Reception Problems... Any Ideas?

I Use an antenna to get over the air television. We get most of our local channels some of the time. Weaker channels come and go. My setup is a Channel Master 4221HD roof mounted with a clear view of the transmitter areas 12-17 miles away. There are a few farther, but they come in all the time.



Recently Ohio had a major storm and over half a million people were with out power. When the power was out we used an inverter to run the tv. We received every local station all the time. Not only did we get a good signal on every station we were getting stations from 3 other markets 80-115 miles away. Most of them were duplicate networks, but there were some pretty cool IND stations too. The power came back up and all the channels went away How do I get them back? Whats causing the interference?

I turned off the main power to the house and re scanned with the tv running from the inverter. No luck there, but I eliminated anything in the house causing interference. I moved the antenna wire away from the smart meter as much as I could. No fix there either. I went to radio shack and bough a high gain pre-amp with an FM trap. Still no luck,that actually made things worse...

Whats next? What can I try?

I live in south-west Ohio and our power was out for a day or two. Unfortunately I had no way to power up the tv so...

Were you only picking those distant channels up in the morning and evening but not in the mid afternoon? If so that would be Tropospheric Ducting, which is an atmospheric condition that allows tv signals to travel further along the curvature of the earth than they ordinarily would. If, on the other hand they were coming in all day that would be very interesting. I've sometimes wondered what would happen if all man made electrical noise went away except for tv signals. How much further would they travel?

Unfortunately the bottom line is that there nothing you can do to consistently bring in tv signals from 80 or more miles away short of an antenna that is elevated extremely high.

It was actually late morning early afternoon when I discovered them. Say between 11 and 12. They were there every time we used the tv till power came back on. I would guess our antenna is about 25' and were located on a bit of a hill. When riding my bike home from work it seems like a much bigger hill. Even so Tropospheric Ducting doesn't explain why some of my close (14 mile away) channels are half strength most of the time, but with power out were full bars. (My tv has a signal meter that measures in bars like a cell phone, no actual numbers)

I live in pretty open area of SW Licking county. Really close to Columbus, 5 miles to 270.

I'm even having trouble with green ones.

http://www.tvfool.com/?option=com_wr...990097fee828df

Radar-All.jpg

Shane,

The meter on your TV set is not a signal strength meter, it is a signal quality meter. Odds are, your local stations are bombarding your area with RF and the distant stations are not, consequently the reflected signal levels bouncing around your neighborhood from your local channels are much stronger than the distant channels. This is known as multipath distortion and used to be seen on analog TV sets as ghosts. It the reflected signals or echos are too strong, they will confuse your digital tuner and your reception goes away.

Regarding the unusual distant reception, I agree with Tim that it was probably caused by Tropospheric Ducting and an easy way to think about it is from the CB radio days. Someone from "The Land of Lincoln" shooting skip (bouncing his signal off of the ionosphere) is able to to talk someone in "The Evergreen State" as if they were across town from each other. 10-4?

Jim

PS Next time it happens, try to get screen shots to impress your friends and to post them here!

I'm guessing that the broadcasters were out of power during the same time and not actually broadcasting at full broadcast power. What I'm saying is I think it's overload. Based on what you've said I'm guessing one TV? You're pointing a 4 bay antenna into a 67 NM(dB) signal. Try sticking a attenuator or splitter (3.5 dB loss) into the system to see if it helps. If it works, get more TVs.