Tv antenna

The Jensen omni is crap, I also have one and hate, hate, hate it.

For me, the problem with the conventional "Bat-Wing", is the ceiling is too high for even me (6ft plus) to reach it.

Wingard makes (used to?) a motorized Batwing. That deploys and turns with a motor. I thought (hard) about that, but ended up moving on.

Testing done by people in this forum suggests to me that the Jack Omni would work (at best) marginally better then the Jensen.

Both suffer from the same problems, size and height. No antenna mounted low to the roof is going to work as well as an antenna with more height.
Also size matters, small antennas don't work as well as large antennas.

I ended up with an Omni sold by Radio Shack. This is much larger then the Jensen or Jack. But I mount it on a separate push-up pole on the rear of the trailer. Obviously not something I would do for an over-night stop.

There is a "old tech" Antenna that should work well, it's two crossed elements that fold up and go into a tube. This design has been around for years, but I believe it is still sold

Jack Omni ?

I also have an omni on my FW. I left it intact, due to it being for the radio, as well as the tv.

I bought the replacement head Jack, that is supposed to replace the batwing head. I fasten this to a two piece aluminum pole, and use a couple of stretch cords to fasten it to my FW ladder.

I have it about 4' above my roof, using the supplied coax. It works great. I just fasten the coax to my outside cable hookup, right near the ladder.

Jerry

Winegard works the best it has built in amplifier that boost the tv signal

I have played with BATWING, JACK, OMNI Hide-a-antenna, BOW TIE Panels, and LOWES BEST VHF/UHF long YAGI.

The LOWES multi-dipole YAGI $80 did the best.


This antenna pulled in some real good signals and by adjusting the positions of the fold-out dipole it worked great with distance and more local station. Was a sight to see however extending 6-feet or more off both sides of my POPUP roof and when I rotated it I was always hitting trees on both sides. Folks lined up however to watch me play with my big antenna...

After about a year of using this antenna I finally totally destroyed it by having to fold-it-out at every stop and the aluminum dipoles finally broke beyond repair.

As shown in the easy-up mount above you can see how I rotated my antenna by just reaching out the window flap of the POPUP and turning away.

The OMNI Hide-A-Antenna as it is called does work but suffers big time on reception. This is basically two DIPOLE in opposite directions and doesn't work well with distant stations. It also suffers big time of losing the digital signals from the HDTV station when aircraft fly over head. This is my BACK-UP antenna as it disappears into the tube and is great for storing when in travel mode.


I then picked up the BATWING and the JACK and mounted them on my easy up pole mount. They both worked great but the BATWING had a wider beam-width allowing me to pick up more HDTV station that were in the same direction but located on the different sides of the town. Washington DC is some 50 miles from us here in Northern Neck VA and they have their transmitting antennas on the NW and E sides of town. We would have to move the JACK antenna to pick all of these stations up. The BATWING would get both groups with one pointing location in this case. The BATWING is the antenna I use today. Easy to transport in my case and I mount everything up and start watching TV in only a few minutes after arriving at the camp sites.


I would say the KING JACK antenna has more gain but you really have to point this antenna towards the transmitting station to get best results.

ADDED NOTE: SCFJEFF reports down the thread here I am wrong with my assumption that the JACK Antenna has 'LESS BEAM WIDTH' then the BATWING. I was just reporting what I found in my very simple pointing antenna tests I did here. That may have been a wrong assumption on my part. All I know is the BATWING outperformed the JACK antenna in my case looking at several HDTV Transmitter stations situated on both sides of Washington DC some 50 miles away... Sorry if I mislead anyone here...


The JACK antenna will mount on the BATWING hardware and crank-up and rotate just fine using the BATWING controls. It also can be mounted just above the roof and only rotate. Like said above being close to the roof makes the JACK suffer from performance somewhat and even things like the roof mounted air conditioner always seems to get in the way when you are trying to pick up a TV station in that direction. Being up as high as you can get worked great for us but I didn't like the very narrow BEAM WIDTH I was getting with it in my setup.



I also experimented with the BOW-TIE PANEL antenna. This is a panel about 3-feet by 2-feet and has 8-BOW TIE dipoles on it. This is a great antenna and is more suited for the home installation. You can mount this on a single pole so can be used on the RV as well...
This is probably the best of all antennas as it has great performance in picking up station up to 75 miles away. Also has great signal reduction to the rear of panel... I use mine here at the house and and the two array panels can be pointed in different directions and this really performs well pointing to the Washington DC digital station which are some 50 miles from here... This array panel was just on sale for $49 Extremesignal recently. I originally paid over $100 for my panel from a different company. I am a sucker for deal hehe...



My antenna story

Roy Ken

I've had a Winegard batwing without the wingman addon and had fair reception on my current mh. I swapped it out for a Jack and was able to receive more channels. I recently replaced it with a Winegard Rayzap Air and receive even more channels. All tests were in my driveway, results in the woods may vary.

I've had both the Sensor IV (current Batwing) and jack on the same 5er camped in the same general areas. I give a heads up to the Sensor IV, but not by much. The antenna on my rig was an old batwing and doing the research I decided to upgrade to the Jack and removed the entire old one in place of a Jack. It was an improvement from the old one but since it is mounted in the bedroom area and stivks up a good 8" or so, I didn't really like the looks of it. That changed when I missed a branch going into a State Park in which I found out how easily the Jack snaps off. That's when I changed to the Sensor IV.

I have the short Jack on my TT. My buddy was parked right next to me and has an Omni on his new AF. I could get 7 channels when he could only get two (both were Spanish network channels). :B

N7,

Winfield RV Products makes a device called a Win-Handle that can operate the Winguard controls even on the 8 foot ceiling of my Titanium. Also will do vent lids.

Sensar IV now available in black!

Sensar IV RVW205B