I just bought myself a shiny new ChannelMaster TV antenna with a five foot mast and a bracket to attach it to my roof (in anticipation of my hopefully soon-to-arrive HD-TiVo). Before I attach the antenna to my roof, I realized I need to have a grounding story. I've surfed around, and found agreement that I need to do some grounding, but not what I'd call detailed instructions on how to make it happen.

Furthermore, I looked at my existing DirecTV dish installation (done profesionally), and I don't see any kind of grounding wire attached to the thing. Do I need to ground that as well? Where should I buy all the grounding equipment? All I saw at Fry's (where I bought the antenna) was a ground block isolator (two coax connectors + a hook for a 12ga solid core wire that you're supposed to run to a true ground). I didn't see anything that you might want to bury in the yard. Do I have to go to Home Depot for that? Anybody done something like this before? Any advice?

(Should I just mount the antenna in the attic and take the lower singal strength in return for not having an ugly antenna on the roof and not having to deal with the grounding issues?)

If there is no ground wire, then your DirecTV dish installer people did it wrong. There is supposed to be a ground wire that attaches to an included grounding block that's inline with the antenna cables. It's a small hunk of metal with female connectors for your antenna cables. There will be an actual thread for the ground screw right on the grounding block. The screw itself is usually painted a unique color such as dark green or dark blue. I'm not sure if the paint is just a marking or if it's anti-corrosion paint or what, but the kits always have them.

The grounding block is not necessarily right on, or next to, the antenna. It's possible that it's under your house or in your attic somewhere. You need to trace the antenna cables before assuming it's not there.

From the grounding block, the thick copper ground wire runs to any seriously-grounded point in the house. If it's convenient, you can ground it to the official ground point in your electrical service box. If not, you can find a bit of plumbing and attach a ground strap to that.

When I grounded my replacement roof antenna, I connected its ground wire to the direcTV grounding block, and grounded that block to the plumbing.

The purpose of the ground wire is to provide a path for the inevitable static electricity that builds up when the wind blows across your antenna. If you don't provide this ground path, then the static electricity will reach ground via the antenna signal cable (i.e., through your equipment).

By the way, do you have the 3-LNB antenna for the HD feed? My antenna has 3 LNBs and four outputs (and the grounding block has four wire points), so I can run two receivers (such as both an HD and an SD tivo) from the antenna without needing a separate multiplexer box.

I have a metal rod (I forget what sort of metal) about 4 feet long that I pounded in the ground right outside my house. It's got an acorn nut on the top of it to attach a grounding wire to. (Do a search for "ground rod".) If your house is reasonably modern, you might be able to find a good way to attach it to the ground of your existing electrical system. My apartment is over 50 years old, and its electrical system is not grounded.

Right now, I've only got the dual LNB, but I have the oval dish that will let me attach a third LNB and I'll be in business.

If my DirecTV dish is grounded, then it's grounded somewhere in the attic rather than anywhere outside the house. Since I was planning to install the OTA antenna right behind and above the dish, I figure it's pretty easy for me to do all the grounding at once. I can run one grounding wire from the dish to the antenna, through the grounding block for the OTA antenna, and down the side of the house to a grounding rod of some kind. The electricity comes into the house on the same side, so I suppose I could do a grounding strap that hangs onto the big metal pole that comes out above the electrical box.

Where would you go to find the heavy-duty grounding wire and all the miscellaneous grounding parts? Home Depot? Should I call around to look for an electrical supply firm of some kind? I don't recall seeing the necessary gear at Fry's.

Home Depot, et al., should have spools of wire, yes.

Most DirecTV installations are grounded at the drip trap, which is where the cable is looped into kind of an S or cloverleaf shape in order to keep water running down the length of the cable from grounding things by creating a local minimum in the height of the cable, usually using a female-to-female connector. If yours doesn't have this, then you may have slightly more to consider than just simple grounding.

The grounding wire can be any heavy-gauge solid copper wire, you can get that anywhere. And thanks for mentioning the drip-loop, Bitt, I forgot about that. (Dan, the drip-loop simply puts a little "U" shape in the cable so that rainwater drips off the bottom of the U instead of collecting at the grounding block or into the hole you drilled in the side of the house. To know the proper place to put a drip loop, imagine that you're a drop of water, where would you go.)

Yup, no drip loop, either. My no-longer-used cable TV line has one, so I know exactly what you're talking about. The DirecTV guy just pretty much took the RG-6 cable and shoved it through a gap under my eaves, straight into my attic. I suppose I could grouse at them to come back out and fix it, or I could just fix it myself while I'm going through the trouble of doing the OTA antenna.

On the othe hand, if I call up DirecTV saying I had premium-mumble-professional installation and they installed something that's not up to code and created a fire hazard and blah blah blah, then I might be able to get them to deal with the proper grounding, upon which I could piggyback the grounding for my OTA antenna.

I would definitely call. I'm sure directv pays the contractor enough money to do the job right.

This site might be useful for evaluating your installation.

http://www.dbsinstall.com/Whatis/Whatisgood-1.htm

I'll try calling later today, but I can already anticipate what will happen. DirecTV will say it's not their problem, call your installer. I'll call American Satellite, from whom I bought the original equipment and paid for installation, and they'll tell me it's their subcontractor's problem. I'll try to track them down and they'll be long gone. Should be a fun adventure, but it's clearly something I want to get fixed.

Presumably what you actually get is a not-very-good ground (through a big resistor), not very high in the air, in case of thunderstorms?

Peter

The DirecTV guy just pretty much took the RG-6 cable and shoved it through a gap under my eaves, straight into my attic.

I'm guessing that the cable had to go downwards to get past the edge of the roof, then upwards again to get into the space under the eaves. That's actually a perfectly valid drip loop, and in the right place, too.

Indeed, I can see how it might qualify as a drip loop, but it's clearly below the standards on that web site that David linked to. The lack of grounding may, in fact, be responsible for why my original DirecTiVo blew up...

Well, that was more pleasant than I thought it would be. The original installation warranty was most likely 90 days. Long gone, no dice there.

But, as it turns out, even though I spent the extra bucks on an oval dish, way back when, to upgrade to HD I'm going to need a third LNB on the dish. I knew that. DirecTV charges the same for installing a third LNB on my existing dish ($49 + "handling" = ~$68) as for shipping out a brand new triple-LNB dish and getting that installed. So, what the heck, I'm going to let them come out, give me a shiny new dish, and I'll insist it be installed and grounded properly. And, when the installer is here, I'll say "I've got this shiny new ChannelMaster antenna. Whadda 'ya want to install that at the same time?"

The house is already wired for cable TV with a distribution box in the attic and taps in three rooms. I'll get the OTA antenna hooked into that, and then I'll just sit back and keep waiting for my HD-DirecTiVo to show up. So, I won't have HD right away, but I will have decent OTA reception for the spare TV in the bedroom (which currently only gets three channels well, plus a bunch of high-numbered Spanish language channels that I think it's picking up somehow from the cable TV wires).

The installer was supposed to arrive "between 8am - noon" on Saturday. He called at 8:30 to say he'd be here "between 11:30 and 1:30". At 2:30, I called DirecTV to figure out what was going on. Finally, I got through to the installer. I was supposed to be job #2, but job #1 was a disaster, as it turned out he had to rip out and rewire an entire installation from scratch. We talked it over, and since my job was relatively simple, he agreed to drop what he was doing, come over and take care of me, and then get back to job #1 where his boss would be heading out to meet up with him and help him out. Would you believe he was originally assigned six jobs for 4 hours? Needless to say, he was way behind.

Changing out the old dish for the new 3-way dish and verifying that it worked took all of five minutes. No sweat. He agreed, for an additional $40, to install my OTA antenna. I assembled the thing (over six feet long by the time I was done), and it turned out that several of the bars were torqued pretty badly, but the majority of it looked to be in good shape. I had already chosen what looked to be the least distressed box at Fry's, so I figured I'd do best to just go with it.

I had bought a roof mount and a five foot pole, but the installer guy concluded he couldn't do what he wanted to do with the mount that I'd bought. Instead, he used a standard satellite elbow mount and attached the antenna to that. Then, I'd insisted that we get everything properly grounded. He was in a huge hurry to get done and overlooked a couple things, but everything got done right in the end when I pointed it all out to him. Both antennas and their cables are now properly grounded to a 10 or 12ga wire that connects to the metal case of my (outdoor) electrical junction box.

I don't have an HD tuner yet, but the difference with a standard tuner is night and day. Our bedroom TV, originally hooked to an indoor antenna, was iffy at best; channel 2, in particular, was just crap. Now, channel 2 is pretty good (minor ghosting) and channels 11 and 13 are sharp as a tack. The higher channels are all beautiful as well, which bodes well for my upcoming HD conversion (all but one of Houston's HD channels are in the UHF band).

Also, right now I'm using a passive 3-way splitter in the attic to route the antenna to the three taps in the house. I can always drop in an amplified splitter later if I figure out I need a stronger signal. I hope I don't need to go with one of the more exotic amplifiers that you mount on the antenna mast. (There's a run of maybe 20 feet of RG-6 cable from the antenna to the splitter, and then another 20-30 feet of whatever my house builder originally installed to get to each wall tap.)

The only issue, and it's a strange one, is that the DrecTV-TiVo I borrowed from Rob after my earlier one blew up, is now refusing to operate in dual-tuner mode. I spend some 90 minutes on the phone with the DirecTV people trying to debug that, to no avail. I started a thread on TivoCommunity that has kicked out some useful ideas for me to go try to narrow down the problem. I also called ValueElectronics, who are allegedly going to deliver my HD-Tivo by the end of the month to see if they could expedite things for me. They didn't make any guarantees but offered to do what they could for me. Hopefully, I'll get that issue straightened out soon.