On Jan 20, 9:34*pm, Shaun Eli wrote:
For transmitting, there are strong requirements to make sure that an
antenna is correct (impedance, wavelength, etc.).

For receiving, it's often not that relevant.

I have an attic antenna but when I got my dtv converter the reception
wasn't as good. *I simply added rabbit ears (on top of the TV, lower
than the attic antenna) and wired them together in parallel.

Unmatched impedance, not correct size for the wavelength... and my
reception vastly improved.

So give it a try.

Shaun Eliwww.BrainChampagne.com

I agree it's worth a try. But we don't really know that you have
unmatched impedance, since you didn't measure. Possibly adding the
rabbit ears in parallel actually improved the impedance match. Back
in the 80s I remember putting up antennas with the university ham
radio club, and though we had an antenna tuner available we still
tried to cut the antennas to the correct length, both for transmit and
receive. We measured, maybe an SWR meter? It's been so long the
details have faded.

We also don't know if your reception would improve even further if you
kept the rabbit ears in place and eliminated the attic antenna.

Rabbit ears should be a variation on a standard dipole, so if you
calculated the length for the frequency you probably did it
correctly. The standard tv antenna isn't a dipole, it's a type that
depends on geometry and is supposed to approximate a frequency
independent antenna.