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Old 25-Apr-2015, 10:24 PM   #5
StephanieS
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Aug 2012
Posts: 442
Trees. A-ha. This is the kryptonite of even the best antenna. See the story below as posted by ADTech. The moral here, with trees present you can completely destroy your chances for reception.

Quote:
Several springs ago, I did a courtesy call to a residential location in South St Louis County (Affton) that was within a stone's throw (less than 2 miles) of most of the St Louis transmitters. One of the towers was visible from the home's sidewalk out at the street, but by the time I walked 40 feet back to the house and checked again for the signal with the portable analyzer, it was down by 40 dB (and barely visible on the screen) from the reading out at the street. The culprit? A pair of 70' silver maple trees in the neighbor's yard, one behind the other, that were wet from a rain shower earlier in the day, that were now directly in the signal path and were blowing in the breeze. I gave the folks a C2 antenna, wished them luck, and took my leave.
There is really no advice to overcoming tree related reception issues than to say get above them, cut them down or relocate the antenna to a better unobstructed area. In more southern locations during the winter they get away with trees due to the leaves being dropped When spring hits however, they experience reception loss due to signal reflection by the budding foliage.

What channels from Montreal do you receive? Real 10 and 12? Any of the UHF?

I'm concerned about your double amplification. A preamp and distribution amp in tandem can easily result in overloading to where your reception worsens. Even off the back 60db is a lot of local signal to contend with. If I owned your set up, I'd pull the preamp and test. If no improvement, I'd pull distribution amp. I'd chase down all aspects of amplification so I had a comparison of scenarios from full amplification to distribution amp only to no amplification.

But as ADTech's example of trees above points out, it may not, amplification issues aside, may not fly no matter what you do. If you enshrouded in trees the signal flutters depending on the trees and there isn't much you or your antenna can do to compensate for that loss of signal.

Cheers.

Last edited by StephanieS; 25-Apr-2015 at 10:29 PM.
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