Revolutionize Your TV with the Winegard RAYZAR Z-1 Antenna

Today we're featuring and we'll be installing the Winegard antenna, the Rayzar Z-1. This antenna is a high definition antenna. And you know, for years we've been using the old, what I call the batwing style, where you've gotta crank it up and then you've got to dial it and find all the tunes, all the different towers that are out there. with the advent of digital signals in television that created the needs for new technology, new antennas, a longer range with those antennas. And that's exactly what this one will do. Now I could boost this old batwing that we have in here but I still only get about half of what I can get out of this new feature here. And what I really like about this is it's permanently mounted. It's going to sit up on the top. It's only 8.4 inches tall. It's got a small footprint in here. So I don't have to crank it up. And more importantly, I don't have to remember to crank it down, when I leave the campground. Now this one's gonna be an easy install because we have an existing batwing on this right now. So we already have the hole in there. We have the co-ax up there. If I was gonna install this new, on a unit, that had no antenna whatsoever, I would have to look for a place that's at least 12 inches from any of the obstacles up on the top, drill an inch and three quarter inch hole run co-axial up there but not with this one. We're simply gonna take the old antenna off, which we have done already. There's a series of screws on the outside that we're just going to cut away on a little bit of the silicone. We pulled that apart, took the screws off. Inside we take the handle off, simple screw, take the secure nut and bring the handle part down and it's ready to go. So we've got that cleaned up, up there. Let's go install our new antenna. So we've got our opening here. We are able to take quite a bit of adhesive here. One of the things that I noticed as we're taking this off is that this was not tight. It was hand-tightened. I could just take it off with my fingers. That's not a good thing. You want these nice and tight. So during the installation, you know, these should've been tightened with a wrench, down here, that might've been part of the reason we had poor reception. So our new footprint's gonna go right in here. The co-ax looks really nice. I got the opening already. The co-ax coming up in here. So we're just gonna put this back in, put a little butyl tape on the bottom of the base and butyl tape's a kind of a putty tape is gonna help seal that. And then we're gonna fill all the rest of this in. We measured our piece. The first thing we did is we came in from the inside, scribed a line. I also went in with a tape measure and measured this and it says you can add three quarters of an inch to that measurement. So we got our deal. We're put it on here. We're just gonna dry fit at one more time, put it through and make sure we've got enough to engage this on my handle, on the bottom side. It looks good. We're reattaching the co-ax. And we want to make sure that we do tighten it up this time. Make sure we've got a good connection going through there. And our base is gonna be about with the seven inches or so in here. So we wanna cover both holes. I wanna make sure we got this arrow right here, to the front. Okay, so we did a dry fit on this and there was still quite a bit of gap in the front with these two big holes like this, just didn't feel comfortable putting that smaller antenna in it. And luckily the old antenna had a base on the bottom of that. So we took that apart. We're gonna put that base back on here and use that to seal every everything up here. Now we did have enough play in that tube. So that's something I would recommend that, you know, if you're gonna put that base in, make sure you measure with that, but it isn't thick enough to make a difference new butyl tape going all the way around. So we're putting our base back on just getting lined up doesn't matter, front or back, everything matches up the same. This is gonna really help seal that whole area, since that was such a big base to begin with. And we're just trying to line up the same holes just so we don't poke a bigger hole in that roof material. There we go. Perfect. And although you could do this by yourself, this actually is much easier with two people, especially when you want to go inside and do some measurements on that tube, up through the top of it, just be able to hold things a little better. And as always caution when you're going up. One of the things we wanted to be very careful of when we took this out is we've got a rubber membrane here. This actually looks like it's an alpha system and we didn't wanna cut that rubber membrane on the top of it, because then we have to spend a lot more time resealing it. We're gonna reconnect our co-ax. And again, we want to make sure we tighten it down with a wrench, get a good connection. You'll notice that this goes over this here. So I do have a little bit of play, you know, when I got this flush, but if I needed a little more room, I can pull that out. And I got the same distance. And I also have some play up here too. I got quite a bit of room that I can use. So, I'll just sneak this co-ax back down inside. Now one thing you'll also notice with this, it's hard to get a screw gun in here. So we're gonna have to use an angle or a small, a very small screw driver to attach this because we can't use our regular screw gun. Nice. Nice and snug, that's good. So now we'll just take and put lap seal, self-leveling lap seal over all this, and it'll just do a nice smooth finish in here. And then I'm gonna go down on the inside We're gonna hook our handle back up. And all we did down there is we took our handle. You put this inside. That goes in. This goes over the top. That's what we measured with. So I'm just gonna take this inside. Slide it up, three screws, and it's ready to go. Before we seal this though, we wanna go inside, turn it on, verify that it's working, because if for any reason our co-ax came apart or pinched or a screw went through whatever. If it's not working, I don't wanna have all that sealant on here beforehand, to have to take it all off to take this. So we're gonna go down and dry run this before we put the silicone back or the self-leveling sealant that's designed for this alpha roof. That's another thing is important. Not just silicone over everything, the proper sealant, for the proper roof material that you have. So we had installed our antenna up on the top. And as you saw beforehand, we used the old plate. That hole was a little too large. We didn't want to put that much caulking or sealant up there. So we took the old plate off. If you've got that situation, simply take it off, your old antenna, reapply that down, make sure you measure the distance on that adjuster tube in there. And then we came in, we put our handle in, three screws. That's all it was, very easy. Now the real test is to turn this on. There we go. And we're in a campground in Northern Iowa. This campground typically does not get the local channel. We'll mute that. Does not get the NBC channel because it's about 90 some miles away in Rochester. And so we noticed with this one, this happens to be the Rochester 720i. I'm gonna go down here and see if we get there HD 1080i. Look at that picture, beautiful picture. The antenna stays up. I never have to take it down. I don't have to worry when I'm going out of the campground. I get about twice as many of the channels beforehand. Just a little bit of tweaking. What a wonderful product Winegard Rayzar Z-1.