Here comes the fun part. In part one of our article series, we showed you the HD-BLADE as it was intended to be used. Parts 2 and 2a came from asking “what if?” Surprisingly, I got four times as many channels just by randomly placing the HD Blade than I did after I tried to carefully mount it. Now it’s time to see what this little antenna can do.
I’m serious. The stuff I’m doing in these next three articles falls under the category of “Don’t try this at home.” We will not honor any warranty based on someone doing the things in these articles. So, are you ready? Let’s have some fun!
First thing I did was haul out a 10-year-old can of paint from the last time I painted my office. It was a little gummy. But, I was glad to see it wasn’t an oil-based paint. I know that an oil-based paint would have melted the antenna. I slathered the paint on thickly, without a lot of artistic effort.
The next thing I did was punch a hole at the top of the antenna. I looked on the white side and it’s pretty easy to see where the elements are. I used a plain-old 3-hole punch and just went to it.
I hung the antenna on a plastic cup hook and did a channel scan. Remember, my original channel scan in the same location got me 29 channels and I was impressed. The new channel scan got me 52 channels!
Now, I’m not saying the antenna was better when it was painted. Most likely the results were due to it being a different time of day or something. But the results were very similar to the ones I got when I draped the antenna over a chair. Obviously the paint wasn’t making things worse, that’s for sure. But of course I expected the antenna to work through paint. It’s just paint, right?
We don’t recommend you paint your antenna. Really. Don’t do it.
Still, it’s nice to know what happens when you do, right?
