Power boost for broadcast towers?

Will broadcast towers be receiving a power boost any time soon to extend dtv signals to rural areas?

, divident!

Probably not. Most full-power stations implemented "power boosts" at or shortly after the digital-TV transition in June 2009. While some stations did receive FCC waivers allowing them to delay going to full power for a few months, mostly because of engineering issues specific to each station, they were the exception rather than the rule in most markets.

Do you have a specific market in mind? Maybe you're not getting the broadcasts because of something simple, such as an antenna and downlead that need updating. If you're 150 miles from network-affiliated, full-power stations, getting high-definition broadcasts probably isn't in the cards, but HD isn't much of a problem for most locations 50 miles out or so. If you'd like some advice, provide us with some of these details and we'll be glad to lend a hand.

Originally Posted by divident

Will broadcast towers be receiving a power boost any time soon to extend dtv signals to rural areas?

There are most likely plans in the works for some stations to increase power, either sometime soon, or they most likely are considering doing so at some point in time. If you are having problems with a specific channel, I would suggest that you call that station and see what their power levels currently are, and ask if they have any plans to "maximize" their transmitter site as it is called inside the industry.

If you are located in a stations Designated Market Area (DMA), and you cannot receive their signal, you may want to complain to the FCC about it. With all of the threats that exist today to the DTV spectrum itself, most stations that were planning to maximize their transmitters are now going to wait and see how the plan to steal the DTV spectrum works out.

Why spend big money on improving a system that many of the powers that be want to have shut down so they can steal the current TV broadcast spectrum for themselves. The digital transition is not complete for a lot of stations, but with the current situation in the OTA broadcasting industry, a lot of stations have put maximization on the back burner for the time being, and it will be the antenna viewers who suffer.

When stations request permission to make changes to their signal, the FCC issues what is known as a CP (Construction Permit), and these are normally good for 3 years. Stations could even have a current CP in house now, but may not have acted upon it until the spectrum fight is either over, or lost depending on the outcome.

divident,

I'd like to add to Don's answer. In my area, over the last two months two stations have been granted power increases: VHF-11 went from 12.5 kw to 100 kw, then it was dropped to 68 kw, and their translator moved its channel and had a significant power increase.

Next, my local ABC and NBS affiliates both have construction permits to remove their obsolete VHF antennas and relocate their UHF antennas to the tops of their towers, with promised power increases.

Last, my PBS channel is currently transmitting with 21.7 kw, but they have applied for additional power: it is under review by the FCC who is argueing with its Canadian counterpart who is concerned about interference. Oddly, as near as I can tell there currently isn't a channel 9 in British columbia, Canada.

So, I think the answer is "it depends" on what region you reside in.
Jim

Originally Posted by Jim In Seattle

divident,

I'd like to add to Don's answer. In my area, over the last two months two stations have been granted power increases: VHF-11 went from 12.5 kw to 100 kw, then it was dropped to 68 kw, and their translator moved its channel and had a significant power increase.

Next, my local ABC and NBS affiliates both have construction permits to remove their obsolete VHF antennas and relocate their UHF antennas to the tops of their towers, with promised power increases.

Last, my PBS channel is currently transmitting with 21.7 kw, but they have applied for additional power: it is under review by the FCC who is argueing with its Canadian counterpart who is concerned about interference. Oddly, as near as I can tell there currently isn't a channel 9 in British columbia, Canada.

So, I think the answer is "it depends" on what region you reside in.
Jim

The FCC records are normally a few months behind in showing the actual status of a construction permit. I would offer an educated guess that as many as 1/5 of all stations have some additional plans to increase power or change antennas etc.

What most people do not realize is that a lot of stations digital transmitter status took a back seat to analog back when digital channel assignments were made. Analog was still king until it died on June 12th 2009. A lot of broadcasters were assigned less than optimum power levels, and directional antennas etc., in order to protect analog stations that were still on the air back then.

I refer back to this fact in my mind when I say that the Digital Transition IS NOT OVER FOR ALL STATIONS, and it may even come into play when trying to advise someone on which antenna is right for their location due to the unknown future plans for some stations.

Now that we have a lot of new threats to the DTV Broadcast Spectrum, a lot of stations are in a holding pattern until they see how this spectrum battle works out. Why spend another million or better on a threatened technology, even if it is still in its infancy and all of its possible uses have not even been discovered yet?

Current estimates say that there are from 14 to 20 million OTA viewers still using an antenna for reception. Isn’t it strange that we are rebuilding our entire health care system at a cost of trillions for about that same amount of people, but then that same amount of people are not considered important enough to be included in the bandwidth battle? Is there not a lot of irony in that comparison? Where is the logic? Maybe the answer could be found if we would just “Follow the Money”.

Originally Posted by FOX TV

There are most likely plans in the works for some stations to increase power, either sometime soon, or they most likely are considering doing so at some point in time.

Given WOCK/Chicago's STA request to increase from 300 to 405 watts and the app for K03HY-D/Petaluma seeking a waiver to increase to 1200 watts, this raises a couple of questions.

1). Presuming that either get approved, will that increase *really* make a difference. In particular, the WOCK STA, if granted, yields just over a 1.3 dB increase.

2). If either applications become a reality, might this set a precedent for low power Vs (much like WPVI's increase has been cited by other facilities seeking more power in Zone 1)?

re_nelson,

I've had similar thoughts as well. Looked at from a different viewpoint: to increase a station's area of coverage, is it more practical to raise the ERP of a main transmitter from 50 kw to 500 kw and use ten times the electricity forever OR is it more cost effective over time, to establish new translators or to exchange sub-channel useage with other 'out-of-area' existing stations? I bet I know who replies to this first!

Jim
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Originally Posted by re_nelson

Given WOCK/Chicago's STA request to increase from 300 to 405 watts and the app for K03HY-D/Petaluma seeking a waiver to increase to 1200 watts, this raises a couple of questions.

1). Presuming that either get approved, will that increase *really* make a difference. In particular, the WOCK STA, if granted, yields just over a 1.3 dB increase.

2). If either applications become a reality, might this set a precedent for low power Vs (much like WPVI's increase has been cited by other facilities seeking more power in Zone 1)?

Originally Posted by re_nelson

Given WOCK/Chicago's STA request to increase from 300 to 405 watts and the app for K03HY-D/Petaluma seeking a waiver to increase to 1200 watts, this raises a couple of questions.

1). Presuming that either get approved, will that increase *really* make a difference. In particular, the WOCK STA, if granted, yields just over a 1.3 dB increase.

2). If either applications become a reality, might this set a precedent for low power Vs (much like WPVI's increase has been cited by other facilities seeking more power in Zone 1)?

Most of the power increases have only a single purpose in mind. They are hoping to increase power "Density" more so than to increase coverage area in hopes of addressing all of the indoor antennas that people were falsely led to believe would be usable with DTV.

When we "Maximized" our power levels at one site, a lot of the reception complaints mysteriously disappeared, and the calls trickled down to nothing. Some people believed that increasing power would only contribute to the Multi path phenomenon by also increasing the reflected signals strength too, but in this area, the opposite seems to be true.

Just because a signal carries digital information, does not change the propagation characteristics of a DTV signal. Consumers were fed a line of Bull when watching all of the DTV Answers commercials back when the transition was being promoted.

The CEA and the NTIA (Which is a broadband and Cell phone advocacy group) was responsible for promoting the false facts that "Rabbit Ears" would work for DTV. Could it be that since the NTIA is a broadband and Cell phone advocacy group that they intentionally meant to steer viewers down the wrong path, just to sabotage DTV as being unreliable and filled with reception problems with the intent of destroying DTV from the start?

Could it be that since the NTIA is a broadband and Cell phone advocacy group that they intentionally meant to steer viewers down the wrong path, just to sabotage DTV as being unreliable and filled with reception problems with the intent of destroying DTV from the start?

Perhaps Hanlon's Razor applies:

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

..or..

"You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity" - Robert Heinlein, Author

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

I tend to go with the stupidity rather than conspiracy factor. The reason being is I was early in the digital TV and computer realm like many other my age here. I worked with digital TV back in 1978, not transmission but digital in the studio. I watched the PC revolution unfold. I got to work with many of the early digital engineers and got an insight into their 'thinking'.

One thing that I hear over and over again about going digital is it will remove all the problems. It will be perfect. It will not fail. It is so far beyond analog.

I am not going to dispute all this but digital has constantly been sold as totally new, where in most cases it was highly depend on the same type of circuits, transmission and display as analog. So many of the problems were over looked as like the digital engineers I worked with never studied analog. They didn't know it. The designed blindly with digital thinking the analog part was old hat and always worked, without having a clue about it's real world characteristics.

A good example was when I was working on early digital studio TV switchers. The engineers could not for the life of them figure how they were getting EMI into their digital circuits. They didn't even know what EMI was until myself and another engineer that knew analog explained to them. Their circuit design was so sloppy they were pouring RF into the circuits on the same and other circuit boards. In many plenty enough to raise the error rate on adjacent circuits into failure. There comment was always, "How can that be? It's wired together! How can there be interference from other circuits? It's digital!"

They didn't have a clue about inductive and capacitive coupling between wires. They didn't understand their circuit design was generating strong harmonics, that because of the size of digital circuits in those days resulted in circuit traces on the boards being 1/4 waves on the higher harmonics.

The very first version of the first machine there was so much trash on the analog coming out of the A/D converter (to be compatible since the rest of all studios were still analog), it looked like 50% snow!

I helped go through board by board, circuit by circuit decoupling the RF out of the digital simply by experimenting where to place bypass caps. Then the board were laid out a number of times until the new layouts stopped radiating.

But the point here is this is still true today. Digital will solve everything, including problems we had with analog (like ghosting on OTA), despite the fact we didn't address any of them. Wrong, wrong wrong. I worked on digital radio (VHF and UHF) modems in the late 1980s, where we virtually eliminated multipath interference. We had the same problems if we received a second reflected signal out of time with the main one even at 1200 baud we were using. We used state machines designed bya group in Tucson AZ. Granted a simple state machine we used in an EPROM was way to slow and simple for OTA DTV, the problem was in the realm of human knowledge.

Originally Posted by Piggie

Digital will solve everything, including problems we had with analog (like ghosting on OTA), despite the fact we didn't address any of them. Wrong, wrong wrong.

Even my grandfather had an intuitive grasp of how shortsighted the people involved in "updating" a system could be. Several years after he retired in 1962, younger colleagues told him that the bank where he had worked would soon "automate" all operations on cool, new computer banks. His dismissal of the idea was characteristically both succinct and blunt:

"Garbage in, garbage out."

I'll conclude with another cliche: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Originally Posted by Jim In Seattle

re_nelson,

I've had similar thoughts as well. Looked at from a different viewpoint: to increase a station's area of coverage, is it more practical to raise the ERP of a main transmitter from 50 kw to 500 kw and use ten times the electricity forever OR is it more cost effective over time, to establish new translators or to exchange sub-channel useage with other 'out-of-area' existing stations? I bet I know who replies to this first!

Jim
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UHF broadcasters were already used to paying extremely high power bills as a cost of doing business due to the inefficiency of the UHF band, and the transmitter technology of the time. The power bill at both of our transmitter sites dropped from $11,000 each per month per site to just over $5,000 per month per site.

That is why so many VHF guys cried the blues to the FCC and got their VHF assignments back, because their power bills were already lower than the UHF stations are now, and they could do a comparison against UHF because most of them got a UHF assignment because DTV was originally supposed to be all UHF as was done in the European countries. This allowed them to get a taste of what a real high power bill really was like, and they wanted their VHF back for cost reasons.

The cost of building multiple transmitter sites that would have to be supplied with a road, a small building, power lines, would add be prohibitive. It would take many years for things to balance out in terms of cost