TV and FM antenna

htfx19

htfx19

Herzel Frenkel
Hi guys and girls.
This is about antennas.
My house is built of wood frame with a steel expanded mesh over chipboard panels toward the outside.
This construction make for a near-perfect Faraday Cage. It "works great" blocking most radio signals or at least attenuating it pretty well.
Do you guys experience that in the Stats? and do you know of good solutions.
Thanks.
 
I think some houses in the US are constructed this way, especially stucco houses or houses with fake rock walls. My old house had expanded mesh tacked to the exterior, then flat, fake rocks with hooks on the back were hung on the mesh, then mortar applied between the hung rocks, to give the appearance of a rock wall.

I never noticed a problem with radio reception, but not all walls were done this way, so the Faraday cage was not complete.

The obvious solution would be to run external antennas to the roof and such, but that's not always an option, either because of the building (maybe you don't have access to the roof) or because of the type of radio signal you are concerned with. Cell phones, for example, probably cannot have such a thing as an external antenna. Although I think they make signal boosters for them, which you could put near a window.

If, as the title of the post implies, you are concerned with TV and FM, looking into mounting an external antenna on a roof or balcony would be the way to go.

Pete
 
I hang a TV antenna in window to deal with living in a house with aluminum siding. Phones seem to do ok but we do have a lot of glass.

They do make phone boosters that use your hardline internet connection to give your cellular data a boost while in the house if you use that. It uses your hardline internet bandwidth.
 
Cell phone carriers and frequencies are different from country to country, but for better cell reception, if you have WiFi internet in your home, check your phone and carrier to see if it can do WiFi calling, which when set up tells your phone to first use the WiFi signal in your home to connect to the internet to make phone calls. If that's available, it would certainly work around the reception problem!

Here in the USA, T-Mobile has had it for several years, and Verizon is now supporting WiFi calling on iPhone and I think Android phones, too.

Agree with other respondents regarding TV and radio, external antennas would seem to be a good solution.
 
It's not likely your house's stucco mesh envelope is attenuating the signal much. It's not continuous, the shape is inefficient and the pitch (it's been a long time since I worked these problems) may affect longer wavelengths but not shorter ones. A sphere is the best design for a cage. When you integrate, you're left with a zero flux. No E field. Man, I haven't thought about this situation in over 25 years.
 
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