Thin-Air ATSC (And NTSC) A Selective Boost Brings Big Bird Home To Roost

The latest in an ongoing series…

I realize that just last Friday I said:

I suspect I won’t have much to share with all of you on this topic over the next few months.

Note however my careful selection of the intentionally nebulous word ‘much’. As such, I felt compelled to respond to reader Dave Telling, who earlier this morning wrote:

I also found (as Brian did) that boosters don’t work for me - I actually LOST stations whenever I tried a booster.

Well, Dave, that depends. As of late last week, I was getting a weather-degraded signal from KOLO’s Peavine Mountain line-of-sight low-power translator on UHF channel 24, along with a completely weather-clobbered channel 13 transmission from KTVN’s double-edge-diffracted signal originating on Slide Mountain. The latter was the more baffling of the two; being VHF, it should have been less affected by airborne precipitation than its UHF counterparts, and KRNV at VHF channel 7 and broadcasting from the exact same tower as KTVN was seemingly unaffected by the weather.

Last night, just in time for another 60 Minutes recording attempt, KTVN again went on the blink. This reception failure was coincident with the accumulation on my VHF antenna of extremely wet and large snowflakes, which had been flying through the air all day but which (until a few hours earlier) the ambient climate had encouraged to melt upon landing. This morning’s warmer temperatures had cleared off the antenna, and KTVN was back. A few hours later, the air chilled, my AntennaCraft’s Y5-7-13 once again got coated, and KTVN again got clobbered.

I went outside, knocked the snow off the antenna, and KTVN’s ATSC reception was again resurrected. A half hour later, the acccumulated snow was back, and the signal was once again gone. I think I’ve found my culprit It’s a mystery to me why two VHF transmissions, coming from the exact same tower, can be affected so differently by a ‘Sierra Cement’-encrusted antenna. Then again, for reasons unknown, KTVN has always had a notably weaker received signal than KRNV. Combine this fact with the inherently sketchy double-edge diffracted nature of the transmission, toss in potential added attenuation caused by the coax wiring in my home, and I suppose that some wet snow on the antenna might be enough to push KTVN’s signal ‘over the cliff’.

I should note, to Dave Telling’s comments above, that my difficulties with receiving KTVN exist in spite of the fact that as of yesterday morning, I’m once again using an amplifier. I’d told you last week that I’d had good reception success when activating the integrated ‘Signal Booster’ feature of Pinnacle’s PCTV HD mini Stick. However, other problems with that particular unit compelled me to quit using it on my Media Center system. Instead, I decided to attempt to mimic the feature via an external signal booster. Last August, I tried using a Motorola unit, but its broadband amplification nature resulted in over-boost (and subsequent reception loss) of KRNV. This time, I instead decided to revisit the first amplifier I tried, the Antennas Direct CPA 19, this time installing it inside the house at the ATSC receiver, where it could both boost over-the-air transmissions and counteract any incremental signal degradation caused by in-house wiring.

The CPA 19 focuses primary attention on the UHF spectrum, thereby explaining why it didn’t improve KTVN’s transmission, but thereby also preventing it from overloading KRNV’s signal. Happily, the CPA 19 made a notable improvement in my reception of KOLO’s translator on UHF channel 24, which is now robust even in poor weather conditions. And I can now even get PBS affiliate KNPB (PBS=Sesame Street=Big Bird…get it?). Not the primary channel 15 signal originating north of Reno, mind you. I’m now receiving a Peavine Mountain translator on channel 47, whose presence I never would have known about save for the informative software bundled with the Pinnacle unit.

Take a look at KNPB’s Wikipedia page. Better yet, take a look at the official list of translators on KNPB’s website. See any mention of a translator on channel 47? Me either, which is why I triple-confirmed the broadcast frequency data that Pinnacle’s TVCenter Pro software was feeding me. Then I hacked into the Windows Vista Media Center program guide information to override the default KNPB physical channel details, crossed my fingers, and launched Media Center. Lo and behold, I had a comparable-quality presentation to the one I was getting from KOLO’s translator, one that (being UHF) was also improved by the Antennas Direct CPA 19.

Dear KNPB, please update your translator information. For that matter, you might want to strip out all mention of analog television from your website, since you stopped broadcasting NTSC two weeks ago. Grrr…