Geek-Out: DIY Hoverman TV Antenna

I now have HDTV at my house. I made an antenna for $5 worth of parts and 1 hour of work, and it gets all 17 local stations on the air, even though my TV and antenna are buried in my basement. This has to be the best $5 I've spent so far this year.

Here it is:

This design is called the Hoverman antenna, as detailed in US Patent #2918672. All I did was sketch out the pattern on a piece of posterboard, tape down the two lengths of wire down on the board in the right pattern, then hook up the 4:1 balun to the feedpoints in the center with two bolts and plug it into my TV. The posterboard stands up by itself, so I just put it on the ground next to my TV, pointed it in the right direction, turned on the TV, and voila! HDTV goodness.

So how did I get here?

The January 2011 of Popular Mechanics has a DIY "Digital TV Antenna" project on Page 84. I read the article, but the antenna design left out some key information: the PM article does not specify the distance between the dipoles, which is an important parameter for the antenna.

*GEEKSPEAK START*
The PM antenna design works by stacking (4) broadband "bow-tie" dipoles on top of each other, with each dipole in-phase with each other in order to "flatten out" the antenna's radiation pattern top to bottom, increasing the antenna's gain in all other directions, with the best gain being in the "broadsides" directions.

The flattening effect is best when the dipoles are about one-half wavelength from each other, since this cancels out the most radiation top and bottom.
*GEEKSPEAK END*

Finally, the PM design requires (10) separate lengths of wire, with (8) connections between those wires, as well as (2) connections for the feedline. That's a lot of connections that can break, get loose, or otherwise messed up.

Since I wasn't happy with the PM antenna, I looked around the Internet for other DIY designs. I eventually found a website that had a link to the Hoverman patent. After finding its gain characteristics, studying it, and realizing that it has better gain than the PM antenna, even with the corrected feed lines, I decided to build one. The Hoverman antenna also only has (2) separate lengths of wire, with only the (2) connections for the feedline. That makes it a lot easier to make.

So I built it, hooked it up to my TV, and the rest is history.

Addendum: Some enthusiasts have continued to develop and refine the Hoverman antenna, resulting in some impressive designs. Of course, the more powerful the design, the more precise the engineering and manufacturing needs to be. The original Hoverman is very tolerant of deviations to its design measurements, but the new ones require much greater precision in order to realize the higher gains promised by their designs. While I was interested in these designs, I decided to make the original Hoverman because it was so much easier to put together and have it work well, and I did not need the extra gain of the improved designs.