I remember what I did now. In the centered to the dish I made, I used a pop can as an LNA amplifier. I remember it was a number of bare wire windings, with no metal core and those windings, fed into some larger quarts crystal, about half the size of a little finger fingernail and then to that center feed out, then I went to wound choked cores, with crystals.
What I must have done, was at first linneate the signal, or give it some sizing like how one rolls bread dough, and then that secondary feed out, was base segregated in signal, to be a stepped or uniformed marched signal, to the TV tuner. This is why I got n immediate translation of that coded television station.
*Why I've mentioned this, is if you can both line up, or give you primary signal some uniformity and then refractionate that signal, so it has some definition of signal, your tuner might be able to make some sense of it. What I used on the end of that pop can bottom, where it's dished to the center, is a spray of copper wire, which would gather signal from both the concentration of the larger out-dish and secondly from the concave reference of the bottom of that second dished area.
Just the inducted RF current powering both the coils, wire winding and crystals powered the unit on its own.
I'm wondering if the problem here, is in somehow fractionating that gathered signal. For a primary antenna, if you use a Delta T time travel antenna, your probably tapping into some non-standard signals. So this would be a must to translate that signal.
Something just flashed in my head, have you also though of a simple wire wrapped Omega shaped antenna, as your unit is so small?
http://stealthskater.com/Documents/TIME/Delta_T.pdf omega shaped antenna - Bing