Hey everybody,

I have been looking into getting my amateur radio licence, and lately have been wondering what to do about an antenna. Then I remembered that I have a TV antenna (roof aerial) that I have no use for.

So I am wondering if this will work as an Amateur Radio antenna by itself, or maybe I will have to do some modifications to it?

Thanks guys.

Matt

You would have to take it apart and redesign it for a VHF or UHF band, that would be about it. A lot of ham antennas are not very expensive to make on your own or "homebrew".
A TV antenna is designed to work quite a bit differently than a ham antenna is.
There are articles about this on the internet and some discuss what you can do to make a useful VHF or UHF antenna for ham radio.
For my money, I would rather find an article about making a beam antenna and follow those instructions. You can get most of what you would need at a Home Depot or similar hardware store. There are tons of articles about building your own VHF or UHF beam antenna out there.

Good luck on getting your licence. You will do great.
Again there are literally hundreds of different antennas you can build and it depends on what frequencies you are operating on how the antenna is built.
It is a huge subject there have been volumes of book written on.
As far as the TV one it was made for the old TV analog frequencies at about 54mHz., so you could probably modify for the 6 meter band but I not sure how well it would work. The 6 meter band is at 50mHz or so.
Keep in mind the TV one was made for only receive too, and not transmit operations.

One of the best antenna resources on the internet I have found are the articles by L.B. Cebik.
He is now a silent key but his information is maintained now by a commercial outfit he used to work with.
It is free to register for the website and access all the articles he wrote over the years, you just have to log in each time you visit.

http://www.cebik.com/

One of the easiest antennas to put up is a simple dipole and there are lots of variations on that you will read about.

Not sure what band you'll be wanting to start with but if it's HF, I've done a rather long,
(didn't need to be that long) video of building a three band (80/40/20) meter dipole fed
with one coax and it does not require a tuner.
It's been up for more than a year now and still working great.
Oh, did I mention it's cheap to build and really works great.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXqSY5JK ... ature=plcp


Good luck and drop me an e mail if you run into problems.

Pete

If the TV antenna is a log periodic design it will work well on 6 and 2M as well as 222MHz. You would need to make a balun that could handle the transmit power

Older style stacked conicalswith reflector did well on 6M and fair on 2M. I was heard in the UK on 6M AM with one in 1957 while working crossband to 10M. That convinced me to build a yagi and become a 6M fan to today. Before that I could regularly copy 6 and 2M AM on my parents continuous tune DuMont TV.

Carl