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So with the renovation of our house came a home warming gift of a brand new Visio 42″ flat screen television. Of course you don’t want to watch analog with that so we needed an antenna. I plugged in our old rabbit ears what we borrowed from a friend at church but haven’t returned yet. We were able to get Fox and ABC intermittently, and also the MHZ channels which included Russian, Chinese, and South African channels as well as the ION (formerly known as PAX) TV, these channels included ION, Qubo, and Worship channel.

We wanted the regular NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX so I ended up going to Best Buy to buy an antenna. Because I was on a budget, I didn’t want to spend more than fifty bucks for an antenna. The first one I bought was the RCA Amplified HDTV Antenna. I got it on sale for $39.

It was flat and pretty stylish, but it all it did was get a more stable ABC and Fox, but CBS was intermittent and NBC was non-existent. I looked up some more resources on the internet about signal strength and direction of the antenna, but still couldn’t get what I wanted.

So, I actually went back, returned the RCA antenna and picked up another one. This time it was a Terk – Amplified Indoor antenna. I bought one for around $44.

This did a little bit better, but we still didn’t get channel 4. It has a nice swivel base that allows you to adjust the antenna as you wish. But I was getting desperate, I didn’t want a $50 antenna that didn’t get me any stations.

So I looked online to see if they had any resources for building an antenna.

I found this on the makezine. It involves making an antenna out of coat hangers. I ended up cannibalizing our old rabbit ears to get the 25-75 Ohm transformer to connect with the coax cable, but other than that everything was made from scratch. Unfortunately, we just recycled most of our metal coat hangers at the dry clean, so ended up using left over copper wire cable taken from the renovations.

I’ll post actual pictures of it when I get a chance, but needless to say, I was able to not only get NBC, Fox, ABC, CBS, (as well as MHZ and ION) we also got all the various PBS stations, spanish channel and a bunch of analog signals… I saved myself 50 bucks, and only had to borrow my mother’s drill to build this project.

Instead of attaching it to a iron pipe, I took one of our pole lamps and attached it there using some left over coat hangers.

Do yourself a favor and build one… and if you still have the receipt to your old antenna, return it to the store.  You should have all the materials at home and you will be amazed at the results… Happy watching!

(p.s. my wife is pressuring me to get cable)

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