I'm nowhere near trying to answer all the questions... but here are some things.
My last OTA installation was two years ago. An oddball occurrence was that we got audio, no video, with static on TV channel 5 from Lake Arrowhead!
On December 14, 2020 at 19:25, buzz said...
How do you handle wildly different signal strengths and keep the big ones from overloading the amplifier while still dealing with the weaker stations?
First, you need a signal level meter. Then you need to decide what portion of the signal you're going to call "the signal" for the purposes of comparing channel levels. I say that because the signal meters I'm familiar with are analog and TV signals don't have one particular carrier like AM did.
As for multiple directions and antennas, it's been guesswork for decades.
A surprise in my history was realizing that sometimes you have to carefully aim AWAY from a strong station in order to improve reception on a weak station. That's because the null of an antenna reception pattern is MUCH deeper than the peak. In Los Angeles, I was able to null out a very strong FM station 1/2 mile from my client so she could receive a low-power station up and over a hill, then 25 miles away.
Back in analog days there were actual splitters made, tuned to the local market channels, that allowed you to get all channels within 1 dB of one another in level.... but only for VHF.
Before you put any energy into VHF, check your area with tvfool, antennaweb.org, or nocable.org (just found this one, haven't tried it). Your area might not use any VHF frequencies.
Get familiar with the channel frequencies (for instance, Ch2 is roughly 54 MHz) while our local CBS is called 2 but it's actually at 36 MHz. Channel frequencies and channel names are not the same. nocable.org does away with the challenge of naming a TV station after the number it used to be or the frequency number it now is. They just name the frequency in MHz, giving you no clue where to tune to get it.
Single antenna? Multiple antennae?
You have to experiment. One client got all channels by pointing east up the adjacent hill toward the transmitters... except for PBS. Its transmitter is on the same mountain as the other channels, but to get it I had to aim due north, 90 degrees from the other stations.
Does your system support both UHF and VHF channels?
Does it have to? As I mentioned above.
Last edited by Ernie Gilman on December 15, 2020 22:50.
