Slap Up an HD/Digital TV Antenna

Are you tired up paying to see ads on cable TV? Well then, pay nothing to see those same ads with over-the-air HD TV. Plus, there is now great public station content in HD.  We get over 30 channels, in crystal clear digital.

We had the Radio Shack indoor outdoor antenna mounted with screws to the eve, but on our one-story house, this didn't get the antenna up very high. Depending on natural factors affecting radio interference, some stations would usually come in great, others not.  So, I needed to get the antenna height closer to the recommended 25' minimum.

I didn't want to put a hole in the roof, for leakage and access reasons (I hate going up in our hot, insulated Florida attic), so I decided to wall mount the antenna to the outside of our block construction house.

ChannelMaster makes an 18" overhang antenna wall mount in gold chromate, (but I really wanted impossible to acquire galvanized) to get beyond our eves.

lower of two parts to the ChannelMaster antenna wall mount. The lower part has three legs, the upper has two. You can see the ground connection here. Lag expansion shields installed with a hammer drill connected the mount to the wall.

I bought a 10' aluminum antenna and ran the antenna up it, using offset two anchors to keep the coax cable from flapping in the breeze.

An 8' galvanized ground rod with 14 gauge copper wire and a bronze ground rod cap completed the ground after running it through a grounding block.

standoffs

grounding block

After the grounding block, a signal splitter (attached with plastic expansion anchors with screws installed with a hammer drill) sent the TV signal to the living room and bedroom.

Inside the living room, a signal amplifier is plugged into an power strip/surge protector and then the coax runs into the TV with a built-in digital converter.