[majortom]

Do urself a favor...ditch the wally world preamp and get a real one. Might
be all ya need to clean up ur situation. Maybe try that first if ya don't wanna get
into building sumthin for outdoors just yet.
See the preamp chart in post #1 of the below thread.

http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=42426

Even if ya wind up outdoors, a good quality preamp can still come in handy,
especially for DX'n.
For Outdoors, Wire elements would probably have less wind load.
I used solid # 8 AWG Copper Ground wire from "Home Debit".
There's all sorts of threads here dealing with everything u'd never wanna know about DIY.
metals, build techniques, wire straightening, etc.

 

[majortom]

I bought that Phillips distribution amp from there a few years back and it overloaded the signal and injected a lot of noise in analog. Thinking it was bad I returned it. Same thing, then return it again and again until they had no more. All gave me miserable results, heh.

300ohm, Just think of all the people in ur neighborhood u helped out by them avoiding the aggrevation once they had no more on the shelf. There is no test selection when it comes to junk

Bigsig330, moral of the story, if it's not on the preamp chart, linked to above, it's for a reason. i.e. - not recommended.
Clicking the link to the RCA thing u linked to I get this...

No specifications available for this product.

What does that tell ya?

 

[majortom]

That's where u need to consider the strongest signals around you, from both TV and FM radio, and compare them to the weaker stations ur looking to receive. You should consider strong FM signals too (FM FOOL), since your interested in pulling in some weaker VHF HI signals.
Multiple Strong FM stations 87-108 MHz can cause pumped up noise / distortion in the VHF Hi range which starts at 174 MHz.

So take a look at the column indicating maximum input for two strong signals. The higher that is, the better the immunity from strong signals on the input to the preamp causing intermodulation distortion on the output of the pre-amp.

The other important consideration is Noise Figure. The lower the Noise Figure, the more it will improve the overall receive sensitivity of your system.