Thin-Air ATSC (And NTSC): The De-Boost (Or Over-Boost) Debacle

The latest in an ongoing series…

As I mentioned last Friday, I’ve been temporarily using Antennas Direct’s CPA 19 amplifier in an attempt to boost the over-the-air broadcast signal strength that reaches my home office from Reno-area transmission sites. The CPA 19 explicitly disregards low-band VHF, but that’s ok in my particular case; all of the region’s ATSC signals are high-band VHF or UHF. And I can tell from visual inspection of the before-and-after KRXI (Fox affiliate on NTSC channel 11) analog picture that the CPA 19 is delivering some benefit…thought I’m still not able to snag KOLO’s (ABC affiliate on ATSC channel 9) nearby-tower digital signal.

But since my agreement with Antennas Direct was for the CPA 19 to be loaner-only, I went ahead and ordered Motorola’s model 484095-001-00 signal booster from Amazon last week. Judging from overall positive customer feedback on sites like Amazon and Buy.com, I hoped I’d have a successful end result. Alas, the converse was the case. Not only could I still not receive KOLO, I was no longer able to receive KRNV, either. KRNV = NBC. NBC = Olympics. This is a problem.

Disconnecting the ‘booster’ fortunately restored KRNV’s signal. So what’s going on here? Judging from the overwhelming positive feedback on the Motorola 484095-001-00, I don’t think that the product is faulty in design (though I suppose I could have a defective unit). Here’s my alternative theory: note that KRNV is one of the two ATSC transmissions that I’ve been able to receive from the very beginning of this experiment, even though my antenna was substantially off-axis from KRNV’s tower at the time.

I later re-oriented my antenna directly at the Slide Mountain tower cluster that includes KRNV’s equipment, thereby (presumably) further boosting the station’s received signal strength at my location. And then, in striving to successfully tune in KRNV’s next-door tower neighbor, KOLO, I inserted an active signal booster into the coax cable chain. I suspect that as a result, I actually ended up with an excessive-signal-strength situation on KRNV, which overloaded my tuner’s pre-amp and thereby degraded reception.

Please note that this (or for that matter, anything I’ve discussed so far in this series) isn’t an ATSC-only issue…in fact, I’ve frequently found that where I was able to receive both the NTSC and ATSC version of a signal (with KRXI, for example), the digital version was far preferable. With that said, I welcome your alternative theories as to the root cause of my Motorola ‘booster’ setback. And have I mentioned yet how much I detest RF stuff?

Sigh.

p.s…For another amusing-and-saddening tale of television reception woes and creative solutions, check out this CommVerge writeup from late 2002.