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Is there a meter that I can hook into an antenna system to see what channels I can pick up? Or how strong the channels signal is?
Thanks

That would be a "receiver" with a built-in signal strength meter.

My baby tells the microvolts of the signal from the antenna :

----> http://i588.photobucket.com/albums/ss32 ... 15427d.jpg

(34uV at the picture)

That's a mighty impressive "meter"!

jwax wrote:That would be a "receiver" with a built-in signal strength meter.

Do they have a trade name? Can you tell me where to purchase one?
Thanks

What frequencies are you interested in?

jwax wrote:What frequencies are you interested in?

I work in a hospital, and I am trying to find out if the patient TVs are going bad or our antenna signal is weak.

Connect a known healthy television to the suspected bad patient's room antenna and compare performance.

That's the easy, convenient way.
Option, if money is no object, is to buy a field strength meter. They make them specifically for the TV bands.

In the Navy, we used the Singer/Stoddard NM-25T. It was exactly as you describe in your wants, but limited to 30MHz or so as I recall. There were other models that went higher in frequency. We had to sweep the HF bands back in the 1970s to do site surveys to check background noise. It was a very boring, twice a year deal that I hated because it took me away from the test equipment repair bench.

I just searched on "tv signal strength meter" and found a variety of meters as low as $30 on my first try

These are not tunable to stations and only give a general sense of what's going on.

99% of the time, someone has added too many splitters in the cable distribution network which divides the signal strength for every port on that network. usually the solution is to replace the passive splitters with active amplified splitters. Note that this can cause problems with digital cable services and internet connections if they use the same cables. The result of too many splitters is almost always certain dead channels among others that seem to work. In digital TV, the picture will probably just freeze or drop out, in analog systems you would see bars of noise roll across the screen.


not for TV frequencies or attaching to a cable so much but many smart phones can download a signal strength meter app for free and use the fancy computer in your pocket. While your at it, a seismograph is a cool app too.

Years ago, in my time of consumer electronics, we used a salvaged TV tuner and measured a signal output voltage for a rough approximation of signal strength. That was way back in the age of analog so I don't know if digital or cable tuners can be adapted for this use.