Rain and UHF DTV
K. B.
KCWE (31), WDAF (34), KSMO (47), KPXE (51) are all suffering
from periodic picture breakup/freezing and no audio.
I found a "sweet spot" for my indoor UHF Loop antenna
several months ago, however, tonight, the "sweet spot"
isn't the "sweet spot" due to rain (I think). I'm
using my Magnavox TB100MW9, I don't recall a rain storm
causing so much DTV interference before.
Kirk Bayne
alt.video.digital-tv Home Page
<http://avdtv.tripod.com/avdtv.htm>
TJ
> Unusual DTV reception problems tonight, local DTV stations
> KCWE (31), WDAF (34), KSMO (47), KPXE (51) are all suffering
> from periodic picture breakup/freezing and no audio.
>
> I found a "sweet spot" for my indoor UHF Loop antenna
> several months ago, however, tonight, the "sweet spot"
> isn't the "sweet spot" due to rain (I think). I'm
> using my Magnavox TB100MW9, I don't recall a rain storm
> causing so much DTV interference before.
>
The leaves are about two-thirds gone now, with the 30+ mph winds we're
experiencing pulling more and more of them down this weekend. Once
they're all gone and that one station that installed the new equipment
has a chance to get it settled in, I'll look for a new configuration.
I'm thinking that the easiest way to eliminate breakup from cars going
by will be to put up something to block the signal from that direction,
allowing the loop antenna to "focus" on the direct signals. Installing
an unamplified bowtie instead of the amplified UHF-VHF antenna left over
from the analog days would probably help a lot, too.
TJ
Daniel W. Rouse Jr.
news:hchd7q$pdo$1...@news.eternal-september.org...
Sorry, but there is no sweet spot for the antenna in use when DTV is
affected by inclement weather. The antenna will always have to be adjusted
periodically.
You will probably find an antenna position that gives stable reception, say
for something like 30 to 45 minutes, only to have the reception start audio
dropping and video issues start to occur once again. You'll probably even
find another adjustment position, might give good reception for as much as
another hour, but then the problems will occur and the antenna adjustment
has to occur again. Expect this to become a recurring cycle for as many
hours as you may plan on watching TV in a given day. (In my case, I've had
at most 2 hours of stable reception before the problems started to occur.)
The signal meter isn't even much help because that 52 signal level (for
example) may drop down all the way to something like 27 (again, for example)
when the gusts of wind occur. When something like that happens the resultant
picture and sound will go directly from stable, to dropped audio and a
frozen screen, to a black screen with a Weak Signal type indicator... all in
just a few seconds.
Depending on how important the programming being aired may be (for example,
news vs. some sort of entertainment show), it may be better just to try
another channel, or else outright give up on the DTV reception and switch to
AM/FM radio or something else, at least until the rain stops and the winds
also calm down.
TJ
>
> Sorry, but there is no sweet spot for the antenna in use when DTV is
> affected by inclement weather. The antenna will always have to be
> adjusted periodically.
>
do something about it, I would. But everybody isn't as unlucky with DTV
as you have been, and everybody wasn't as lucky with analog as you were.
I had one room where the analog stability was as bad or worse as the
stability you see with digital OTA. No matter what I did, you still had
to move the antenna every time you changed channels, and if you were
lucky that was all. On some channels, it hardly ever was stable,
especially when the wind blew. And I'm not just talking about a little
snow or a couple of ghosts - I'm taking about a picture that wouldn't
sit still and audio with pops and buzzes that made it next to impossible
to tolerate. The difference in stability on that TV between analog and
digital is night-and-day.
I am 3000 miles away, and under very different conditions than yours.
There is indeed a DTV sweet spot in the room I watch TV in the most. In
fact, there are several, some of which are better under one set of
conditions and some under others. It's true that I do need to adjust my
antenna periodically - at least every six months when leaf
configurations change. Other than that, normally, like when the
transmitters aren't being worked on, it *may* have to be adjusted under
extreme conditions of wind and rain for a station or two, and back again
if I move to one of the others. But I'm lucky enough that that's all I
need to do in this room. In others, like my bedroom, I haven't moved the
antenna since installing the converter in February.
> You will probably find an antenna position that gives stable reception,
> say for something like 30 to 45 minutes, only to have the reception
> start audio dropping and video issues start to occur once again. You'll
> probably even find another adjustment position, might give good
> reception for as much as another hour, but then the problems will occur
> and the antenna adjustment has to occur again. Expect this to become a
> recurring cycle for as many hours as you may plan on watching TV in a
> given day. (In my case, I've had at most 2 hours of stable reception
> before the problems started to occur.)
>
It isn't that way for everybody. While I don't have the TV on constantly
and can't speak for those times when I'm not actually watching, the TV I
watch most is stable for weeks at a time, except for the brief, one
second or two breakup once a week or so when a tractor-trailer goes by.
The exception has been recently, as I mentioned in another thread, where
one station broke up with every car after a new piece of equipment was
installed at the station. BTW, those breakups have become much farther
apart, with no changes by me so far, though they haven't gone back to
mid-summer stability yet. My bedroom TV and VCR, where I do most of my
recording, hasn't broken up yet that I've noticed - since installing the
converter.
> The signal meter isn't even much help because that 52 signal level (for
> example) may drop down all the way to something like 27 (again, for
> example) when the gusts of wind occur. When something like that happens
> the resultant picture and sound will go directly from stable, to dropped
> audio and a frozen screen, to a black screen with a Weak Signal type
> indicator... all in just a few seconds.
>
I didn't find the signal meter to be of much help, either. It's not
nearly responsive enough to antenna movements, and you tend to pay too
much attention to the numbers and meter movement and not enough to the
picture itself. But then, things are stable enough in my house that I
don't need it. The wind isn't blowing tonight, and I just cycled through
all my stations in this room with the meter on my Digital Stream
converter showing, just to see what it said. Most stations are between
80 and 90 on the meter, and they sit there nice and steady. The
exception is the station I've been having trouble with lately. It varies
from 40 to 51. Four cars going by didn't affect the meter, yet two did
break up the picture for a second or so. As I said before, the antenna
needs to be adjusted for the new conditions. I'll do it in a week or so,
when I have the time to fool with it.
The converter in my bedroom shows the meters - one for intensity,
another for quality - every time you switch channels. Tonight, all
channels but one are maxed out on both meters. The one channel, which by
the way I can't even get in this room, reads a constant intensity of 28,
but the quality varies from 7 to 56. Even with those widely varying
quality readings, the picture and sound are stable tonight. They do
bother sometimes, but I don't watch that channel much, anyway. One thing
the meter tells me though - the fact that in two rooms next door to each
other one meter maxes out while the other reads no better than fifty on
a particular channel means that there probably is indeed a sweeter spot
in this room for that channel. I just have to keep looking until I find it.
> Depending on how important the programming being aired may be (for
> example, news vs. some sort of entertainment show), it may be better
> just to try another channel, or else outright give up on the DTV
> reception and switch to AM/FM radio or something else, at least until
> the rain stops and the winds also calm down.
>
>
Or I can just go into one of the rooms where the TV *is* stable on that
channel. But I do realize that everybody isn't as lucky as I am. I just
wish you could realize that everybody isn't as unlucky with DTV as you are.
TJ