Need Advice for Antenna in Zip 72315

[rbh]

Ok, I'm trying to come up with a better tv antenna solution for my parent's house. Since the digital conversion, they have had trouble receiving stations that had always been clean previously. The house is located in Zip Code 72315 (Gosnell, Arkansas). The majority of available stations are out of Memphis, Tennessee. According to AntennaWeb, they lie on compass headings ranging from 167 to 175 degrees (most are at 171-172 deg), from 48.6 to 56.3 miles distance, and on RF channels ranging from 5 through 51 (5 is the only VHF, the rest are UHF). If that was all there was to it, then this would be pretty simple. Unfortunately, there are a couple of stations on a heading of 266 degrees that they had before the big switch, and would really like to have back. The most important of the two is RF Channel 8 out of Jonesboro, Arkansas, about 54 miles distant. That's a biggie as that station does much better local news and weather for the area than the Memphis stations. The other is RF Channel 20 located about 45 miles away. That's a PBS, and would be nice to have, but not a deal breaker as they get PBS out of Memphis. Of course, that 100 degree difference in compass headings means multiple antennas or a rotor. At present they have two random antennas (no idea of brand or specs) mounted stacked on about an 8-10 foot rooftop mast. I don't know how the two are coupled together, but I don't believe it's with any sort of proper coupler. There is an amplifier (Wal-Mart special of unknown specs) in line, but I don't know that it does a lot of good as the antenna on the roof is almost directly above the tv in the living room, so it shouldn't be much more than a 25 foot coax run. It would be nice to be able to split the signal to multiple TVs though. We've tried it before with an unpowered splitter, and it made the signal too weak or too noisy to work on anything.

So that's the basic setup. The question is how best to proceed from here. The Winegard antenna selector recommends the HD7084P or HD8200U antennas in a multiple system or on a rotor. I'd rather avoid a rotor, though it's trickier to rig two antennas to work properly. Of course it's tempting to throw two HD8200s up there, but that's an awful lot of antenna. Would we do as well with HD7084s. Or, for the Jonesboro antenna, what about an HD7697P or HD7698P, since we don't need low VHF in that direction. Or even maybe a YA-1713 if all we were concerned about from that direction was channel 8 (which is kind of the case)? And mounting them both on a mast, how far apart do they need to be to work effectively? And how far above the roof (standard asphalt shingles)? To couple the 2 togerther, I'm thinking a CC7870 is the way to go, yes?

What about amplification. Like I say, it's a fairly straight drop from the antenna on the roof to the main living room tv, probably 25 feet, might be a 50 foot cable, not sure. But we would like to be able to run more than one TV off of the antenna feed. Would we use something like the AP8700, or would we be better off with some type of distribution amplifier?

I know there are quite a few questions there, but they all seem necessary to coming up with the best solution. Thanks in advance for your help.

[winegard]

Good afternoon rbh,

The difference of the HD7084P and the HD8200U is that the HD8200U will receive about 10% more signal than the HD7084P. The difference between the HD7697P and the HD7698P is also only 10% with the HD7698P being the stronger of the two antenna. In your case the recommended antennas would be the HD7084P or HD8200U pointed toward Memphis and a HD7697P or HD7698P pointed toward Jonesboro. The two antenna will be separated 40” vertically on the same mast. Use the CC-7870 coupler to combine the two antennas. The lead length from each antenna does not have to be the same length since you are not stacking theses antenna for gain in the same direction.



Since you are only going 25 feet to the inside of the house you can use a Winegard HDA-100 ahead of your splitter and you should be able to run 4 TV sets without a problem.