On Sat, 2009-05-09 at 11:34 -0400, Nick Nobody wrote: > Sorry, I wasn't very clear in my sleepy state. > > Right now I have one length of wire that comes down from the antenna (which > is > on a mast above my roof) and gets terminated inside the house to something > like this: http://imgur.com/JG0L.jpg > > >From there I either connect the television or the capture card, never both > >at > the same time as that would be impossible :P
Ah, OK. moving on... > > This is the joy of digital TV reception that the FCC did not convey top > > the public. :( The FCC didn't fully assess the impacts to OTA > > broadcast to outlying areas either, I suspect. What does > > > > http://www.antennaweb.org > > > > say you can expect for digital reception of WFFF at your location? What > > is the bearing that antennaweb.org say you should point you antenna vs > > the bearing at which you have it? (antennaweb uses magnetic north) > > Antennaweb should be running a Longley-Rice propagation model to give > > you some decent expectation of availability. > > Sadly I can't use that because I don't live in the US. I tried entering my > coordinates and it only lists two stations from Plattsburgh. One at heading > 201 (WCFE) and the other at heading 188 (WWBI). Right. And antenna web is probably running a link margin with the Longley-Rice Irregular Terrrain Model (ITM) with (I'm guessing) a 95% (or greater) availability. Those were the only two stations, under antennaweb's assumptions about your setup, that have that availability year round. > The WFFF transmitter is > southeast of me, I'd estimate the heading to be about 150 degrees and the > distance (using google maps) is about 142km (~88mi) "as the crow flies". > > This may seem far, but there are 3 other transmitters in that area that I'm > able to get great signal from (WCAX, WPTZ and WETK). For all four of those stations don't count on > 95% availability year round. > > Weather fronts and temperature varaition betwenn you and the > > transmitting station also make a difference at times. > > Sure enough, as soon as the sun comes out, "scan" no longer finds the channel > nor will gnutv get a lock on the signal. Wait until the sun is higher in the sky, and not in any of the beams (main lobe nor side lobe) of your antenna. Reception might improve as long as your antenna isn't pointing at the Milky Way at that time. the time window when the Sun is not in your antenna beam might not be many hours of the day at a northern latitude pointing southward... > So it looks like my only option is to try out a pre-amp, I'll see if I can > find > one around here at a reasonable price. Avoid units from Radio Shack, any unit that doesn't have a noise figure stated, or units with a noise figure over 3 dB. The companies in the US that come to mind are: Winegard (Indiana?), Channel Master (North Carolina?), and there's one up in new England somewhere (IIRC). I found looking at various electronics stores to be a waste of time; I ordered via the internet. Good luck. Regards, Andy _______________________________________________ ivtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://ivtvdriver.org/mailman/listinfo/ivtv-users
