Milwaukee HDTV User Group

Hello All,

Sorry about the recent flood of spam.   The user has been banned, and their IP has been blocked, I'm going through now and deleting all the messages, there is a lot so it's taking awhile.

Loadstar, not sure if you still check this.  I am attempting to get cable back, this time with 3 tivos (two S3s and one Bolt).  Spectrum cannot apparently pair them even though they say they are active and are getting good responses on their end.  My bolt keeps saying channel unauthorized v58.  My two S3s can only get broadcast channels (broadcast from Spectrum not from antenna).  So frustrating.  I miss Time Warner Cable.

Could be too much signal, too many reflections (ghosts), or possible 5G interference.
Don't use an amplified antenna.
Try an attenuator.
Try a 5G filter (blocks 600 Mhz and up)

We're on the Lower East Side in an old Victorian, and for the past few years we've just had a cheap flat antenna on the first floor behind the TV, which mostly worked fine. However, we would inevitably get glitches during sports games, so I decided to move it up into our (third floor) attic:

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That's a good 11' off of the attic floor, or around 35'-40' off the ground. Other than the lead coming from the antenna (maybe 6'), it's RG-6 tri-shield all the way to the TiVo. As far as I can tell, other than some trees down the street, there's nothing between here and the WITI tower. I think the other towers are just hidden behind the apartment building down the street, but I'm not 100% certain.

At any rate, the signal strength meter on the TiVo reports 100% solid for WITI, with zero fluctuation. WDJT is also around 99-100, while the other local channels are generally somewhere between 90-98.

And yet, today WITI was freezing for a split second every couple of minutes. Not long enough for the picture to entirely break up, but enough to cause a glitch in the audio and a slight stutter to the video.

The question is: why? Signal strength clearly isn't an issue. Nor does it seem that cars or people should be an issue. Is there any way to methodically troubleshoot this? I have the antenna oriented about halfway between the WDJT and WITI towers, and it's nearly as close to the front of the house as it can get (it was previously 2 rafters to the right/east, but moving it didn't seem to help). I have no problem getting a better antenna (perhaps a CM-4220HD?), but I question how much that would really help (it certainly seems like overkill).

Unfortunately putting an antenna outside really isn't feasible.

The towers range from 2.25 miles for WITI to 4.15 miles for WDJT:

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Any ideas?

We used to have engineers from WDJT and WVTV around.. Not sure if they are still around

Are there any local engineers still around here who can give us some insight on any plans for ATSC 3.0?

Mystery solved.  I had to go behind my TV last week and move some things around.  I noticed the Coax cable from the wall to my Tivo was bend and the part that screws into the connection seemed loose.  I took that cable out and put a newer RG6 in. 

Picture perfect.  Thanks for everyones help. 

Greenfield.  43rd and Howard.  Attic in roof faces north.  Roof is a single layer of gag shingles. 

That Makes sense about still being able to receive some VHF......and Tivo has a reputation of not having the best tuners in them....so the tuners inside the TVs are probably better in receiving them.

Some UHF only antennas are pretty good at receiving the upper VHF band. The available signal to noise won't be as good as an actual VHF antenna though. Lightning will affect the VHF band more-so then UHF, especially if your receiving a poor signal to begin with. What is your rough location?

As far as I can tell it looks like a UHF only.  Antennas Direct Clearstream 2

I attached the instruction manual.  I still have the box, it says optimized for UHF DTV frequencies.  So that answers my question, however why did I used to get Ch 10?  And like I said, Ch 10 came in the worst out of all channels when I did get it.  All others I get 99% of the time, most of the time it's when there is a lot of lightning that I get pix-elation.