Lafayette, LA / Beaumont, TX / Lake Charles, LA - HDTV - Page 255

And JUST what you need for those LOWband VHF DTVs (most of whom are low powered):
http://cgi.ebay.com/Terrestrial-Digi...item19bcdc4af3

Personally, I cant see why anyone would want a lowband LD....However, a LB hi power on 4?? Well, there's antenna already waiting at ~1000ft ......I doubt Nexstar will take it down anytime soon.

Oh, I know! But you know that LP channel 4 in Woodvile has a granted CP to go on the Devers tower! I wonder if they ever realize that the old analog channel 4 antenna is there? But even when that Houston station was on channel 5 before the transition, there was someone on the Houston thread that said he was in line of sight to Houston tower farm, and could literally see the tower from his back yard, and still could not recieve the station when they were on channel 5! Maybe that antenna you linked to would make a good directional FM antenna, percchance?

I just kinda wondered what happened to the apps, that was all... In reality, I would rather them be there than take up space inside the "good" spectrum.

Might be a market for them here what with KCWX-DT-5 23kw at 46 miles north of town http://home.swbell.net/pjdyer/fred-2.htm Sometimes the analog Ch 5s from Mexico on Es get strong enough to see thru their digital snow.

They probably think they can get "Houston" coverage from the Devers site (25+ yrs of the FMs trying to do it and badly I might add....they think a LDTV will???? AHHHH nope!)

Yeah I knew about 5 (ION 49 analog) in Houston...it was running low ERP for a "full power" and it was temp anyway....they moved to 32 when KTRK moved their digital back to RF13...ION is much happier now (their original 1200 ft analog tower west of Splendora still stands..I guess they wont be taking that stick down anytime soon but no RF is on that stick now; about 3 miles to the east is the 2000ft 106.9 tower where 55 analog was...their DT is in the Mo City farm as well)
Yes, the antenna would do a GOOD FM but then any VHF TV antenna that covers 6 will as well...

Man I miss 55. Was really let down when I realized that they were going to the antenna farm.

On the other hand... I just bought 2 vintage UHF converters! Can't wait to get them! The ORIGINAL converter boxes!

Okie dishnet gurus, would one of you kind folks inform me via PM what specifically I need to do to "move"? I get an 85% signal for the Houston locals, so I may just "move" there, that way I get more channels + my locals. Thanks!

Your "service" addy...and go paperless and autopay....My PO BOX in Bmt is my mail address.....been that way for 6 yrs...aint nothing special

The Houston Spotbeams have gotten stronger since the change a while back....with an outside antenna, you have "locals" and backups via Houston or vice versa

A new app has been filed, and accepted by the FCC as of today, by DTV America Corporation for a new station on channel 47 in Port Arthur. They filed for 10 KW from 45 meters above ground at coordinates:
29-54-39 N and
93-55-35 W

I can't exactly tell where this is because there are no freakin' contour maps anymore! AAaarrrgghhhh!

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&sour...,0.883026&z=10

Google Maps is your friend. (It's the green arrow.)

- Trip

45meters (!48ft) ??? Along the railroad tracks??? Who are they kidding....there is a cell monopole there but I doubt its 148ft......St Mary's hospital is down the road and so is Pioneer Park with the water tower (but I dont think its 45 meters).....

Mike:

Just to let you know, I had Advanced Electronics do the 1000.2 install today & they charged me $95.00 (which included the dish & installation). Not bad.....& now I have (8) more HD channels than I did before & one less dish. Unfortunately most of the new channels I could care less about.

Ken

Just thought I'd add my 2 cents here. The "move" doesn't require autopay or paperless. You can still receive paper bills; you just tell them to send the bills to your billing address (which of course is actually your physical address). It's the way I do it & have for several years since I don't believe in AutoPay for any creditor.

Ken

But the upside is you will be set now for any new hd that comes down the line, barring DISH going mpeg 6 or 8 or whatever.

I am going to try to go scope out the site over the next couple of days to see just how high the cell tower looks. It is behind the old what was at one time the Wiengarten's grocery store shopping center that has been razed. My grandmother used to shop there and many a times I have gone to the store there with her, rest her soul.

There was a TG&Y about halfway down and a store on the end that sold clothing that I can't remember the name of... I think it was a Thom McCann's shoe store on the other end near 25th Street.

Thanks for the "move" help! Guess i'll be calling them in a few weeks to "move". Guess there's no way to do it online? Thus far, I like Dish.

I looked at the tower registration this morning, and indeed , the tower is 48.9 meters or so above ground. I have linked to the registration page for the tower below...

http://wireless2.fcc.gov/UlsApp/AsrS...regKey=2667934

KEHO-LD, which had a granted CP for channel 49 on the Cumulus tower 11.3 miles NW of Winnie (which I refer to as the "Midway" tower because it is about halfway between I-10 and US Highway 90) for 15 KW at 553 meters above ground has filed a Minor Modification application with the FCC to move to the Clear Channel tower (commonly refered to as the "Devers" tower), still at 15 KW but from 500 meters above ground.

Midway isn't bad......I go by the FM stations on the sticks...
The one in Stowell, south of Winnie, is the Cumulus 97.5 tower (97.5 formerly KAYD FM)..can see this one from I-10

The "Midway" tower which you can see from I-10 around the Fm1410 exit is the Cumulus 103.7 tower...on a clear night, you can see ALL 4 of the towers from I-10 (if the strobes are working right on all the towers

The tower just south of HWY 90 is the Liberman (who owns the tower and the FMs) or "98.5 & 107.9" tower (2 FMs on it)

and the original "Devers tower is the Clear Channel one...originally built for 98.5 back in the 80s...with the worst road to it (logging trucks use it on a regular basis!!) Then at one point it had 5 FMs on it; 93.3 (still there), 98.5 (moved), 99.9 Liberty (at 500ft and still there), 100.7 (still there) and 107.9 (had its own antenna below the master at 1900ft which had the other 3 into it)....

Here is an interesting item about re-allocating channels 5 and 6 for LPFM and AM(?) ...


http://www.rbr.com/radio/24952.html

I never call them. I always use the Live Chat feature. Most chat sessions of changing address, programming...5-10 minutes tops.

You'll also be glad you did this as last time I checked the plans...Dish was going to be moving more and more HD off of 61.5 to 72.7 so you would have been getting messages on your receiver saying you were going to lose sets of channels as they got moved.

I remember when 107.9 move to the Devers tower, and somewhere I might still have the tapes of the transmitter tests that they ran when completing the installation late one night or rather in wee early moring hours.

I have found the gates open to go out to the Devers tower open twice, once shortly after it was built and just a couple of years ago on a trip to Houston found them open on the way back and got another up-close look at it. The roads weren't all the bad the second time around. It was getting to be near hunting season, and there were a lot of deer blinds scattered about on the way out to the tower sight.

There is a road just south of Highway 90, near the old barn that is covered with vines that gives a pretty good up close look at the Lieberman tower.

As the "Winnie" tower (as I like to call that one) was being finished up, my best friend and I were on our way to Galveston and found the gate to that one open. The crew must have gone to lunch or something because there was no one out there. since we had our cameras with us because we were gong to Galveston, we got some pretty good pics of it.

I have never been up close to the "Midway" tower, alas...

For ease of reference to my not so radio headed friends, I find it simpler to just refer to the towers from south to north as the: Winnie tower. Midway tower, New tower (since it was the last one built), and Devers tower. And we have been able, one time, to make them all out in the daytime from Highway 90! A very clear day that started off with us being able to see the "New" tower from the traffic light at Highway 90 and Major Drive. I looks like it is sitting in the middle of the road...

Yes, many a time I've had to drive to the Houston airport very early in the morning and seen those white strobes flashing from 90 at Major Drive, 15 miles away.

-ML

Actually, there is several proposals. One done by some of the best radio engineers in the biz proposed using TV RF 5 and 6 for FULL power FM stations..
create a new class and allow closer spacing on the new band than currently done on the current commercial band (2-3 channels or 400-600kHz apart for full power 100KW 2000ft Class Cs is 65miles....then 4 channels or 800kHz apart can be sitting on the same tower!! Go figure)

The AM idea is to move "Local AMs" like KOLE, 1450, etc (on the old Class C/backyard channels) to FM, delete lower power AMs and allow higher power on the remaining clear and regional channels....but it will be a hard fight on that one! (Of course the FCC is now allowing AMs to have FM translators...which is an oxymoron since a TRANSLATOR does NOT change the original signal in ANY way other than frequency....AM to FM?? Thats a retransmitter OR a LPFM)

There are soo few LD 5 and 6s left (Full power that is)......if they could clear the channels totally, then the full power plan would work...it could still work even with the limited number of DT stations if they placed the FMs away from the areas of the DTs...(of course given tropo on lowband, the DTs would get clobbered by FM carriers all over the 6 MHz wide range, not just one analog carrier as it was before June of last year (hard to believe its been one year as of this weekend since we said goodbye to full power analog TV)

Outside the US, I think in Japan the FM band goes down to 75 or so MHz...so they can manufacture radios that could cover 76MHz to 108MHz...but a lot of folks would have to get new radios to cover the new band....probably would make folks have to buy a HD FM radio....if that would happen, would be an excellent time for the FCC to mandate AMAX on the AM side of the radio....audio fidelity to 10kHz (where they roll off above 3 kHz or so), add DSP and/or Noise Blanker, CQUAM AM stereo mandated and AM could have a rebound...I SERIOUSLY doubt IBOC (the real name of HD Radio) will ever take hold on AM...a lot of stations have turned it OFF,,WLS in Chicago still operates in CQUAM stereo; they ran IBOC during the day for a while but at night, it would go off and CQUAM would come back on (you cannot run both at the same time).....Now they run CQUAM stereo all the time (on a talk station??? but I would love to hear MusicRadio back on the BIG89 with a decent radiio...actually I used to back in the 80s...WLS started with the KAHN stereo system...where the lower sideband was LEFT channel, the upper sideband was RIGHT channel and you heard it in mono on a normal AM radio....BUT the old tunable AMs (remember them??) you could one down and one above the main channel and get STEREO.....Leonard Kahn who came up with the system never allowed licensing of a IC chip that could decode his stereo system....the other competitors (Harris, Belar, Magnavox and Motorola) ended up either dropping out (Belar) or modifying their systems to be the same (Motorola won of course with their CQUAM -- Compatible QUadrature AM..involves both phase and amplitude changes)
AM stereo is different from FM stereo and takes much less bandwidth and was thought to be the savior of AM music stations...but the receivers still suck out there...I have a SONY XRA33 which can decode all the AM stereo systems and has a filter for narrow and wide....in the wide mode and listening to 790 AM KKBQ during the Q-ZOO days, it sounded better than the 92.9 KKBQ FM to me and I listened to WLS In stereo at night whle they were still playing music....ahhhh the good old days...
Now with the DTV transition, some folks are looking at the low band TV channels for reuse as most stations have problems if they are on lowband...
oddly enough, there IS a LD3 in DFW that operates from Cedar Hill where all the TV and most FMs are and it covers the metroplex pretty well....one DT on a low channel out in Neb (???? I think) still covers as well or almost as good as their analog did...wellll as long as there is no lightning storms...then they are up the creek and SOL....will 2-6 go away?? Probably at least 5 and 6 will...with the guard band between 4 and 5 (72-76 MHz) 2-4 could remain DTV and 5+6 go FM expansion....time will tell......

(My fingers are getting tired!! )

The south tower (You call it Winnie) is actually listed as being in Stowell (which is just south of Winnie) in the FCC ASR database...Midway is listed in the FCC ASR (Antenna Site Registration) as Winnie.....

I would call the sticks, Stowell, Winnie, Liberman, and Clear Channel/ CC since the Liberman tower is also "Devers" or may be actually "Felicia"...there used to be a microwave tower north of the rail road there that was called that name and was a weird config..there were 3 dishes..one pointing to Dayton and one looking at Beaumont and the other looking toward Port Arthur...the support was not a conventional tower...but looked like a grid...three legs (actually tower about the size of ROHN55G) and wrapping around the dishes at the top..this site was the relay location for ATT's microwave that brought long distance phone AND network TV to our area...the Port Arthur end of the path was KPAC TV 4, the Beaumont end was the Western Union building downtown (the dish is still there that looks west) where short hops then went to KFDM 6 and KBMT 12

Been to the base of all 4 towers....been up the CC Devers tower (damn scary.....the elevator gets little maintenance until it breaks!!)...But then been up both the DeWalt 1400ft tower (the longest home for KPRC2, KHOU11 and 39 until they all moved to 2000ft towers and that shortie is now being dismantled...the candelabra that was 75ft from center to edge of walkway is gone...I have pics I took when I was up there in 93....and have been up the 20000ft original (actually the rebuilt after the original crashed to the ground in 83) Sr Road tower that 9 FMs and KTXH 20 was originally on. The 9 FM are still there; each has a stake in the tower and run it under a Sr Rd Tech Group corporation...if you ever see SRTG, now you know what it means
THAT tower was for a while the tallest broadcast tower in the US....one in the Dakotas now outdoes it by 50ft or so...

I've still got a c. 1968 BT UHF converter box (6AF4A VT, output on Ch 6) that we had to get in Austin, TX when their Ch 42 (on since late 1965) signed with NBC. KTBC-7 had been covering it as well as CBS and ABC since they came on in 1953 - resulting in very weird-hour delayed programming. (Once the "Great Escape" movie was spread over two nights - one on each channel!) As we were LOS to the towers across town it just had a UHF loop. Its use was short lived as the 1957 21" RCA b&w set was replaced by an all-channel color set that June.

I just found out about these converter boxes a couple of years ago. My parents bought our first TV in 1955 with the extra IRS tax refund that they got from me being born in 1954. KFDM, channel 6 also came on the air in 1955, and it wasn't until about 1980 that I stumbled on an old ad in the Beaumont Enterprise for a TV shop that would guarantee reception of KBMT channel 31. Up until then, I had thought that KFDM was the first television station in our area. I never knew anyone who had a UHF converter, and had never heard mention of them until I was researching the DTA converters before the transition. I was fascinated with them, and then recently started a quest to obtain a couple for myself. I think it was in 1963 when rules came out that all televisions manufactured for sale in the US would have to include an integrated UHF tuner.

As a side note, I was looking for information the other night about our first TV, a B&W Admiral when I came across a vintage ad for a 1949 Admiral in which the point of the ad was it was the "Big 16 Inch" set. I couldn't help but chuckle a bit... My current HDTV is now twice as big, (32"... apples and oranges I know) and it is cosidered "little" for a lot of people.

Our first 1955 TV (something of a lemon by GE, metal cabinet) had a "UHF" position on the channel selector knob. For that to work required a service shop to install a pre-fab circuit into the tuner (accessed by the wafer switch). As there was then but one UHF station on in the SF Bay Area (an independent) we were quite happy with 4-NBC, 5-CBS, 7-ABC, 9-Edu, and 13-ABC so it wasn't worth the $. Other sets often replaced an unused VHF channel in the tuner with a UHF one. Converter boxes were easier and let one have Ch 14-83.

In mid 1962 Congress passed the law for "all channel TVs" to go into effect in Apr 1964. The matter was often a very heated discussion topic in the TV Guides of that era.

San Antonio is something of a pioneer in UHF TV with Ch 41 in 1955 catering to the Hispanic market. Even with their (eventual 500-kw) xmtr downtown, many sets of that early era still required outside bow-tie, etc UHF antennas. KWEX-41 had the most elaborate NTSC shutdown broadcast of any local
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BXwr7Oxk-k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMZ_y6r6hvU

http://www.qsl.net/wa5iyx/images/kfdm-60.jpg from when KFDM was still rather new.

All of the Univision stations did the countdown, etc...it was a rolling national NTSC shutdown..by time zones....I helped at Univision 23 in Dallas...the countdown for the central states hit zero, the CE hit plate off and flipped the wall breakers on the analog, we moved two patches, the asst changed exciters and tada!!! KUVN-DT was on 23 (originally on 24) in less than 2 mins after analog 23 was gone for good...they had a conf call going to coordinate it all......started at 9pm ET and stayed up until the west coast (not sure if they have any HI stations) switched..We got off the conf call around 12:30 local and the Chief (Brian) and I headed for his favorite pub (we worked at Liberman in Houston together for 3 years....he wishes he could hire up there...so do I!)

Signed by an ex-boss and old friend of mine (and Richard's boss who hired him!), W5KWA (SK)
Harold was the original CE of KFDM and Richard is only #2 !!
Harold retired in 1983 and had a 2way shop going for a decade or more until he sold out and retired in the 90s...His 2nd wife, Evelyn, was the former Sec at the Beaumont FCC office (where MANY of us took our ham and commercial tests at...I remember she grading my 1st attempt at the 2nd phone...there were 5 of us testing..I walked back from the hallway and Evelyn looked at me with a frown "You missed one too many" she said...before I could ask for a recount, she said "I already counted them 3 times.......(lifting the template) You had #40 right...and you changed it!" ARG!!!! Needless to say, when I took the 2nd Phone at the Houston office 3 months later--it was the exact same test questions! -- I aced it and handed in so fast, the examiner gave me a look...then graded the test....twice...and then walked over to the counter and said "You passed........" I asked how many did I miss (which she couldnt tell me) ..She mouthed zero
AHHH the good old days when the commercial license meant something!!