How I Installed a TV Antenna

I live in South San Jose; recently we have discovered that now that we have fast Internet, WII and Netflix, we already have access to hundreds of movies, so what do we need a tv for? Local news. Okay, but they are being broadcast for free, in hdtv, just install an antenna on the roof and go.


Started with looking up our area on antennaweb: entered my address and it gave me directions and this map.

The site also say that frequency ranges have colors, and that I have to choose an antenna that has the right colors.







Since there's over 60 miles from my home to San Francisco, the only reasonable choice was ChannelMaster 4228D - they sell it at Fry's.

Turned out that to install it I need more than just this box. I need a pole and the stuff to attach the pole to the roof. Below I explain what I did. I bought a 5-foot piece of "black pipe" at Lowe's (here on the picture the end of the pipe), a cap for the pipe and the piece which I want to attach to the roof.
You need a cap on top so that rain won't penetrate the pipe. Before attaching the bottom piece to the roof, I had patched the area below with roof coating, to avoid leaks:
Now we need these things from OSH (electric department and bolts and nuts department) to attach to the pole the guy wire that will hold it.
This is how the top of the pole looks like with all the stuff attached:
I have attached two eye screws to the sides of my roof, and two went straight into the roof:
After I drilled the hole for the screw, I patched it so the rain won't get in:
Now I have to attach the guy wire to the pole and to the eye screws; for this I use clams:
The guy wire does not go all the way through from the top of the pole to the screws. I cut the wire and attached turnbuckles that allow me to tighten the wires later:
This is how it looks with antenna attached to the pole using brackets, and the guy wires tightened with turnbuckles.
Now it's time to get the cable into the house. I bought a 25-foot white coaxial cable, connected it to the antenna's amplifier, got it along the roof and the wall.
I had measured the position of an existing tv socket inside the room, and used a long drill to drill through the wall to get to the socket as close as possible.
I used this bushing for the cable to get through. Bought it at Lowe's.
Had to cut the bushing, or else how would I get the cable through?
When I got the cable through the wall, I applied a good amount of clear caulk to make sure no water gets through.
I was lucky, the cable got exactly where I wanted it.

So all I had to do is connect my tv, scan the 56 channel it found and enjoy the show.

And you know what? It sucks. I don't have a dvr on those channels, so there's no way I can pause it, or get any information regarding what is it about... no recording. And the channels... what nonsense people watch, omg.

So, was it all worth it? Probably. I had fun with my antenna.

Here's a photo I took from a digital channel: