I have an RCA outdoor preamp with separate UHF and VHF inputs, so that should work nicely for UHF TV plus VHF communications. I'm also interested in playing with SDR to monitor VHF police and aircraft communications, so I'll eventually mount a vertically polarized scanner antenna on top of the same mast.
I expect that viewing the amplitudes of several channels at the same time, perhaps even the entire UHF band, I should be able to optimize the orientation of the antenna to receive the greatest number of channels. Toward that end, I ordered an RTL DVB-T USB stick to use with SDR# software. It occurred to me that even though SDR software is not designed to view television, it can display the carriers of several channels simultaneously, with very good resolution of amplitude. However, the viewing software can display only one channel at a time, and the signal strength indicator only displays six bars, not very good resolution. In preparation for installing a UHF TV antenna on my roof, I installed TV viewing software on a laptop computer so that ATSC TV broadcasts can be viewed by means of a USB tuner stick plugged into the computer.
