From: Steve Rich
Subject: WOHL-DC 35 >> Indy
To: fred@wlio.com
Hi Fred,
As a DTV DXer on the far north side of Indianapolis, near Carmel, I thought I'd let you know that your 9 kW WOHL-DC, with some tropo help, was really getting out late this morning (@ 119 miles). I captured two screenshots and have attached them. Just thought you'd enjoy knowing how far the new signal can go.
Plus, during the same time, WLIO-DT 8 was quite strong here, too.
Steve Rich
Indianapolis
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( 2.9 / 209 )by Bill Husted, Atlanta Journal-Constitution & Toledo Blade
It was just a short drive to a friend's house in another neighborhood, but it felt as if I was driving back in time.I spotted first one, then another and finally about four shiny aluminum rooftop antennas. It was like being back in the "Leave it to Beaver" days when almost every home had a sizable TV antenna on the roof.
Based on what I'm seeing and e-mails from readers, it seems the move to digital TV has sparked a minor resurgence of using an antenna to get free over-the-air TV. Some of you have cut the ties that bind to cable or satellite providers.
The fact that money is tight in many families probably gives this revival a bit of a boost.
There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, over-the-air HDTV actually can provide a better picture. All HDTV signals are compressed to some degree, but there's generally less compression used for over-the-air broadcasts.
Today we'll talk about antennas for the digital age. The first thing to know is that, despite what you frequently see in ads, there's no such thing as a digital antenna. No special antenna design or feature is needed to receive digital signals.
• However, many people find they need a better antenna to pull in reliable over-the-air digital signals than they did before the switchover.
The best antennas for the digital era are large, designed for the frequencies you want to receive and put up as high as possible. Let's start by looking at each of those three criteria.
• Bigger is better: While small rabbit ears may work, the bigger the antenna is (up to a point), the more signal it can grab.
• Finding the frequencies: Broadcasters send out their signals on UHF and VHF (ultra high frequency and very high frequency). Some stations that used VHF in the analog days have moved to UHF with the digital switch. So an antenna made purely for VHF reception - and one that may have done just fine before - is not a good antenna for UHF signals.
Here in Atlanta, seven channels in my reception area use UHF, and three use VHF. You can check what broadcasters are doing in your area - and get a lot more information, including recommendations for the antenna you should use - at www.antennaweb.org.
Bottom line, whether you use rabbit ears or some giant eye in the sky, make sure your antenna is designed for both VHF and UHF signals.
High and mighty: At the frequencies TV broadcasters use, the signal basically follows line of sight. It doesn't bend very effectively around the curve of the earth, nor does it do a good job at penetrating huge masses such as hills or mountains. Putting the antenna as high as you can increases the number of stations it can receive.
While some antennas are designed to work in all directions, most large rooftop models are directional. In other words, they do best when turned toward the transmitting antenna. If your antenna is working well now, no need to mess with anything.
But if some stations seem weak, adding an antenna rotor can make a big difference. At the end of this column I'll list sources for both antennas and rotors.
I realize that in many homes, the idea of a huge mess of aluminum tubing will not be a welcome sight. In that case, consider installing an antenna in an attic, or use a smaller antenna that can be mounted under an eave. It will not be as efficient as a full-sized antenna up high, but it will beat the pants off the world's best rabbit ears.
Some of you will be lucky enough to get by with rabbit ears. Since my primary source of TV is cable, I only use my rabbit ears as a back-up to make sure that the Braves and other sports teams can continue to break my heart in case of a cable outage. I'm close enough to the transmitting antennas for the stations I watch to make that possible. The antenna Web site I mentioned earlier will tell you what you can expect based on your ZIP code or street address.
OK. I promised you some other Web sites:
• www.rabbitears.info/market.php: A quirky Web site with lots of detailed station information.
• www.channelmaster.com/category.php: My favorite source for antennas (both indoor and outdoor), signal amplifiers and rotors.
• www.techhome.com: A source for finding professional antenna installers.
• http://tinyurl.com/nl92v8: Antenna tips along with information on mounting an antenna in the attic.
Contact the author...
tecbud (at) bellsouth (dot) net
Bill Husted writes for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Click the Related Link below for the original article
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( 3.1 / 214 )(original article posted in the RELATED link)
TV antennas making comeback
By Jennifer Ditchburn, The Canadian Press
A spiny pack of near-extinct, multi-limbed creatures are turning up in cities across Canada, creeping up the sides of buildings and settling on urban rooftops.TV antennas are making a tentative comeback in this country.
Nobody in the broadcasting industry or the government seems to have a handle on how many Canadians are scrapping cable and satellite in favour of the old-school technology, but there is anecdotal evidence that a miniboom is under way.
Ironically, it's all being fuelled by the high-tech switch by broadcasters from analog to digital and high-definition channels.
Viewers are discovering that they can get over-the-air, digital television stations that proponents say come through even better than on cable and satellite, where signals are compressed.
"And the magic word is 'free,"' says Jon LeBlanc, Canada's antenna guru.
LeBlanc began an "over-the-air" discussion board on www.digitalhome.ca five years ago, where a few diehard antenna fans would pop by. Now he's the most popular forum on the site, with dozens of new people logging on every month to find out about getting hooked up.
LeBlanc himself gets 14 digital stations, including six from the United States, with his rooftop antenna in Delta, B. C..
"If a person weeds through what they're actually watching, does the value-added provided by a cable company or a satellite company make any sense? In this financial environment, more and more people are saying No," says LeBlanc, a former high-tech worker.
Conventional TV broadcasters say they're struggling to survive in a multi-channel universe with dwindling ad revenues. They are pushing the government to provide some regulatory and financial relief, particularly when it comes to the costs of converting their transmitters to digital by 2011.
But the industry has not publicly discussed the phenomenon of Canadians willingly rejecting the 500-channel universe in favour of the signals they can catch locally.
The Canadian Association of Broadcasters says it's not something they have noted at all.
The number of Canadians who rely on over-the-air TV is repeatedly pegged at nine per cent nationally, 16 per cent in Quebec.
David Purdy, vice-president of video product management for Rogers Communications, predicts those numbers will continue to decline once all Canadian stations convert to digital by August 2011.
He points to the range of specialty channels, and now video-on-demand, that cable companies offer and Canadians are lapping up.
"The notion that a linear television offering, whether through rabbit ears or a digital receiver, is somehow going to meet the customer's needs is completely not reflective of the world we live in," Purdy said.
Karim Sunderani, co-owner of Toronto's Save and Replay store, says he's been selling 1,000 antennas a month, and he feels he's at the cusp of something big.
Sunderani's been getting orders from condominiums, motels, nursing homes and boarding houses to put up antennas.
"It's hard to believe, we're in 2009 and it's something you expect your grandfather to have," says Sunderani, who gets a dozen channels in his store with a $50 set-top antenna.
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( 3.1 / 192 )WOHL-DC is now on the air testing on Channel 35.
WOHL operates with 9,000 watts ERP, and will be the home to ABC and CBS. Programming will start August 17, 2009 at 7:00AM
At the present we are testing, so the signal may be on an off the air at times.
I look forward to reception reports.
Frederick R. Vobbe, Chief Engineer
___________________________________________
As of Saturday, July 25 at 10:53, here is where WOHL-DC Lima has been spotted.
MAP / JPeg Image
Stereo PCM Audio will be tested next week starting Monday 7/27/2009 afternoon.
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( 3 / 179 )The following article appeared in CGC Communicator and I think demonstrates the problem with DTV and propagation. Propagation for the 'non-technical' folks is Skip, when signals are made to go in different directions due to atmospheric factors. - Fred
THE BURROWS & ATTWOOD STUDY
One of the most interesting engineering articles around is an extract from the 1949 report entitled, "Radio Wave Propagation" by Burrows & Attwood. Here, the radio-reflective properties of the temperature inversion layer are explored and explained.
The inversion layer is the thing that traps smog in the L.A. basin and it's particularly notorious during summer months in southern California.
Bouncing a radio frequency signal off the inversion layer is like skipping a stone off a pond.
"Temperature inversion layer ducting" or simply "ducting" is where VHF and UHF signals from one market are reflected off the underside of the inversion layer and bounced into another market with great strength -- sometimes with signals augmented by 20 to 30 dB for long periods of time.
For example, ducting is what imports San Diego and Tijuana FM & TV signals into the Los Angeles basin during the summer months even though the reverse path is not as dramatic (Mt. Wilson is almost always above the height of the inversion layer and its signals tend to shoot through the layer without a lot of attenuation as documented by CGC signal strength recordings).
Understanding ducting is important because the DTV transition has packed television transmitters close together geographically.
CGC has recommended specific frequency offsets for some of its clients in order to mitigate co-channel interference, and we look forward to continuing this effort in the weeks ahead. Meanwhile, enjoy the Burrows & Attwood study:
http://earthsignals.com/add_CGC/Burrows_Attwood.pdf
As a closing thought, don't confuse ducting with other forms of propagation such as Sporadic E which, on a single bounce, can import signals in the 400-1300 mile range. Ducting typically operates in the 50-200 mile range based on local (so. Cal.) observations.
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( 3 / 168 )The Federal Communications Commission has before it a petition for rulemaking filed by WSYX to substitution of DTV channel 48 for channel 13 with a power of 1,000,000 watts at 286 meters in Columbus, Ohio.
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( 3 / 177 )
Since the June 12 switch to digital television, more than 800,000 homes have readied themselves to receive digital broadcasts. As 400,000 new homes upgraded in the last week, this now leaves only 1.7 million, or 1.5%, of U.S. homes classified as "completely unready" for digital TV.According to Mediaweek, many unready households are still receiving some form of digital signal...
Not all unready households are completely in the dark; in fact 60 percent of unready households receive at least one low-power or foreign station (from Mexico and Canada). On average, homes that can receive low-power TV stations have 3.5 station signals available to them.
African-American TV households are the least prepared with 3.5 percent completely ready, followed by Hispanics at 2.3 percent. Only 1.1 percent of white TV households are completely unready.
Click RELATED for more...
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( 2.9 / 160 )
This is an editorial to the Editor of The Toledo Blade in reference to their editorial about the Toledo TV stations and their DTV woes. The Toledo stations are suggestion doubling (or more) their transmission power.Click on RELATED to see the original editorial.
Fred
John Block
The Toledo Blade
541 Superior Street
Toledo OH 45660
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
John,
This is in response to your editorial in The Toledo Blade, “We Interrupt This Program”.
With apologies to Tim “The Toolman” Taylor, the solution is not more power, it’s a better tool.
Why is it that people in Lambertville and Ottawa Hills can’t get the Toledo stations, yet I and others in Allen County can see WTVG, WTOL, WNWO, WUPW, and WGTE? The reason is that the technology has changed the way we receive television.
When WLIO-DT came on the air in 2002 we operated at only 430 watts, on channel 8 (VHF) from an antenna 160 above ground. We were surprised to find that we had viewers in Deshler, Defiance, and Sidney. And yet we had viewers inside Lima that could not see us at all!
In the spring of 2006 we increased our transmissions from 430 watts to 27,500 watts at 455 feet off the ground. Conventional logic would say that this cured all the reception problems. Surprisingly, it helped a few viewers in the distance, but it also compounded problems with more people in our county.
During this past seven years we spent a lot of time working with viewers and engineers to find solutions to many DTV reception problems, and have identified a few important areas.
If you remember your old analog TV reception; occasionally you would get noise or a flutter in the picture. You could still hear the station, and watch the video, albeit the picture had some lines through it and maybe flickered. But it was viewable.
With digital, once noise or distortion is introduced into the signal, you completely loose the sound and picture. Digital must have a constant stream of data for sound and picture. This is the reason the majority of people have problems with DTV, and it boils down to several factors.
The first thing we found is antennas recommended by many retailers, (including our own government in public service announcements), do not work! In our area, 95% of the DTV viewers who own rabbit ears antennas are experiencing severe reception problems. Only 5% that have rabbit ears antennas can get fair to reasonable results.
Rabbit Ear antennas looked very promising to the consumer due to the cost, and the promise of great reception. However, some products boasted “50 dB amplification”, or “can receive stations 50 miles away”. These claims are simply false.
The performance issue of antennas also applies to pancake antennas, (the type that are normally installed on RVs, and are making their way into homes), Halo antennas used on the top of satellite dishes, and cheap non-directional roof-top antennas.
Signals from DTV stations arriving at these antennas from different angles causing phase cancellations and can not be decoded properly within the DTV receiver or converter. The result is no signal or a pixilated picture with sound cutting out. VHF and UHF stations both struggle with the reflection issue.
Why not increase TV station power to compensate for low gain antennas? Because signal integrity has not been solved. In fact, you’re now bouncing higher levels of reflected signals around. It’s like being in a gymnasium with a group of people. The whole room echos. If you can’t hear someone, they can shout but it still echos. And what if all the people want to be heard? If they all shout, are you going to hear one person? Probably not.
What happens when all the DTV stations double or triple their power to be heard? You increase another problem because not only are you trying to solve the problem of signal integrity, but you also have to try to keep out of town stations interfering with your local stations.
Increasing our stations power did nothing for our viewers in our area. Not a single viewer told us by increasing our power from 430 watts to 27,500 watts solved their reception problem. We did, however, receive more complaints from people living in the city with small rabbit ears antennas. Again, this is due to our signal reflecting off downtown buildings and being picked up by the viewers antenna, along with the signal direct from our transmitter.
How do you solve the problem? Good directional antennas are needed in most applications. In urban areas, an antenna such as the Winegard HD1080 will do well. The one I tested was easily mounted to the soil stack of my home. A neighbor attached one to the top of his gray satellite dish. I get my local stations, and some of the Toledo and Fort Wayne stations.
For distance, antennas designed like the AntennaCraft Y10-7-13 or Y5-7-13 work for VHF stations like 11, 13, and ours on channel 8. For the UHF stations a panel style AntennasDirect DB8 works well. The directional characteristics of these antennas allow for reduced multipath, (reception from other directions other than the original signal), and gain from the intended station. The down side of this is that most directional antennas require a rotor to position the antenna. If you want to receive just local stations, an antenna like the Winegard HD1080 works well once it’s up in the air and out in the open.
I can remember growing up in Toledo in the 50s and 60s on the west side, and we would have to rotate our antenna to the east to get Toledo stations clearly, and to the north-north-east to get Detroit. Perhaps having to do this as a kid is why I don’t mind it now.
Antennas should be up and in the clear of obstructions. They can be mounted on a pole to the chimney, or to a small tower along side the house. Try to get your antenna above roof lines, or natural barriers. Use good quality wire and antenna products. A word of caution, always mount antennas away from power lines!
Embracing the larger antennas can be a disappointment, but it is necessary if you want to watch DTV without signal loss. Antenna installation should be an investment, one you’ll make and live with for many years. And keep in mind that the antenna technology we’re doing today, is not much different than what our fathers and grandfathers used to pick up TV back in the pre-color days. Some things never change.
Keep in mind there is no such thing as a “digital antenna”, or a super modern inside powerized amplified antenna system for reception. The physics of VHF and UHF antenna theory have not changed in well over 60 years. What has changed is the type of transmission, and how it’s delivered to the home. As with any technology it will take years to perfect. I still remember my father complaining about trying to get the new station on channel 24 called WDHO. And he couldn’t understand why we needed another antenna. Sorry dad, technology changes.
And lastly, let us not forget that it was not broadcasters or the viewer that drove digital television. Congress pushed DTV in their quest for selling spectrum, supposedly for Homeland Security and other services they could auction off.
When DTV was first proposed the handwriting was on the wall, so to speak. Then F.C.C. Chairman Reed Hundt had a poster above his office that looked like a check. The “check” to the U.S. Treasury boasted that the transition to DTV would make payable to the government “$1-billion” in spectrum fees. And that was when $1-billion was something. I don’t know about you, but I would have felt better if digital television was driven by a need from the consumer, and not a Congressional mandate.
Frederick R. Vobbe is VP and Chief Engineer for WLIO Television (Lima OH) owned by Block Communications Inc.
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( 3 / 192 )Channel 6 quadruples signal to improve reception
Bob Fernandez, Philadelphia Inquirer - Mon, Jun. 22, 2009
6ABC, which faced withering criticism when thousands of over-the-air television viewers lost reception on June 12, quadrupled its TV signal over the weekend.The emergency signal boost was granted under temporary authority by the Federal Communications Commission and will last six months. A 6ABC official said the station will seek FCC permission to make it permanent.
On June 12, the nation's TV stations ended their use of analog signals in favor of digital signals. The switch improved picture quality, but for viewers using traditional over-the-air sets and rabbit ears, it also led to problems receiving 6ABC.
Viewers should rescan for the station on their digital-converter boxes. Some people still may not receive the station because of malfunctioning converters or poorly functioning antennas, said David Dombrowski, an FCC electronics engineer in Philadelphia.
The weekend's action confirmed that the FCC underestimated the necessary digital-signal strength in engineering models. Those models, experts have said, were based on outdoor antennas, which many homeowners in the Philadelphia area lack.
click RELATED below to see original story.
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( 3 / 178 )(From the CGC Communicator Magazine, a California Technical publication)
Some San Diego viewers accustomed to watching Los Angeles over-the-air analog TV are finding the new digital-only signals intermittent or not receivable. The problem involves variations in temperature inversion layer ducting, a profound problem in southern California. The affected viewers seem to instantly understand when DTV is explained as "Fair Weather TV," but their disappointment is evident nevertheless.
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