Hi Everybody,
I recently moved away from my cozy "I can see the transmission towers from my living room and receive OTA television with my dental fillings" location to a new apartment about 16 miles away from our local antenna farm. The
new location is here.
At this location I was able to receive all of the channels I should get (WBNG, WSKG, WIVT, WICZ) with a set top indoor antenna, placed outside on my porch, but the signal was marginal and flaked out, as expected.
So, I purchased and installed the CM-2016,
seen here. It's installed on my back porch, approximately 20 feet off the ground, aimed directly at the antenna farm 16 miles away. This antenna is connected via RG-6 (approx 12-15 feet) to a two way grounded splitter. The splitter then feeds two TVs, again via RG6, one TV is six feet from the splitter, the second about twenty. The splitter claims 3.8dB of loss. There are no amplifiers here, as I didn't think my short cable runs warranted amplification.
The setup seems to work well. Neither of my TVs have signal meters (grrr....) but my TiVo does, and it claims a SNR of 27dB to 29dB on the two UHF channels (WIVT and WSKG) with a signal meter percentage in the mid 70s.
Here's what's interesting though. The two VHF channels (WBNG and WICZ) claim the same SNR readings at night, but during the day they drop to 20-21dB, with respective signal meter percentages in the low 50s. The signal is still rock solid during the day, and doesn't seem to be further impacted by weather (nasty storms here yesterday and I had the same reading), but I'm curious why the signal is so much stronger at night? I know that lower frequencies propagate better at night but I'd thought that VHF was largely immune to such happenings?
Should I be considering a better antenna, VHF wise? The
CM-2018 has improved VHF gain over the 2016, but it's also significantly larger, and I was endeavoring to keep my setup as non-intrusive as possible.
