Use of home tv broadcast ant for nfm radio

Has anyone flipped a home tv antenna to a vertical position and try to use it as directional beam ant for nfm?
Your results?
I am thinking it would not provide good results but maybe just somewhat acceptable reception.
Thoughts?
Thanks

I've heard of people doing it with a UHF-only TV antenna. I think a VHF-UHF TV antenna would be too unwieldy to do it.
I don't know if it would give you much in the way of gain, but it should give you some directionality. There should be acceptable performance in the UHF and UHF-T bands, and of course in the 700 MHz and 800 MHz bands. (The old full UHF channel list, 14-83, ran from 470-890 MHz. The UHF-T band is 470-512 MHz if you live in one of the metro areas that uses it, and of course the 700 MHz and 800 MHz bands are heavily populated in most states.)

What do you have to lose in trying it? Give it a try.

John
Peoria, AZ

vocoder said:

Has anyone flipped a home tv antenna to a vertical position and try to use it as directional beam ant for nfm?
Your results?
I am thinking it would not provide good results but maybe just somewhat acceptable reception.
Thoughts?
Thanks

Click to expand...

That's basically what the Scanner Beam that Grove used to sell was. A TV type antenna, rotated 90 degrees to make it vertically polarized instead of horizontal. I had one for years (from Grove Enterprises), before it was 'attacked' by a large tree that the wind damaged. It worked very well for my purposes. If you have an old TV antenna, give it a shot, Scanner Master was selling the Scanner Beam for a while, after Bob Grove retired & closed down. Currently, it shows as not in stock.

I use one all the time. It was originally a Band 1,2 and 3 antenna but now that we've all gone digital it's no use. I cut the Band 1 (45 to 65MHz) down to the aircraft band, 600mm/24" per leg and left the other two bands (200MHz and 600Mhz centre of bands) as they were. There's a pic here somewhere....

To read all about using TV antennas for scanners, scroll down in this RR thread to the post from zonian149 which was originally written by Bill Cheek titled "TV Antennas for Scanners?"
https://forums.radioreference.com/scanner-receiver-antennas/63421-tv-antenna-scanning.html

hiegtx said:

That's basically what the Scanner Beam that Grove used to sell was. A TV type antenna, rotated 90 degrees to make it vertically polarized instead of horizontal. I had one for years (from Grove Enterprises), before it was 'attacked' by a large tree that the wind damaged. It worked very well for my purposes. If you have an old TV antenna, give it a shot, Scanner Master was selling the Scanner Beam for a while, after Bob Grove retired & closed down. Currently, it shows as not in stock.

Click to expand...

I had that antenna too. Pointed directly at KSTL, I could receive ground transmissions at around 25 miles.

You probable should try and use an UHF antenna that have as few elements as possible, like 4 or 5 in a row, to reduce directivity and increase out of band performance.

I had one years ago for 470-700MHz and used it for 410-460MHz with great results and when I added a $10 sat dish inline amplifier it improved UHF just a little bit but the VHF range really came to life from airband 118MHz and upwards and VHF band had only minor directivity. Amplifiers seems to improve the signals most when the antenna are out of tune and badly matched to the frequency.

/Ubbe

Back in the 90s I experimented with one of our TV antennas. And it worked great. Some will say it won't work, others comment that it will.
My advice is for you to try it and post what your results are.

hiegtx said:

That's basically what the Scanner Beam that Grove used to sell was. A TV type antenna, rotated 90 degrees to make it vertically polarized instead of horizontal. I had one for years (from Grove Enterprises), before it was 'attacked' by a large tree that the wind damaged. It worked very well for my purposes. If you have an old TV antenna, give it a shot, Scanner Master was selling the Scanner Beam for a while, after Bob Grove retired & closed down. Currently, it shows as not in stock.

Click to expand...

I built one from a Radio Shack TV antenna back in the 80's. Elements had to be cut down to match freq range of about 30-512 Mhz and new mounting holes drilled. I didn't find it to be any significant improvement over my other antennas, one of which was the Ant. Specialists Mon R31. It probably had some potential for distant mobiles/inputs, but I didn't use a rotator with it.