"Peter" wrote in message
...
On 9/2/2010 5:44 AM, Robert Green wrote:
Later this year, I am going to mount a
tall mast on the chimney and put up the rotor again, with the largest
aerial
I can find to pull in the stations like 22 that broadcast from
Annapolis, 90
degrees away from Baltimore or Washington and some other transmitters
that
aren't located with the other major towers. )-:


We also opt for over-the-air reception. We are lucky. At our location
(north
of Wheaton, MD) all the DC transmitters are within about 15 degrees of
each
other, except for Chan 22, which is about 90 degrees further east.

Dang, we've got enough DC area posters here to form a local chapter of AHR.
I've been in a few other newsgroups that have "met up" with each other, and
it's always interesting to put a face to the name. Channel 22 is really the
red-headed step child of the DC area, existing out in left field. A friend
that lives in Wheaton gets WTOP radio on her phone lines, the towers are so
close by. (-:

We opted for
a fixed mast on a chimney mount with a high gain, directional, unamplified
VHF/UHF antenna. Although the antenna is directional, we get
4,5,7,9,20,26,30,32,50 and 66 reliably without needing a rotor. Since we
often
want to watch a DC station while recording 22, or vice versa, a rotor
would not
have been a good solution for us.

I've found it's hardly ever a good solution and it's why I'm working with
the two aerial/two DVR system that's working fairly well. But since we're
in a small valley, I suspect that the extra 10 or 15 feet I'd gain with a
chimney mounted antenna would eliminate a lot of the dropouts. I am
surprised you get reception with an amp. How long is the run of cable from
the aerial to the TV set?

Our installer agreed to try mounting an
unamplified 8 bow tie UHF antenna on the same mast, pointed at 22, using a
reverse splitter to merge the signals from both antennas into the single
feed
wire. Although you can find many web sites that say phase distortion
makes that
type of setup unworkable, it works like a charm for us even though we
passively
split the download 3 ways. You might want to try it before you invest $$$
in a
rotor.

Since that same technology works well to give my whole house good X-10 (the
home automation stuff) RF coverage. I got an amplifier, a five way
splitter-combiner and mounted five small aerials at each corner of the
house with one in the middle. They're not even really aerials, just
sections of RG6QS peeled back to reveal the central wire stripped to a
length that's allegedly a multiple of the RF wave). Ever since I installed
them, I get full coverage from my home automation system throughout the
house and several hundred feet away from it. I was also warned about phase
distortion, I've seen no evidence of it. In a plaster/lathe house, one
aerial just doesn't cut it. Now I have only one "slightly" dead spot right
near the furnace underneath the spot where all the ducts diverge. I see no
reason why the same technique would not work on the TV antennas. It would
certainly be easy enough to try. I guess it's time to get the coax and
tools out. I miss not having 22 - ComcASSt dropped it (and WHUT - 19) from
their ever-shrinking basic cable lineup. I read somewhere that DC is one of
the few places where they have delayed the digital switchover because
residents here poll as very price sensitive and likely to leave ComcASSt if
force to upgrade to digital.

I still get dropouts, though, from overhead planes, rain clouds and
elves.
(IOU, I am not sure what causes them, but I do know they proliferate at
the
ends of programs where they're saying "Of course, the killer had to be -
silence, splotches, more silence and finally the picture returns).

Us too. It can be totally clear, sun shining, no breeze and no sound of
airplanes, yet suddenly the signal strength starts fluctuating wildly and
we get
drop outs or even short episodes of "no signal" blank screens. Since it
most
often happens at about the same time of day for a particular station, I
suspect
it may be aircraft activity from BWI and/or national relatively close to
the
transmitting tower and too far from the house to hear anything. Of course
there's lots of helicopter traffic in the close-in DC area. As you say,
it
usually happens at a critical moment in whatever program is in progress!

I also live next to the only multistory building for miles and there's quite
an issue with multipath distortion. While it's not so easy to spot with a
digital tuner, when I had analog, and a plane flew overhead (we're on the
approach to both BWI and Andrews AFB) you could see a second image appear,
shift left, then right, then slowly vanish. I only wish digital did
something like that and not the "picture gone" or "sound gone" problems I
see. Another slight annoyance is that channel surfing is much, much slower
as most of the tuners I have take a second or two to "lock" in the channel.

--
Bobby G.