DPres
13-Mar-2012, 3:57 AM
I have an interesting problem with multipath and am hoping that someone will be able to help. I live 18 miles southwest of my desired TV transmitters.
Here is my tvfool report:
http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/l...foolreport.png
I live in a valley and a wooded hill is between my house and the transmitters-close to my house. I have an old bow-tie UHF antenna extended above my 48ft tower. (Pictured here: http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/l...N/P3062435.jpg ) It has a preamp that is old. The indoor part says Galaxy III series. I think the outdoor part is older.
My biggest problem is that there is a train track that runs from southeast to southwest of my house about 1/4 mile away. When trains go by, my picture on several channels pixellates and stops. Audio completely cuts out for 30 seconds to a minute. It naturally depends on how long and fast the train is. The channel signal strength according to my Samsung HDTV or my OTA DishDTVPal DVR is in the mid to upper 80%s for my worst channels. My 95%+ channels don't cut out much. I theorize that the signal is bouncing off the moving train cars into the back of my antenna. This is worse in Winter when there are no leaves on the trees to block the bounced signal. The funny thing is, the area where the train begins to interfere is directly behind the antenna, but the faces of the cars are at an oblique angle. That doesn't make much sense to me.
Does anyone have advice for me? I installed a rotator but I can't find a position that fixes it. My thinking is that I might need to get a new antenna that is more directional and/or rejects signal better from behind. I don't have any specs. on my old antenna to compare to new ones. What should I be looking for in beam width or front-to-back ratio. Or any other advice would be appreciated.
The TV stations I am interested in all are in the same direction: NorthEast. We watch the top 5 stations on the list. The worst one affected is ABC, then PBS. NBC is sometimes affected, but CBS doesn't cut out at all.
Thanks!
Here is my tvfool report:
http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/l...foolreport.png
I live in a valley and a wooded hill is between my house and the transmitters-close to my house. I have an old bow-tie UHF antenna extended above my 48ft tower. (Pictured here: http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/l...N/P3062435.jpg ) It has a preamp that is old. The indoor part says Galaxy III series. I think the outdoor part is older.
My biggest problem is that there is a train track that runs from southeast to southwest of my house about 1/4 mile away. When trains go by, my picture on several channels pixellates and stops. Audio completely cuts out for 30 seconds to a minute. It naturally depends on how long and fast the train is. The channel signal strength according to my Samsung HDTV or my OTA DishDTVPal DVR is in the mid to upper 80%s for my worst channels. My 95%+ channels don't cut out much. I theorize that the signal is bouncing off the moving train cars into the back of my antenna. This is worse in Winter when there are no leaves on the trees to block the bounced signal. The funny thing is, the area where the train begins to interfere is directly behind the antenna, but the faces of the cars are at an oblique angle. That doesn't make much sense to me.
Does anyone have advice for me? I installed a rotator but I can't find a position that fixes it. My thinking is that I might need to get a new antenna that is more directional and/or rejects signal better from behind. I don't have any specs. on my old antenna to compare to new ones. What should I be looking for in beam width or front-to-back ratio. Or any other advice would be appreciated.
The TV stations I am interested in all are in the same direction: NorthEast. We watch the top 5 stations on the list. The worst one affected is ABC, then PBS. NBC is sometimes affected, but CBS doesn't cut out at all.
Thanks!