Digital Antenna Experiment - Part 2

Today's experiment was to try a Fractal Antenna. I have heard these are the antenna to have, and they really aren't that hard to make.

However, I did a really quick job on this one, so the angles weren't perfect. After playing with it a little bit, I think that it may be work purchasing good materials to make the antenna with.

For this one, I used two coat hangers, a transformer I had laying around, some random peice of plastic, duct tape, electrical tape, and two screws. As it turns out, I think next time I will replace the two screws with electrical tape.

I think that due to the large amount of wast that I had left over from the coat hangers, I probably could have used 1 coat hanger, but I would have had to straighten out the coat hanger completely.

So, I tried to follow these directions that I found on instructables.com but I didn't have all the stuff they said to use, and I was shooting for more of a $0 budget rather than $15.

I also opted against the reflector, but as soon as I find a scrap peice of aluminum, I will be right on that. (I may canabalize my Xbox case, there is a big peice in there... or I saw this chicken wire idea on YouTube.)


So, down to what this thing can do! Well, it still doesn't get FOX, but I can adjust the length of Coax cable that I have attached, and the antenna seems very sensitive to direction, height, and angle. Sometimes I can pick up the analog signal enough to get sound, but I haven't gotten the digital signal yet.

The real question is wether it is worth the effort. And I think the answer is yes! We have beaten the all mighty nail on the end of a Coax cable with this one! However, we didn't beat it by much. Today, while playing around with my antenna (AKA coax cable with a nail on the end) and I found that if I continually run the autoprogram feature, sometimes my antenna wouldn't pick up all the channels, however, the Coat-Hanger fractal antenna will consistantly pick up 21 channels (even though 9-2 and 51-1 are in spanish, 16-1 and 16-2 are the same, but in different resolutions, 9-3 and 28-2 are completely identical, and 33-4 is the worship channel.) So despite everything, I still have 16 completely unique channels that I can watch, including a channel for little kids (in the event that someone from my family actually comes out to Seattle with one of my neices of nephews.)

So, the coat-hnger fractal antenna is worth the time to put together in my book, and with a little bit of luck, I might be able to put one together that actually picks up FOX.