What is a Rabbit Ears Dipole Antenna?

The term Rabbit Ears Antenna came to be used as a colloquial name for the set top TV antenna of yester years. It was also called bunny ears TV antenna, with adjustable ‘ears’ for tuning! Tuning to a frequency can be done by adjusting the length of the telescopic elements. KV5R has published a design for a tunable, foldable, collapsible Rabbit-Ears Dipole for VHF/UHF bands. It was actually made by refurbishing an old Rabbit Ears TV Antenna!

A somewhat similar HF portable antenna was the Big Ear Portable HF Antenna which was available from MFJ, and would cover eight amateur radio bands from 40m up to 6m in the lower segment of VHF. It had telescopic whips stretching a span of up to 34 feet. There was a 45 degree center block with matching system. I have seen pictures of these types of antennas posted on X by radio amateurs on portable operations like Parks on the Air and Summits on the Air. It had a tunable loading coil on one limb and a balun at the center, thus forming an Off-Center-Fed Dipole (OCFD) loading system.