie gets up I might try messing with it a little more to see of the angle can be adjusted and if it can get any better.  It is still a little grainy which makes watching not as fluid.  After that is fixed, bye, bye cable bill!  At least for awhile. 

Today I started to make my attempt for getting rid of cable.  Anyone who has knowledge of our house knows that we have a 25-30 ft. television antenna outside of our house. It is old, but it has the same basic setup as the roof antennas sold today. Sadly, when I hooked the TV up to it we only got 6 channels.  ABC was the only one of those six that we would watch with regularity.  None of the other big ones came in through that antenna. Upon some research, I found that when looking at the antenna we currently have, there are things missing or have fallen off of our current one. Because of this I am now on a quest to find an antenna that works.

This was my attempt.

Here is what I used to make it.

I used the plans from this video and substituted in copper wire instead of wire coat hangers.



And to answer the video's question at the beginning, yes, I did buy one of the amplified ones.  It didn't get one channel. I picked this one because it has a ton of views and most of the comments are positive with the responders saying that they had success with their projects.

Sadly, I only got two analog channels that came in so fuzzy I had no idea what the channels actually were.  I am going to experiment with running cables into the attic and seeing if that would do the trick.  My friend Jay has his antenna in his attic and says that it comes in really clear from there with not too much trouble.

I'll keep you posted on my progress.  I really hope I can find a way to make this work. It would be so great to eliminate the cable bill from our monthly expenses.