In installing ye olde antenna(e), I'm forced to tackle an issue I've been avoiding for quite a while: fishing cable down from the attic into an exterior wall.
There are a handful of problems with this. Luckily, one of them isn't insulation—it appears our house is old enough that the walls aren't packed with fiberglass. At least, the two sections of wall that I've opened already didn't have anything.
Anyway, the biggest problem here is drilling through the header into the wall cavity. As you can see in the picture, there's only about six inches of space between the roof sheathing and the header up in the attic. That's right: the header is waaaaay back at the end of the attic. This sucks.
Plus, there's fiberglass insulation all over the attic and it just to happens that the one set of joists I have to crawl down to drill this line happens to have a huge sheet of plywood nailed vertically along it, making my life suck.
So what are the answers here? I don't particularly want to run the line out of a soffit, down the wall, and back into the siding—and I'm not sure I can use one of those long flexible bits to reliably drill a header hole, either.
Thoughts?
P.S. That 80-degree weather we've had lately? Yeah, that makes working in the attic at 6pm just lovely.
1) do your attic work first thing in the morning, like I just did (it's 6:30am here).
2) Cut a hole in your drywall just below the ceiling and drill up through the header, then push a fish tape up and run the cable that way. Then replace the drywall nugget and patch, paint. That's the easiest way to get at it imho.
Wireless?
Mouser-
Damn. I guess that may be the easiest solution. Seeing as I've already got a gaping ceiling hole to patch, I suppose cutting a new hole won't be too bad.
Raven-
Yep, wireless! That's what the antenna is designed to pick up.
--D
I think Raven has the right approach, though. Simply contract the TV stations to set up their transmitters in your living room, then you can pick up the transmissions with your braces.
I like where you mind is Mouser. Dan, do it our way and forget even having to cut a hole in the ceiling.
Somehow I suspect putting a UHF transmitter in my living room is going to require something bigger than "a hole."
I still think like my idea of going thought the wall in the middle of the house, down into the basement, under the room and up through the wall. I don't actually know how hard that would be or if it would even work.