Phil’s Easy Way To Improve Your UHF
TV Reception

Missing Out On Broadcast UHF TV? Here’s Help . . .

By Phil Karras, KE3FL <ke3fl@yahoo.com>

The special wire used to make the antennas.

For a while now I’ve been interested in finding out if I can improve my UHF TV reception. We’ve lived in our present house for over 10 years now and have struggled with the UHF reception for all that time. The VHF stations from both Baltimore and Washington DC are not too bad, even with just rabbit ear antennas, but the UHF has only been good for one or two stations.

My Rating System

Bad—Can tell there is an image in the snow, but not viewable
Poor—Can see the image, almost viewable
OK—The image is viewable, but has much snow
Good—Much more image than snow, acceptable
Perfect—The image is clean with no snow

I first tried the bow-tie antenna; I’m sure you’ve seen it—it’s simply a bare-wire antenna that looks like a bow-tie. It has twin-lead feedline coming off it that’s about three feet long. The center plastic piece has a grabber that attaches to the largest diameter section of your rabbit ears. This didn’t help much so I thought I’d give it some height. I went to the hardware store and they only had the “clear” plastic twin-lead feedline. I bought all they had and put the antenna on a pole about three feet long, added the feedline, and placed the antenna on the roof. I was unable to get it on the peak because I already had a metal support for my HF dipole there, but reception improved markedly.

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