OT: TV Tower.

[Stuart]

Ta. Stay wires would be redundant then unless you are worried about /very/ severe winds.

[Michael Kenefick]

[Steve]

This tool may provide some useful information:

[dpb]

their signal strength... :(

I _know_ where they are (there are, after all, only three affiliate signals within 150 miles and the local and PBS are very low level output.

--

[Dale Miller]

That depends...some towers are not ment to be true free standing. Most expensive towers can be true free standing.

[Dale Miller]

Yes...we turned off Direct and went to OTA and netflix. I also put together a computer to be a DVR with MythTV and a Silicondust HDhomerun.

also use Hulu and Boxee as other forms of getting programs. Our set-up works quite well and Netflix isn't too bad. We get about 30 channels and if I could get my antenna up about another

10 feet or so I think we could do even better. It sits at about 32 feet right now.

[Dale Miller]

OTA TV is a Mpeg2 stream so yes it isn't compressed. With the digital stream you can just save the stream to a harddrive. With the old analog you need to decode the the incoming signal which takes quite alot of processing power.

[Stuart]

I am a retired transmitter engineer, having spent most of my working life in broadcast, and the definition I gave is the correct one.

Any structure requiring stay wires is a mast whether it is a pole a few inches in diameter or a TV mast 1000ft high with a much larger cross section, including such as the mast at Waltham-in-the Wolds, which is an enclosed steel cylinder having a lift up its inside capable of carrying four men at a time.

As you say, towers are expensive so tend to be used only up to a couple of hundred feet. The notable exception in the UK, is the concrete tower at Emley Moor - which replaced a previous mast, like the one at Waltham, which fell down.

[Lew Hodgett]

------------------------------------------ Same pitch here in SoCal.

Lew

[Robert Bonomi]

My *guess* would be that it's the cell-phone companies, and the other folks (like "Clear') selling 'wireless' (*not* "wi-fi", but stuff with 'multi-mile' range) Internet access, that have their eye on that spectrum.

I don't see the cable companies spending the money -- 'Internet TV' is already costing them lots of customers, and it's more than likely that _that_ is where most over-the-air customers would go.

[Dale Miller]

Then explain these guyed towers.

if it is triangular or square it is not a mast but a tower, if round than it is a mast.

[Stuart]

Sorry but masts can be any cross sectional shape, though triangular is very common due to maximum strength for minimum material. The only governing principal is whether it is self supporting or not.

is a pity there are no illustrations but the text is clear enough, referring to "Self supporting /towers/" and "Guyed lattice /masts/" You may like to note that if you follow the link to masts you will find reference to masts of triangular section.

However,

some interesting photographs and notes regarding the triangular section /mast/ at Sutton Coldfield. Note especially the BBC Engineering department letter at the bottom of the webpage referring to /mast/

There are details of lots of other Tx stations here too, including a very iced-up Holme Moss and the collapsed mast and new concrete tower at Emley Moor.tower

Again, note the references to /mast/ here:

think we are falling into the same terminology problem where, for example, you americans, rather illogically, call a machine for planing a piece of wood flat (a planer) a jointer and a device for machining a piece of wood to thickness (a thicknesser) a planer

See:

read the section "Mast or tower", Americans are out of step with both UK Broadcast engineers and civil engineers.

[Ed Pawlowski]

"Dale Miller" wrote

The Stratosphere Casino is a mast?

[Martin Eastburn]

I get the only station in town in HDTV on my office TV via Rabbit Ears! They are an electronic type - loop between the two extension type whips. When storms wipe out the satellite on HD - I switch to the same channel in analog - different angle in the sky. Then switch back.

I have and four down-links from 4 satellites for the house and shop. We get a lot of junk and will likely truncate the channels to cut the bill. Last time, they dropped the price to keep us were we were. We were one of the first in the area to get it around here.

Mart> >> I know this is OT, but I respect the opinion of many here so here it >> goes. >>

[Dale Miller]

Yes there in lies the problem...here in the USA we call the "pipe" portion of an antenna system a "Mast" and anything of lattice construction whether guyed or free-standing a tower. If I had of seen your email was in the UK I probably wouldn't have responded at all.

[Hoosierpopi]

We went free digital TV last year - I put up a little (2-3 foot long) $40 antenna and pointed it to the channels (see Antennaweb.org for the application to find your local channels) and it worked pretty well. But, maybe because I have a six-way splitter behind a two-way splitter, I tried a Radio Shack in-line amplifier and everything improved significantly.

I bought a larger antenna for my vacation home as it is much further from the stations. Have yet to install it as I, too, am searching GOVDEALS.COM for a tower - but, so far, they have been going for hundreds of dollars there. At one point, I received analog Free TV there with a "Standard" roof antenna I'd recovered from the trash. But, when I tried it with the new digital, not so good!

I am told that you can "gang" antennas with 300 ohm wire, pointing each toward a different cluster of broadcasting stations and improve the number of channels received w/o a rotor.

There;s a Cable Customer group on Yahoo:

I think we were hosed with the advent of Cable. We had free over the air TV all my life in exchange for watching the advertisements. Now, we pay for the privilege of watching the same old same old and there are more commercials per hour than ever before.

The "News" has been replaced with Opinion "Journalism" which seeks and commands great ratings and advertisers while spewing conflict.

[Steve]

Leon wrote in news: [e-mail]:

Leon,

It is nice to hear someone else who thinks the Uverse remote is crap. I have had it about 2 months and I still hit the wrong button at the wrong time. I am considering getting one of those fancy Logitech remotes that runs everything.

Steve

[Robert Haar]

That's pretty accurate, but you left out the part where the "news" is a shill for the new network TV program.

[Robatoy]

I had NO idea what there is to learn about antennas.

[Dale Miller]

Check out this forum Robatoy.