On Sat, 13 Jun 2009 01:08:24 -0700 (PDT), wrote:

Oh well, some more cable along with a UHF/
VHF splitter (combiner) and that big Winegard in the garage will
hopefully cure it.

By this little snippet of what was intended as an aside may, in fact,
be your solution for VHF. Given your predicament of "code" (arbitrary
or otherwise), you can put the cable to work.

The solution is called a "Franklin Antenna." It would be disguised as
an antenna cable (or telephone cable, or power line, or other
innocuous wire) that trails up (to something innocuous), but never
connects (who is going to look? and if they did, it could always be a
dummy connection).

A Franklin antenna is a stacked, gain antenna that is very colinear
(hence the cable motif). These are most often described on the Web
for home wi-fi or bluetooth applications, but with scaling you can
bring them back down into the TV VHF band. A quick search gives:
http://www.para.org.ph/membersarticl...s%20-%2021.pdf
which on page 11 gives a pictorial representation (I can't say I vouch
for the entire paper, but it is representative of the topic).

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC