the doctor who and japan channel
Dec. 18th, 2021 09:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solarbirdSo we don't have cable television, we stream or watch local TV over the air. We get 64(!) air channels, counting those we block for evil content. (Fundamentalists and 24-hour shopping get the boot.)
But there are some channels we REALLY want, like NHK World via KBTC-2 in Tacoma.
We're in a terrible location for over-the-air for a lot of reasons, some of which are very specific to our building, some of which aren't. We shouldn't be, according to most maps, but we are. For reasons.
So after fiddling around with various little indoor antennas, I finally put a good antenna in the attic, mostly UHF, and then added a second antenna and joiner for VHF-High. (We don't have any VHF-Low in range, so I could optimise.)
This mostly worked great. Where did it not work great?
Channel 46 1-7 (RF channel 12), 9 1-4 (RF channel 9), which we could sort out by adding the VHF-High antenna...
...and KBTC's Seattle retransmitter, 28 (RF 28), which we could not.
28.1 is KTBC main, 28.2 is NHK World, 28.3 is First Nations, 28.4 is TVW, the state legislature.
I want all of these.
And I got it to an okay point, but then the building needed new ductwork and that meant more stuff in the attic and messed up reception so I decided to move everything. That's also when I added the VHF-High antenna to solve 9 (RF 9) and 48 (RF 12).
Now, I know where KBTC's Seattle tower is. I've been there! But aside from that, it's not hard to miss giant ass TV broadcasting towers in Seattle. They're huge and on top of hills. Hard to miss.
And I have a compass on my phone and maps and reference data and I know how to aim.
There are two main clusters. From where we are, they may as well all be in the same direction, it's only a degree or two different.
If we aim right at the transmitter, all channels transmitted from there are stupidly powerful... except KBTC, which in the day is pretty iffy, and at night is gone.
(Well, also, KCTS 9 is a little iffy, though less so. Or was, until we got the VHF-High antenna and added that in. Now it's fine.)
But what I figured out is that if I aim it in this other direction, all the super-powerful stations become less so (while staying acceptably strong)... and KBTC gets much stronger.
I'm not talking a little off, I'm talking 60 degrees off axis.
(All this elides all the experimenting I had to do to find decent locations in the building for antennas due to This Fecking Building. It was hard, but take all that work as read.)
It's kind of a compromise, much weaker signal on most other UHF stations (tho' some are strangely unaffected), but still solidly in the 60s or better signal strength range in rain like today and NHK World comes in stably, so it's the good kind of compromise: one that works.
But being me, I gotta know what the hell is going on here.
So I plot it out. I print out(!) some maps because I don't have the right kind of software for this and don't want to find some, and I can do this well enough on paper, and I don't have reason to do that often.
And I draw the lines and at first I'm doing a pretty large-scale map because I'm honestly wondering if I'm getting the signal off Mount Rainier, but that's wrong by a good 20 degrees. It's not Tahoma, even if the station is in Tacoma.
So I plot it out again on a smaller map, wondering if it's bouncing off something on Seattle's eastside, and I draw lines and...
...it goes right through the middle of Tiger Mountain State Forest.
And then I go, "...where exactly is Tiger Mountain on this map?"
...oh. There it is.
yeah. xD
It's ... almost cartoonishly accurate. I hadn't even thought about Tiger Mountain. It wasn't even in my head until I saw this on the map.
To be fair, I don't know that it's not something else, maybe closer. It could most certainly be! But I'll be damned if my little angles and lines didn't absolutely pinpoint Tiger Mountain to within the accuracy of the map - and well within the specced range of my UHF antenna. And that would be a damned odd coincidence, I think most people would have to agree.
So I guess I am the latest person to (re)discover Tiger Mountain! And I found it via... RF and television antennas and a compass... and to cartoonish levels of accuracy... largely by chance!
Seriously I found the location and was just "you are absolutely shitting me." But there it is.
And that's how I can get NHK World over the air when I absolutely can't get it by pointing the antenna at the transmitter.
I can get it because Tiger Mountain exists.
Apparently.
...
RF is weird.
And if you're me, this... this is hilarious. xD
But there are some channels we REALLY want, like NHK World via KBTC-2 in Tacoma.
We're in a terrible location for over-the-air for a lot of reasons, some of which are very specific to our building, some of which aren't. We shouldn't be, according to most maps, but we are. For reasons.
So after fiddling around with various little indoor antennas, I finally put a good antenna in the attic, mostly UHF, and then added a second antenna and joiner for VHF-High. (We don't have any VHF-Low in range, so I could optimise.)
This mostly worked great. Where did it not work great?
Channel 46 1-7 (RF channel 12), 9 1-4 (RF channel 9), which we could sort out by adding the VHF-High antenna...
...and KBTC's Seattle retransmitter, 28 (RF 28), which we could not.
28.1 is KTBC main, 28.2 is NHK World, 28.3 is First Nations, 28.4 is TVW, the state legislature.
I want all of these.
And I got it to an okay point, but then the building needed new ductwork and that meant more stuff in the attic and messed up reception so I decided to move everything. That's also when I added the VHF-High antenna to solve 9 (RF 9) and 48 (RF 12).
Now, I know where KBTC's Seattle tower is. I've been there! But aside from that, it's not hard to miss giant ass TV broadcasting towers in Seattle. They're huge and on top of hills. Hard to miss.
And I have a compass on my phone and maps and reference data and I know how to aim.
There are two main clusters. From where we are, they may as well all be in the same direction, it's only a degree or two different.
If we aim right at the transmitter, all channels transmitted from there are stupidly powerful... except KBTC, which in the day is pretty iffy, and at night is gone.
(Well, also, KCTS 9 is a little iffy, though less so. Or was, until we got the VHF-High antenna and added that in. Now it's fine.)
But what I figured out is that if I aim it in this other direction, all the super-powerful stations become less so (while staying acceptably strong)... and KBTC gets much stronger.
I'm not talking a little off, I'm talking 60 degrees off axis.
(All this elides all the experimenting I had to do to find decent locations in the building for antennas due to This Fecking Building. It was hard, but take all that work as read.)
It's kind of a compromise, much weaker signal on most other UHF stations (tho' some are strangely unaffected), but still solidly in the 60s or better signal strength range in rain like today and NHK World comes in stably, so it's the good kind of compromise: one that works.
But being me, I gotta know what the hell is going on here.
So I plot it out. I print out(!) some maps because I don't have the right kind of software for this and don't want to find some, and I can do this well enough on paper, and I don't have reason to do that often.
And I draw the lines and at first I'm doing a pretty large-scale map because I'm honestly wondering if I'm getting the signal off Mount Rainier, but that's wrong by a good 20 degrees. It's not Tahoma, even if the station is in Tacoma.
So I plot it out again on a smaller map, wondering if it's bouncing off something on Seattle's eastside, and I draw lines and...
...it goes right through the middle of Tiger Mountain State Forest.
And then I go, "...where exactly is Tiger Mountain on this map?"
...oh. There it is.
yeah. xD
It's ... almost cartoonishly accurate. I hadn't even thought about Tiger Mountain. It wasn't even in my head until I saw this on the map.
To be fair, I don't know that it's not something else, maybe closer. It could most certainly be! But I'll be damned if my little angles and lines didn't absolutely pinpoint Tiger Mountain to within the accuracy of the map - and well within the specced range of my UHF antenna. And that would be a damned odd coincidence, I think most people would have to agree.
So I guess I am the latest person to (re)discover Tiger Mountain! And I found it via... RF and television antennas and a compass... and to cartoonish levels of accuracy... largely by chance!
Seriously I found the location and was just "you are absolutely shitting me." But there it is.
And that's how I can get NHK World over the air when I absolutely can't get it by pointing the antenna at the transmitter.
I can get it because Tiger Mountain exists.
Apparently.
...
RF is weird.
And if you're me, this... this is hilarious. xD
no subject
Date: 2021-12-19 05:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-19 11:05 pm (UTC)it's the plot that really did it. i wasn't even thinking about tiger mountain until I drew that line right through the state park. and then i placed the mountain and it was
whelp
guess i found it xD
no subject
Date: 2021-12-19 11:40 pm (UTC)I'm guessing it's more fun if you put Googlemaps on terrain view
Also guessing I shouldn't bother trying this myself, since I see that from the south end of Mercer Island, Tiger Mountain is blocked by Cougar Mountain and the Newcastle highlands (as opposed to where you are, which is looking straight down the Sammamish River valley, across lake Sammamish to Issaquah), and IIRC, TV reception is doomed if you don't have line of sight.
(admittedly it's been decades since I last attempted to receive broadcast TV (in order to watch Babylon 5, from my apartment in Kirkland, in ... 1994))
no subject
Date: 2021-12-20 01:01 am (UTC)Also really strict line-of-sight isn't required for most channels. We can pick up the strong Seattle UHF stations - which since the repack is almost all of them - on the ground floor near the actual ground with just one of those dumb little rectangle-in-a-window antennas, and that's with a hill in the way.
Oh yeah, you probably don't know: "channel numbers" aren't actually RF channels anymore and are entirely logical. KOMO 4 isn't VHF-Low 4, KING 5 isn't VHF-Low 5, etc. They're mostly high-power UHF stations now, all part of the "repack" re-allocation of bandwidth that followed the switch to ATSC/high definition and the reallocation of fairly sparse utilisation on the high end of UHF. And because channel numbers were so important in marketing for so long, they implemented "virtual channel" functionality, so they show up on your television at the traditional number.
(UHF stations are allowed more powerful transmitters than VHF-Hi, which are in turn allowed more power than VHF-Low, for reasons. I suspect they want to ditch VHF-Low entirely, but the transmitter changeover costs are prohibitive for a bunch of local stations in the great plains so they don't.)
The only actual VHF-High channels in our area are KCTS-9 (actually on 9), KSTW-11 (actually 11) and KUSE-46 (actually on 12). There's a VHF-Low channel out on the peninsula (KYMU-6, actually on 6) which we could theoretically pick up but it's at very edge of range and at least partially redundant. Maybe entirely.
Everything else is UHF with beefy signal output. KOMO-4 (a.k.a. the Jeopardy Channel xD ) is actually UHF 30, KING-5 is UHF 25, KIRO-7 is UHF 23, FOX13 is UHF 22, etc.
no subject
Date: 2021-12-20 04:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-20 04:36 am (UTC)(looks it up)
Yeah, 5G and all that wanted a chunk of the UHF band rather than the VHF band, but you're otherwise right, and now it's 13-36 only, but as you can tell, they can put channels right against each other now. Here's Wikipedia's writeup:
"In 1983, the US FCC removed channels 70 through 83 and reassigned them to Land Mobile Radio System. In 2009, with the move to digital television complete in the US, channels 52 through 69 were reallocated as the 700 MHz band for cellular telephone service. In 2011, Channel 51 was removed to prevent interference with the 700 MHz band. Additionally, in 2019 the US removed channels 38 through 50 for cellular phone service. The US UHF channel map now only includes channels 14 through 36."
no subject
Date: 2021-12-20 01:09 am (UTC)https://www.antennaweb.org/
It's surprisingly terrain-aware and specific, and also pretty good! It thinks we should have a harder time getting KWPX (seven channels) than we do but is otherwise pretty accurate. It wants a zip code to start but you can drag the map pointer to individual locations and it updates appropriately.
(KWPX channels:
33-1 Ion (mostly cop shows bluh)
33-2 CourtTV (court cases)
33-3 Bounce (general programming with a Black focus)
33-4 Grit (100% westerns)
33-5 Defy TV (Basically A&E marketed at men)
33-6 TrueReal (Basically A&E marketed at women)
33-7 NEWSY (News programming, not obviously rightist on brief overview)
)
no subject
Date: 2021-12-20 04:48 am (UTC)ok, this is cool. What's freaky is how much (according to this) the reception changes from house to house in my neighborhood. Evidently I need all of the bells and whistles (violet: big-ass directional with preamp) to reach Tiger Mountain, but only medium-directional with preamp to reach something way the fuck over in Kitsap... whereas two houses away from me, both of those links are yellow (small diddly shit antenna suffices).
And apparently I'm also supposed to be able to reach something on Orcas Island with the violet stuff. But I don't get Tacoma.
On the other hand, I have some freakishly tall trees in my back yard. I suspect diddly shit antenna way 200 feet up could receive all sorts of odd things. (also guessing trying to put a directional antenna in a tree will just lose).
no subject
Date: 2021-12-20 06:46 am (UTC)What I have is an Antennas Direct ClearStream 2V for UHF, and a Stellar Labs 30-2475 Yagi for directional VHF, combined with just an old Archer basic splitter/combiner box, nothing special to it. I did have to do some positioning futziness to keep them from interacting badly with each other, but I got it figured out and it seems to be working well so far!
I was also talking with someone I knew back in grad school who at one point in the analogue days wanted to get a PBS station for Doctor Who - a station 120 miles! away! So he dredged up an old satellite dish reflector and addedwhat he describes as a very mediocre UHF antenna at the focal point and pulled it off. When he and his wife called up to donate during a marathon, she told them where they were receiving from, and the station put them on the air with the call volunteer to tell people how they'd done it because they were like "...how?!"
A bit of elevation and an old satellite dish is how xD
And that story revives just a bit my desire to get CBUT over the air. It's just theoretically possible. I think. Their tower is way the fuck up that mountain, it's like 1800 metres. I'd probably need a tower myself and one hell of an antenna, but most of the distance is water, so... it might could work!
no subject
Date: 2021-12-21 10:45 am (UTC)That gets me the altitude I need for an extraordinary-measures antenna.
I am not building that tower.
And I'm a little mad about it. xD
no subject
Date: 2021-12-20 02:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-21 10:46 am (UTC)While in grad school in Kentucky, I did late one night briefly pick up an FM radio station one night from Ontario. Clearly, too! Got enough announcement to know what it was, then part of a song, then it vanished.
I don't even know what it was bouncing off of. Maybe an airplane, maybe a satellite, I've no idea. to this day.