Dumb antenna question

but I really don't know! Electronics in general is not my strong suit and I'm not sure what the right answer is here.

I'm trying to migrate a friend from a TV/HTIB setup to a proper receiver, speakers, etc. keeping only the original TV which is a halfway decent but older Sony 40" LCD.

My question is this. I spend a lot of time there and I'm kind of a radio junkie, I listen to the radio as much as I watch TV, so I definitely plan on hooking up an antenna to the receiver when I get this all together.

My addled brain seems to recall that the FM band is actually in the middle of the VHF band, so a TV antenna should work for FM as well yes?

I was thinking of providing her something along the lines of a Terk Silver Sensor and then using a splitter to feed both the TV and the receiver. (she currently only uses cable) that way she could watch OTA television if desired as well as have radio reception.

Is there anything wrong with this plan? Can I use just a cheap passive splitter, or should I use one with filters to filter out the UHF frequencies etc. for the connection to the receiver? And if the latter, could you recommend a product?

Or should I ditch the idea completely, and just use a dipole for FM and worry about the TV separately?

thanks much!

The Silver Sensor appears to cover only UHF, which is good for the TV and not for you. FM is low band VHF. If your stations are local, a dipole is cheap and might work just fine. fmfool.com will give you that info.

The specific model that I was thinking of using was Terk HDTVa which includes rabbit ears as well as the UHF antenna... I had one before and it was the only fancy antenna that I'd tried (and I'd tried and returned a few) that seemed in any way to beat plain old rabbit ears and bowtie. Would probably still be using it had I not given it to my friend to use in the waiting room of his shop, where it was promptly stolen in a break in...

But my question is more general - is there any issue with taking something like this - or even a plain set of rabbit ears - and splitting the signal between TV and receiver for FM? I've seen specialized splitters that cut out undesired frequencies, but is that really required for what I'm thinking?

Just trying to cut down on the number of things required for proper reception of everything...

N8Nagel said:

. . . My addled brain seems to recall that the FM band is actually in the middle of the VHF band, so a TV antenna should work for FM as well yes?

Click to expand...

In the U.S., the FM broadcast band, 88-108 mhz, is between TV channels 6 and 7. So the answer is "yes" if you have an antenna designed for use across the VHF portion of the TV spectrum, channels 2 through 13.

N8Nagel said:

I was thinking of providing her something along the lines of a Terk Silver Sensor and then using a splitter to feed both the TV and the receiver. (she currently only uses cable) that way she could watch OTA television if desired as well as have radio reception.

Is there anything wrong with this plan? Can I use just a cheap passive splitter, or should I use one with filters to filter out the UHF frequencies etc. for the connection to the receiver? And if the latter, could you recommend a product?

Or should I ditch the idea completely, and just use a dipole for FM and worry about the TV separately?

thanks much!

Click to expand...

I don't know that antenna, but I've run one antenna, no splitter, to TV and FM tuner without problems. But you still need some sort of coax "T" to split the antenna feedline to tuner and TV, right? A proper splitter probably costs about the same.

I would be more concerned about the directional characteristics of a single antenna when trying to receive two signals simultaneously. That's going to be a compromise in most cases. Chances are your FM station and her TV station won't be coming from the same direction, unless they happen to be on the same tower.

If it was me, I'd go with separate antennas.

In general, a decent antenna will work great. However, should you ever use an outdoor antenna, be mindful of lightning and grounding.

An old TV antenna that covered the VHF bands should work except for a few designs that had built-in FM traps. The new antennas for HD do not operate anywhere near the frequency of FM, so your results will be somewhat random - it may or may not work.

I would go with a separate antenna so that you can change direction independently. Also, a lot of FM is vertically polarized whereas television is horizontally polarized, so you have an additional degree of freedom there.