The Amazing Melting Antenna

 These days you are much more likely to see solar panels on the roof of a house than you are to see a television antenna peaking above its highest point. This of course is due to technological progress and the dominance of cable TV. 

At some point the temptation of a glut of channels seemed to be worth the ever-increasing cost of having a cable come into your home, and force feed you more reality shows and highly opinionized news then any one person could conceivably imagine. At the price a person pays, the compulsion to lock your eyes open and stare at the vast emptiness of quality programming seems to be almost natural if not necessary. 

Noticing this gaping monthly hole in our wallet combined with the bad taste in our mouths from what was actually being offered to us the watch, the wife and I decided to cut the cable and rely solely on streaming services, and OTA (Over the Air) television.

To accomplish the reception of over the air television (yes, it is still being offered), I put up a small antenna pointed at a particularly thick congregation of television antennas seven-teen miles northwest of my location.

This antenna was once available on Amazon and does provide decent service. It happily hung out on my roof for a few years with a variety of other antennas, sensors, and plumbing.

Recently, however I had noticed a distinct drop in signal strength and quality of picture. Something was wrong up there, and I did not know what. Perhaps some of the high winds we get moved the antenna out of alignment. I had to go up and see.

What used to be an easy climb up onto my roof has since become somewhat of a task the older I get. Nonetheless I did hobble up to see what was going on. The first thing I noticed was the antenna was absolutely COVERED in bird shit. Is bird shit conductive? Was it shorting something out? I did not know. So, whatever the reason I had to take the antenna down and clean it up.

Below you can see the antenna after it has been cleaned up a bit. It does still appear a bit rough around the various feed points. In my attempt to clean those up, the plastic holding them secure fell apart in my hand. I suppose the years of it baking in the sun and bathing in bird shit had just deteriorated them. 

Luckily, I have a 3D printer and a mind to use it.  I was able to design and print a reasonable facsimile that worked rather well.

This time I mounted everything in the attic to keep the birds away from the antenna. I pointed things in the right direction, and everything was good. The signals were strong, and the picture was solid. I had all of this completed before the summer heat got too hot to work in the attic.

After about a week I started to notice that channel 2 was not coming in at all. This didn't make sense to me since the signal was nice and strong when I hung the antenna. I popped up into the attic to take a look and this is what I saw. The elements responsible for VHF-Lo band reception (Channel 2) were bent over and sagging as if they were sad. On further inspection when I took the antenna apart, I found out that my printed PLA parts had gone soft and melted a bit.

How was this even possible? The attic should never get that hot. Well apparently, it did because I had found that my attic fan had stopped working. So, I took the antenna apart and put it to the side while I fixed the attic fan.

In the end however I hooked my discone antenna up as a stop gap until I repaired the directional antenna again. Come to find out that the discone antenna works WAY better than the direction one I fixed. So, I just left it in place and have not had issues with it since.

Another lesson learned; I suppose.