External TV Antenna at Permanent Campsite

Cable just bypasses the booster so if you don't have enough signal with the larger antenna you might want to try adding a booster between the interior connection and the TV.

You are using your external cable input as an input for over the air antenna signal. You would need to switch the connection from the booster to the cable output to the television. Your television should continue to be set for antenna.

As noted above, your booster is no longer involved and the switch may not improve your reception.

An antenna pulls the signal out of the air and sends whatever signal it's attuned for through the wire. Analog, digital doesn't matter, advertising a "digital" antenna is just a sales gimmick. Where I live it's about 80 miles to the stations and most people that don't have satellite use one of the 150 mile range antenna's from Amazon. They come with the amplifier and rotor for about $35 and work well out to about 100- 120 miles. There are several identical ones all with different brand names. You can mount one on a standard antenna conduit I hose clamped one on my old TT ladder when I was building my house.

Unless your TV has 2 different coax inputs labeled cable and air (doubtful), you want to tell it to run on "air," not "cable." To the TV, the difference is what frequencies it scans for, and if an antenna is connected, it's "air."

If you have an RV antenna with an internal jack and switch on a wall plate, you probably want to make sure the switch is off (LED not lit) - that switches between using the RV antenna and the external input.

Used to do it all the time.......

YES antenna booster OFF....TV input stays on 'AIR'

I often use a Jack antenna on a mast, fastened to my ladder, extended about 4' above my roof. I have coax fastened to cable inlet, on outside. The Jack comes with it's own power up source, plugged in inside. This gives much better range than my omni OTA, which is only good for short range to towers.

Yes, you need tv set to OTA, when using cable inlet, for OTA viewing.

Jerry

Thanks for all the replies. I'll assume at this moment my antenna is facing the wrong direction. If the rain ever lets up, I'll mess with that and see what happens.

Need to properly 'AIM' antenna towards TV Transponder Towers

Use any one of these to FIND which direction

https://www.antennaweb.org/Address

https://www.antennasdirect.com/transmitter-locator.html

http://otadtv.com/tvtower/index.html

https://www.fcc.gov/media/engineering/dtvmaps

I can vouch for this type of antenna



This one is a Channel Master CM-4221, but other companies make similar ones. If you search around, there are plans online to make your own.

Digital TV antennas are not really different than the old analog antennas. They are smaller because they only have to tune a smaller amount of RF spectrum. Also, because they tune (mostly) higher frequencies, they are much more "line of sight" sensative which means that the further you are from the broadcast tower, the higher it needs to be mounted.

I was able to play with the antenna briefly after the rain stopped, we were able to get a channel but we definitely need to go higher and aim it better. Looks like that will be next weekends project!

Thanks everyone!