Homemade low power TV transmitter?

[Phil Nelson]

Originally Posted by Steve McVoy

The FCC allows a maximum radiated power of 100 mw. This won't cover a whole house, but will work within a rooom. You can find devices that broadcast TV on ch 3. with that power on Ebay.

You can also buy kits. A Google search should turn them up.

I would not recommend the Ramsey kit. I built one a few years ago. The signal quality was abysmal, and the usable range was more like 3 feet than the claimed 300 feet.

Last year, I bought a Recoton video sender. Not really a TV transmitter, since it has receiving and transmitting units, and requires an RF modulator on the receiving end. It works OK in the same room, but the usable range is, again, far less than the manufacturer claims, which sort of defeats the purpose. If your range is 10 feet, you might as well just move your TV 10 feet closer to the source and make a direct connection.

If anyone knows of a better quality video sender, I'd love to hear about it. I would like to be able to tune a station on our satellite TV box and relay it to my workshop in the garage.

Splitters can't be used here. Our system detects them somehow and blocks the signal. When they installed the system, it wouldn't work at all in one room. The guys finally discovered an old splitter with an unused branch of coax in the crawl space under that room. (We used some existing wiring from a previous antenna system in the attic.)

Phil Nelson