First, a bit of background.
I'm not familiar with outdoors antennas and how to use them, but it seemed necessary for over-the-air digital television, since the little combination rabbit-ear and loop indoors antenna I was using more or less successfully for over-the-air analog broadcasts appeared unable to successfully receive digital ABC or CBS broadcasts. I already had the digital to analog converter box, which seems to work quite well (except for not getting ABC or CBS as said), and just got an outdoors antenna from Amazon. I've constructed those parts of it that needed to be constructed for completion (a few nuts and bolts), and need only the mast, which I'll obtain from a hardware store in a day or so (the mast is nothing more than a steel pipe and some mounting hardware).
The outdoors antenna actually will be indoors, mounted to a large worktable. Be that as it may. After constructing the outdoors antenna, I noticed that only ten "elements" of this antenna, which is supposed to be a "twenty-element" outdoors antenna, were electrically connected to the two pairs of ribbon cabling that lead to a transformer, to which would be connected the coaxial cable that leads to the television. The ten electrically connected "elements", which are connected with a thick wire that I think is scored bare aluminum and which wanders from side to side, are the largest "elements" by far, except for the little baby "elements" nine and ten. They are all in a flat horizontal plane. The two funny "wings" which hold what seems to be six more (shorter) VHS "elements" and which angle off from the main antenna rod, are not electrically connected in any way to the coaxial cable (through the transformer). Nor are the nine strange little "butterfly arms" connected to the main antenna rod through an extender which I bolted onto the main antenna rod, and which seem to be for UHF, electrically connected.
Yeah, that seems to add up to 25 "elements", of which only ten are useful. The other 15 "elements" seem effectively to do absolutely nothing. Will it hurt to simply run a thick bare copper wire or two from the main antenna rod, which appears to be electrically isolated and which has all the useless "elements", to the same bolt(s) which hold(s) the thick scored aluminum wire to which is connected the transformer that actually supplies the signal through the coaxial cable to the television?
I really don't understand why the (Chinese, if that helps) manufacturer did it this way (for Philips, if that is useful). Is this arrangement supposed to make sense, or is this a sloppy practice meant to look good even while only a little of the antenna is actually producing a useful signal?
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