View Single Post
Old 22-Aug-2014, 5:13 PM   #8
stvcmty
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Mar 2013
Posts: 135
Based on the partial lat/lon on your plot (33.39,-91.13), it looks like you are by a river, so low local terrain.
TV fool does not predict LOS paths until around 70’. Looking at the distances between you and transmitters, the closest full power transmitters are 50+ miles away. A lot of them are 77+ miles away.
In my experience, 50 mile reception with a decent noise margin is easy. 75+ mile reception starts to become a problem just from the curvature of the earth.
For your location, you probably need:
1. As tall of a mast/tower/pole as you can safely and legally put up. (No one [with very few exceptions] can keep you from putting up an antenna, but local government can make sure anything taller than 12’ above your roof is safe. http://www.fcc.gov/guides/over-air-r...n-devices-rule )
2. A high gain directional UHF (real channels 14 to 51) antenna, a DB8e is an example.
3. A low noise preamp to keep what signal the antenna gets alive down the coax into your TV. I recommend the Antennas Direct PA-18. The noise specification is very low and your location should not overload it.
4. Good grounding for the antenna and whatever support you put it on.

Your location may not be very VHF (Real channel 2-13) friendly.
VHF low stations (real channels 2-6) suffer from a lot of noise. WMD has a NM of 6 at 100’ with a 2 edge path. WMC-DT is still a 1 edge path even at 500 feet. At 500 feet, the NM is 15.4. So from the discussion in http://forum.tvfool.com/showthread.php?t=2858 WMC-DT may be receivable by extreme measures, but it may not.
It looks like for VHF-high signals your location is co channel hell. There are two channel 12 signals that are close to 180 degrees apart. To fight that would require a big antenna with a high front to back ratio. (based on 33.39,-91.13 at 70 feet it is even worse, the two channel 12’s are almost right on top of each other’s signal strength.) On the other hand, real channel 7, KETS PBS would come in very well at 70’.

If I lived near you live, I would focus on UHF stations. Once I figured out what was available on UHF, I would see if I needed any VHF stations to fill-in major networks.
stvcmty is offline   Reply With Quote