On Tue, 27 Jan 2009, Daniel Dalton wrote: > > > I'm connecting it to a co-axle point in my home; I lost the original > > > antenna. > > > I'm reasonably sure that point should work fine. > > In place of the original antenna, you can try a short > > length of wire, say, 5cm long for the UHF frequency, to > > about half a metre for the other frequencies. This will, > > What kind of wire? Ear phone? and how do I hook this up to the receiver > since it has a co-axle input plug on it. The type of wire should not matter. In fact, you may not even need to make contact between the metal of the coaxial connector and the wire conductor for a very strong signal -- although ideally you would make this contact. The idea behind this is that Antti has suggested that your tuner may not work well with strong signals, so we are wanting to get a somewhat weaker signal. It could be, though, that you will not get enough of a signal. This all will depend on the distance you are from the transmitter site, the power it sends, and what sort of terrain exists between you and the sender. One thing has popped into my mind -- there are different standards for coaxial connectors used in different parts of the world for the same function, so I may have a totally different idea of what you have... Anyway, you are connected to your wall by a cable that connects to your device. Perhaps that cable is connected to some sort of push-on or screw-on connector, or maybe it is firmly attached to the wall without a connector. The part of the connector of interest will be the centre conductor. Through europe, this exists on TV-type tuners as an outer ring, somewhat over 1cm diametre, and a smaller ring inside with a couple millimetre diametre. I can actually take a length of bell wire or thin electrical wire, fold about 1cm of it over on itself, and stick this into that centre conductor to make a simple antenna that receives strong signals. If you have a screw-on type of F connector, that was common for cable TV in america when I was there, but in europe is found primarily on satellite equipment, then the part that connects to the wall will have a centre conductor which extends somewhat, if you are lucky. This can be a bit tricky, but a clip lead, with small alligator clip can be of help, particularly if the F connector cannot be readily screwed off. Now, for the other type of F connector -- the female type, one can simply stick in the end of some bell wire, after removing a cm of insulation. The problem is that I personally can't imagine myself doing this without sight, because it's too easy to cause a short-circuit between the outer and inner conductors, which means your reception will drop to zero, and I rely on visual feedback to see this. So if you have some technically-minded friend who can help you with this, it may be easiest. (There are no dangerous voltages to be found on these sort of antenna connectors. In strong signal areas, I can get a good signal simply with my finger on the inner conductor, possibly moistened for better conductivity. This is not to say that your equipment will be at earth potential, as all this depends on the presence of and quality of your earth ground, and in fact whether all your devices make use of it, as I'm often zapped lightly when connecting USB devices to an earthed computer, due to the lack of earthing on said devices. At worst, your tuner may deliver 5v to power an active antenna, but nothing to throw you across the room.) Actually, 5cm wire for the UHF frequency in use might be a bit short, so you may be better with 20 to 100cm overall. Another thing to keep in mind, though it won't be as important as it is with a rooftop-mounted antenna, is the polarisation of the radio signals from the transmitter; the scanfiles I see here don't give any hints to that for your area, and my internet connection presently is too poor for me to look online. Anyway, good luck; it could be that with this you are unable to receive any signal whatsoever, in which case all the time I spent writing this will have been for nought, and, unless some other brilliant idea reveals itself, you will be forced to go the path of obtaining a different tuner and hoping that one works out-of-the-box... barry bouwsma -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-media" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
