San Francisco, CA - OTA - Page 156

I'm in the outer Richmond in SF. OTA with my VIP622/rooftop antenna, KRON 4.1 and 4.2, KTSF 26.1, 36.1 is coming in stronger now than before the switch. Every thing else seems the same.

KGO 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 on my Samsung LCD can only get a strong signal if I reposition the rabit ears a certain way. It's located in the bedroom facing Sutro. Still can't get 36.1 in there.

What reception are you getting for KNTV (D12), the other VHF DTV station?

Yes, 8566, hope seeing the display triggers mostly good memories for you! I have a small collection of old HP test gear, but that's getting a bit off-topic I suppose.

Regarding multiple 91xg's, good suggestion. But I'm not sure how much more time and money I want to 'invest' in this little project. We do have KQED via Dish, but it's only in SD, and only 9.1, and not terribly good image quality either.

Food for thought, anyway.

Peter

Anybody in San Jose notice channel 44's signal lower than before the transition.
My HD recording Sunday was pretty bad, with a lot of breakup in the picture.
Channel 44 is the only channel in the UHF range that I am having trouble now.
I have given up getting KGO Channel 7 with my present antenna CM - 4221.

I thought that allHDTV channels were supposed to be UHF because the VHF bandwidth was going to be used for other purposes. Five years after buying my 4228 I find out that I now can't receive channels 2 & 11 cause they switched back to VHF.

malmgren, I imagine you saw gjvrieze's advice yesterday in this thread. If not it sounded pretty good to me. Though where I am I don't need it.

In other news I did play with some rabbit-ear antennas to find the optimum setting for receiving KGO 7.

I took a pair that had snapped onto a TV at one point and then mounted it in a handle I made. I rolled up a paper bag into a tight roll which I then rubber banded. Anyway, this allowed me to sit in front of the TV in a chair while I moved the rabbit ears all over the place. To keep things simple I had it collapsed into its smallest form.

Anyway, what I found is that the tips of the antenna should be pointing north and south where the transmission tower is north of me. And that they should be in a V shape.

I tried extending it to 2 sections, 3, 4, whatever. The basic finding stayed the same. The ends should point north and south and it should be in a V shape.

This is already how I had my Radioshack antenna that's on the top of my TV arranged. But then I tried to push the envelope more with the RS antenna.

I started with a signal strength of 75. I ended up with a signal strength of 90.
update1-a(I've not seen it hit 90 very often since I said that. 83 to 88 is more like it. I wonder if I just was reporting the highest number I saw. If I did that's not very good. It gives a false impression that the cited number is sustained over long periods)

The V needs to lean south away from the direction of the transmission tower. The side that's closest to the transmission tower needs to be almost straight up and down, but then fall away from the transmission tower some.

I wasn't able to make this leaning determination using the pair of ears I held in my hand. Just using the one on top of the TV.

Oh yeah, the RS rabbi tears are collapsed to just 4 sections. I extended them all the way, then held the 4th section and collapsed the rest into it. So they are bunched up at the top instead of the bottom.

http://i39.tinypic.com/sowsr6.jpg is a picture of my Radioshack 15-1892 VHF/UHF antenna with the rabbit ears optimized for KGO 7 which is 17 miles north of me according to http://tvfool.com/.

I moved it to the floor just for this picture, of course. So that there was less distraction from other stuff. It is an alright antenna I suppose. I just wish you could rotate the VHF rabbit ears without having to rotate the base unit. When it sits on my TV now the buttons that control the UHF antenna in the flying saucer are facing to the side.

update1-b(
In this message on 6/17/09 I had some more to say about this.
)

@kev: You're in San Mateo though. Much closer to Sutro. It may not work out for someone in the South Bay or Sunnyvale. I lost KGO too. I'm down in Santa Clara (North part, 95054), and I don't get anything on my Terk HDTVa (UHF/VHF indoor). I can pull in KNTV 11 though which is a bit closer on San Bruno mountain. I can also get all the Sutro UHF channels fine. Just 7 is MIA.

I'm going to get a TV converter pretty soon so I can see if I get any sort of signal at all from 7, as my Olevia TV doesn't have any sort of useful TV signal strength indicator (it shows strength while scanning, but doesn't show WHAT channel it's scanning .. LOL).

Yep, what I said could be worthless. Someone wondered, so I looked into it. Maybe it is useful to someone.

The Zenith DTT901 is nice in that when you press its [Signal] button it beeps faster as the signal gets better or slower as it gets weaker. Unfortunately it doesn't give you a number reading, just a multicolored bar.

The DTVPal does give you a number and a colored bar, but not the beep. Both can be gotten at Sears. Kmart also apparently carries the DTVPal.

32 is coming in fine here in Berkeley, but they're showing a screen that says they're still working on things...so no actual programming.

To answer Larry's question, I'm getting good signal strength (i.e., "88" or "94", according to the numbers on one of my units) on 2.1, 5.1, 11.1, 20.1 (though "quality" is not rated as good as the others right now for this channel), 26.1, 32.1, 44.1, and 60.1...strength is lower, but still adequate (i.e., "72" or "77"), for 4.2 and 7.1.

I have a direct shot across the bay (except for my tall deodar cedar on the west side of the house) to Sutro with my (it must be) 40-year old old-fashioned antenna.

Cheers - Tony

@Kev: if you've time please go ahead and post the pic....I'll play around with my antenna to see if I can get ANYTHING from KGO. Right now my fusionhdtv app is reporting a big fat "0" for signal strength for KGO7.... I've already manually set the channel num back to 7 in the fusionhdtv app..... at least I get ~60-70% with KNTV11....I'm using a terk hdtva too. No problems with other UHF channels.

I'm in S. San Jose
I have issue with 4.1 / 4.2
I changed it to 38
but signal isn't stable and far less power than was before
I'm getting inconsistent signal between 20% & 60% - it fluctuate all the time
as result no image / sound at all for a while.

I assume you meant channels 7 & 11 -- channel 2 is still UHF. However, I just disconnected my large VHF yagi channelmaster antenna (which had been combined with a 4228) to see how my 4228 would do on its own with channels 7 (on physical 7) and 11 (on physical 12). My reception on 11 did not show any appreciable change in signal quality using my MyHD receiver card and my reception on channel 7 is now at 100% signal quality -- better than my reception using my larger antenna. Of course, this improvement may simply be due to better multipath performance since the antennas are mounted several feet apart. Still, the 4228 seems to be doing fine with both of these upper VHF channels. I'm located in Los Altos, by the way, and I do not think that I have clear line of sight to the transmission tower, although I don't have any major near-in obstacles.

An indicated 70% in FusionHDTV is marginal for stable reception. Since the KGO signal is likely weaker than KNTV's at your location, that probably explains why you're not getting it.

I live in south San Jose (near 85 & 87). KGO looks pretty good with my CM 4228 (a popular UHF rig) - much better than I expeted.

You can see my setup here:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...6#post15719526

I have the CM 4228 split between two tuners:
- My Panasonic Plasma (KGO = 86%)
- My Tivo HD (KGO = 89%)

Regards,
Scott

I hooked up my spectrum analyzer today to look at the post-transition signals. There is already a MediaFLO signal on former channel 55.

Ron

Yeah, I found it in St Louis last week while also playing with an SA. Took me the better part of the day to figure out (remember) what it was.

According to Larry they'll bring up another transmitter this Thursday and you'll get a stronger signal. A lot of these reception problems will go away by the end of the week.

Could be the auxiliary antenna usage...see the post on Saturday around 4pm by Larry.

On another note, I had been getting KNTV really good on Saturday but I haven't gotten a strong enough signal since Sunday night. Not sure whether I had an unusually good atmosphere for me Saturday and bad today, but I didn't even get it during the day Monday. KGO still coming in solid, with no Leroy Nieman painting moments or black screen moments.

[Me: in SF, but indoor antenna that faces the wrong direction from Sutro / San Bruno]

ok so i did the obvious thing and just hoisted the antenna up 20 feet in the air and now i get some kind of signal.

for the record, after i relocated the antenna, i simply entered "7" on the remote and got a picture. so it may indeed be possible that you can "add" a channel that wasn't picked up in a previous scan.

but that's a topic for another thread. the moral of the story for people more than 20 miles away from sutro who lost KGO is just to take care of antenna basics. an antenna that gets UHF very well may not get VHF nearly as well.

according to http://www.hdtvprimer.com/ANTENNAS/choosing.html , when trying to tune in VHF with a non-optimal antenna, height is the simplest way to improve your situation.

Reporting from Sunnyvale here-- I get marginal KGO reception on my LCD TV in the day (37-40% signal strength), but it doesn't come in at night. Second TV uses a Mediacenter PC as a tuner (MCE2005), which reports no KGO reception at all, day or night. All other channels are as good as before the switch.

Using a CM 4228 mounted on the roof. Can someone link me to some resources on adding a VHF antenna? Amplifiers vs. combiners, etc.

Someone in San Jose asked about KBCW, on the real channel 45. My reception of them in Santa Clara is now hanging on the edge. I read somewhere that they are on the "low power antenna" on Sutro, whatever that means. That may have something to do with it. I am concerned with KTVU being on real channel 44 now. These guys are packed in like sardines now, and some inter-channel spillover may occur.
JamesF

I'm in West San Jose (Cambrian area - Highway 85 & Camden) and no longer get KGO. I used to get get it with a signal strength of 75-80 which was sufficient but now, nada zip. This is with my 4228 mounted on a single story home chimney and a 10' pole on top of that.

Oh, and this is after a rescan with my Dish 622 DVR. I'm thinkin' this may resolve itself as things settle down after the transition or is my wishful thinking not gonna pan out and I need to do something about it?

I just found this on KGO's website; dunno how long it's been there:

"We expect indoor antenna reception to improve with our new main antenna, although reception will vary until all tower work is completed in October 2009."

More here:

http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/feature?s...nfo&id=6339723


Patty

Good info! So what I read from this is that they'll be working on the KGO/KBCW stack first (see Larry's Sutro Tower diagram) with completion expected by mid July. After that whenever the crews are working KGO will switch back to its auxiliary antenna.

Chuck

Yeah, that is good information. I'll try some of the other suggestions here in the meantime. I really don't feel like putting up a VHF antenna just to get one channel. I'll wait til July, then October to see if things improve.

To answer someone else's question about channel 11/12 - I see about 70% with two Samsung TVs.

It's going to be interesting to see how well KGO gets out on their auxiliary antenna. As you might have noticed on the Sutro diagrams, it's way down at Level 1. They should have to move to it fairly soon as works begins on the Southwest tower... the one the channel 7 main antenna is on.

While doing a scan today I found a big surprise! KVIE 9 and KXTV 10 were coming in with a signal of about 15 dB... but my antenna was pointed toward Sutro, not Walnut Grove. With my antenna pointed at Walnut Grove I've been getting about 12 to 13 dB on these channels.

I did some peaking and got channel 9 up to 17 dB and channel 10 up to 18 dB. My antenna was pointed at 257 degrees, so I was apparently getting the signals as reflections off of Twin Peaks!

The signals lasted for about 15 minutes then slowly disappeared. It's going to be interesting to see if this was a freak incident or something that happens every so often.

Larry
SF

I'm also in Sunnyvale using the CM4221, noticed that I totally lost KGO. My conclusion was the same: the CM4221 is a UHF antenna, and KGO switched from UHF24 to VHF7, which is pretty far out of spec for my antenna. The other stations coming out of Sutro Tower come in just fine though. Guess I need to upgrade the antenna before the next season of Lost starts up!

Speaking of the HDTV Primer web page, I see quite a bit of new work has been added about the Channel Master 4228HD which is supposed to be optimized for VHF.

http://www.hdtvprimer.com/ANTENNAS/TemporaryPage.html

It doesn't look good at all.

Has anyone tried one of the new Winegard series of Hi VHF/UHF antennas? I would think that many people would find one of these antennas acceptable.

Chuck

I lived in Sunnyvale for over 7 years and I experimented with a number of different antennas. All the SF stations came in good with a moderate size Winegard VHF/UHF antenna. The claimed gain of the Winegard HD7696P is very similar to the CM4221. Seems like that ought to be a decent UHF replacement plus it adds VHF.

Chuck

This is a follow up to this message I posted on 6/15/09.

I talked to someone lots more knowledgeable about the antenna subject than me. He said that in an ideal setting the rabbit ears would be flat and in a V and pointing at the transmission tower. I said but I found the V leaning away from the tower with one end closer to the tower and the other further away to be the optimum setting. He said that's because of interference and the signal bouncing off of other things (or something to that effect).

I guess the lesson is that each person's optimum will depend on their surroundings. You just have to try different things to find what works best. And like I think someone else pointed out if you are too far it won't matter what you do, the rabbit ears won't be enough.

I did some searching around and these are the things I found:
http://www.kyes.com/antenna/rabbitear.html says for ch7 the ears should be 32" (= 16" per side)
http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/thread/337071.aspx which has a message from a Chief Engineer at a ch7 station says each side should be 17". (they moved from UHF to VHF in February and got a flood of complaints like I imagine KGO is getting)
http://www.hdtvprimer.com/ANTENNAS/RabbitEars.html says ch7 should have 44" (= 22" per side)

Mine are 23" on each side. One of those sites I believe pointed out that the lengths of the ears should be the same. And that the ears ideally should be away from anything metal. Mine are sitting on top of my DVR which is on top of my TV and I still get a solid 83 to 88 percent signal strength. (according to my DTVPal Plus converter box).

Some other things I came across:
EV's Best Top Rated DTV Indoor Antenna Review Test Round-Up Guide 2 MB w/ images enabled (warning to dial-up users)

The Official AVS Antenna Topic