Gray-Hoverman TV antenna

If you’re a resident of the UK who has adopted (or been forced to adopt) the all-singing, all-dancing and often non-working DVB-T digital television standard, you’ll have probably spent some time cursing your TV aerial or the trees between it and the transmitter. I don’t have any such issues myself, being no great fan of modern television programming but members of my family still insist on vegetating in front of the inane spectacle for hours on end, becoming disconsolate when the ‘entertainment’ carried over the air by UHF radio waves and an MPEG-2 stream is interrupted.

Looking around for an alternative, I saw a revised design of an old antenna design in the web technical digests, namely the Gray-Hoverman antenna. Based on the Hoverman antenna of the 1960s, the now computer modeled design is said to outperform other commercial antennas for limited line of sight applications over long distances.

I’m going to try to evaluate whether the Gray-Hoverman would be useful for UK DVB-T and I’m considering making one myself.

The design is licensed under the GPL v3

8 thoughts on “Gray-Hoverman TV antenna

  1. I’m also in the UK and have poor reception, I would be interested to see how this works

    Well, if I can get hold of the equivalent of #8 copper rods here in the UK, I intend on having a go at building one. I will possibly work towards the PVC pipe design with the wire mesh back screen.

    At the moment, my DVB cards report a signal strength which is 1/5th of ‘ideal’ using the biggest Yagi I could lay my hands on.

    • I am in the UK, and simply can’t browse anything from the Digital Home forum, except on very rare occasions. I understand they basically ban all IP addresses outside North America.

      But they don’t even have an explanation on their website any more, if you click “read here”, you just get a form to send a message to the owner. Very poor show. Oh yes, they don’t bother replying either. I have heard that the webmaster, Hugh Thompson, is a racist.

  2. Another option for copper rods would be aluminum welding electrodes, available at any welding supply company. I found some at various wire gauges and 33 inches long.

  3. “The design is licensed under the GPL v3”

    The GPL cannot license a design. The Hoverman (expired patent) and the Gray-Hoverman (never patented) is in the public domain. Go for it and forget about the GPL.

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