Should I use my house as an antenna?

[Andrevich4]

So I was thinking...

I live in an old house that seems to have several generations of mysterious copper wires running through it. I don't know what they were once for but they're just occupying space and they do NOT have electrical current running through them.

I just bought a radio that has an auxilary antenna plug-in. I bought a six foot copper wire antenna that works ok but isn't great. I had ambitions that I'd get VPR from the southern Hudson Valley but that isn't happening.

I got to thinking that maybe I could hook my radio up to the copper wires and those miles of wires would serve as a bigger antenna and I'd get more stations and better reception.

A couple of questions:

1. Would this work?
2. Is this going to kill everyone in the house?
3. Are there any other reasons I should or should not do this?

[David Tollefson]

Your house is a Faraday cage...

[bigbill]

Maybe if you add a rotating magnetic field using a large motor on the roof and several large magnets, you could turn your house into a giant tazer or at least have some wicked static shocks.

[ericpmoss]

[...] some wicked static shocks.

I'm now consumed by an image of a big rubber balloon and arms that rub sheep on it. It could be a coffee deficiency...

[thollandpe]

Ain't gonna work.

I'd been using a design my grandpa showed me to make a 300-ohm T-type FM antenna. I don't know if he was drunk or I misunderstood, but it didn't work.

Recently googled it and made one that worked. The idea is that the lengths of the legs match the size of the wave you're intercepting. Simple and easy once you get the idea and the dimensions.

[j44ke]

My neighbor on the first floor is a ham-nut. He asked me to help him set up an antenna so he could calibrate/tune some ham gizmo he had before he took it upstate. All his ham stuff is up near Germantown, and he has it connected to the Internet so he can use it remotely from the city. Which is good, because after we set up his antenna, a 7 story high circle of copper wire that hung from our rear fire escape, he went down to his apartment to turn on the machine. I went back to my apartment, and when he switched on his machine, this sound like a collision of electronic go-carts came through all our speakers at the volume of 40 trombones. And judging from the sudden presence and confused looks of people on their balconies across the street, they got an earful too. When he came back upstairs to take the wire down, he said well it works.

I bet you have some really old wiring like our house had when I was growing up. It was just bare copper wire run from insulator to insulator. No wonder houses burned down back then. Just takes one well placed mouse. When we first moved in I remember my dad standing in the basement looking up and saying those can't possibly be live. Bzzap!

[Mabouya]

Maybe if you add a rotating magnetic field using a large motor on the roof and several large magnets, you could turn your house into a giant tazer or at least have some wicked static shocks.

Better yet, you could make a giant Van de Graaff generator:

[bigbill]

Ok, seriously, as a kid I had a Sony Earth Orbiter 8 band radio next to my bed. I had a 10m antenna in the attic and it worked pretty well.

[Tristan]

Doesn't every radio station in the developed world broadcast over the internet now?

[Bob Ross]

I live in an old house that seems to have several generations of mysterious copper wires running through it. I don't know what they were once for but they're just occupying space and they do NOT have electrical current running through them.

I would want to be doubly, tripply, quadrupply sure of this before I even thought about whether repurposing them would work!

[j44ke]

My brain was scratching itself raw trying to remember what that wiring is called, so I had to search - knob & tube. Knobs are the ceramic insulators that kept the wire suspended off surfaces, and tubes are the the ceramic tubes used to insulate the copper going through the beams.

The ones in our house looked pretty much exactly like the stuff in the photos at the link.

We run the Internet through the electrical wiring in our apartment. An ethernet cable runs from the router into a "Home Plug" unit plugged into an outlet, then I have another Home Plug in a signaless area of the apartment that is connected to my wife's computer by another ethernet cable. Works very well, plenty speedy enough to stream HD movies and bicycle races. Makes me wonder a bit more why knob and tube wiring couldn't be used for some sort of an antenna. Just might not be very powerful.

[thollandpe]

We run the Internet through the electrical wiring in our apartment. An ethernet cable runs from the router into a "Home Plug" unit plugged into an outlet, then I have another Home Plug in a signaless area of the apartment that is connected to my wife's computer by another ethernet cable. Works very well, plenty speedy enough to stream HD movies and bicycle races. Makes me wonder a bit more why knob and tube wiring couldn't be used for some sort of an antenna. Just might not be very powerful.

Jorn, that's a power line carrier signal. You broadcast a signal over the power wires, superimposed on the 60 Hz alternating current. Much different than using a network of random wire lengths and directions to intercept a wave in the air that's of a known amplitude.

[j44ke]

Jorn, that's a power line carrier signal. You broadcast a signal over the power wires, superimposed on the 60 Hz alternating current. Much different than using a network of random wire lengths and directions to intercept a wave in the air that's of a known amplitude.

Aha, I see. Makes sense.

[WayneJ]

Getting radio stations through the internet is easy, but some of us (okay, maybe just me) get great pleasure out of pulling in stations by moving a dial. I'm one of them and it's why I still have my MR-78 tuner. Crazy as it sounds, I even enjoy a little static at times. It reminds me of the days when my dad and I listened to the Red Sox games together.

My antenna choice is a simple di-pole type (t-shaped as tee-aitch-pee-eee mentioned). I have experimented with di-pole antennas of my own and my best success was re purposing a hula-hoop and some wire to tune in very specific FM frequencies on the low end of the dial.

Don't worry, I have a back up hula hoop for using it the proper way.