More New Outdoor Antenna Options, And The TV Antenna With Red Light

[CK-722]

My neighbor has an amplified antenna on his roof with a red light. I just noticed it tonight. I can't see it well, but it has a driven folded dipole for High VHF, a small UHF parabolic reflector, and several UHF directors that I can see in the dark. Never saw one with a light before. I'll look at it in the morning to see more details. To keep up with the neighbors, I'll have to put up a red solar light on my anemometer supporting pole.

In trying to figure out what model it could be, I discovered this link.

There seem to be as many options now as in the Allied Catalog Days. Not all of them great.

Some of the good news is that MOST now have a 7-13 Dipole, even if it appears to be an afterthought. Some also have small rotators. This acknowledges the two biggest limitations of the "UFO" 360 degree designs. And as many are designed to be outdoor antennas, you have the option of getting a lot of noise free gain from being higher AGL and not shielded by walls and roofs. That can quickly add up to the "gain" of noisy preamps.

The bad news is that few if any of the new designs have a tuned Low VHF element, which, if the FCC has its way, will become as big of a problem as a missing 7-13 element like the "UFO" designs. Maybe we'll start to see "area specials" like the ones in Grand Rapids when WZZM-TV 13 signed on circa 1960, with one antenna for Gun Lake, and a high gain High VHF antenna to get the new one way out by Grant, when the new Low VHF stations start popping up.

https://snapgoods.com/best-outdoor-antennas/

[innate-in-you]

If you saw a very small red LED, Light grey case, and a yellow and black sticker on the underside, I'm guessing it's a Televés.

A really good antenna if space limited.

One disadvantage is that it is not designed for Low-VHF.

[CK-722]

The design you mention IS apparently identical to the antenna next door, but is apparently marketed under several different brand names.

The rotator, though welcomed from a technical standpoint, looks a little wimpy. Cornell Dubelier might have come up with a longer lasting, tougher version. It doesn't look like a rotator that would stand up to DXing. If you ever saw the insides of an older Alliance heavily used for DX, with the chewed up plastic gears, and shavings from the gears filling the housing, you know what I mean.

I wonder how the V-shaped folded High VHF dipole affects performance. I'd like to see the polar patterns and gain figures for each channel range, without the preamp. I would want a switchable preamp that would put it either completely in or out of the circuit, not an extremely lossy pass through.

[k8jd]

Those non, directional saucers are subject to multipath , a problem in urban and suburban settings. Used to cause "ghosting" in the old signals but now it will cause intermittant "pixelating" or blue screen. Some directionality is the cure for that problem !
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[innate-in-you]

The Televés antenna doesn't rotate. It originates in Europe, where every service is carried on a network of several transmitters and every broadcast tower carries all of the networks. They have no use for a rotator, since every station is from the same tower.

If the US were like Europe, a resident of Manistique would get as many channels as someone in Detroit.

The Tevevés antenna sold in the U.S. is an export version. It has a VHF dipole to receive VHF-High stations and a directional antenna for the UHF stations. All terrestrial television in Western Europe is UHF.

[CK-722]

These options are not well explained on lists generated by Google and Amazon. Some rotate. Some may not have preamps. But the antennas are identical. I wonder why they have the VHF High Dipole if they don't have VHF in the European Models. Just a one size fits all and retrofit options?

[CK-722]

Anyone know if the 8 Bay Bow Tie is designed to work at VHF-High and How well? I know the Finco Bedspring antenna was supposed to work on UHF with a slight modification. I"m thinking that the two 4 Bays may be functioning as one half of a full or near 1/2 wave at High VHF. This would probably work better with Bowties tuned to receive 348-608 MHz not just 470 to 608 MHz, as the original 4/8 Bays were for 470-890 MHz.