Huntington-Charleston Locals Off Last Night...

[paulman182]

I was up at about 1:30AM, doing my usual check of 103b signal and looking for new HD, when I discovered all the locals from my Huntington-Charleston WV DMA showed the slide saying D* was aware of the channels being off, and they would be back on as soon as possible.

Some of these towers are separated by fifty or more miles and it is unlikely the were really off the air all at once. D* must have been doing something. Does anyone know what?

[SamC]

There really is not any one place all of the H-C signals can all be picked up by OTA means.

The signals are all picked up at WSAZ's studio in Huntington. It is the responsibility of each station to get a signal to that location. Huntington's WSAZ (NBC) , WOWK (CBS), and WPBY (WV PBS) are easy. Charleston's (towers actually located in suburban Putnam County) WVAH (Fox) ,and WCHS (ABC) could be picked up with a plain old yagi antenna on the roof, but the stations choose to pay for a land line to keep signal quality up. Portsmouth's WQCW (CW) takes a feed off of its Huntington LP repeater. Ashland's WKAS (KY PBS) and Athens' WOUB (OH PBS) are compressed signals sent over the internet. You will note that WOUB experiences quite a few drop-outs, which are a result of the low bandwidth nature of the signal.

When all of the signals are received, DirecTV then sends them via landline to a regional uplink center. The outages are generally just somebody needing to hit the reset button at WSAZ or just a plain old power outage in downtown. WSAZ runs on automation from the end of the 11 PM news until the start of the 5 AM news, so there is nobody there to fix the problem.

[paulman182]

There really is not any one place all of the H-C signals can all be picked up by OTA means.
The signals are all picked up at WSAZ's studio in Huntington. It is the responsibility of each station to get a signal to that location. Huntington's WSAZ (NBC) , WOWK (CBS), and WPBY (WV PBS) are easy. Charleston's (towers actually located in suburban Putnam County) WVAH (Fox) ,and WCHS (ABC) could be picked up with a plain old yagi antenna on the roof, but the stations choose to pay for a land line to keep signal quality up. Portsmouth's WQCW (CW) takes a feed off of its Huntington LP repeater. Ashland's WKAS (KY PBS) and Athens' WOUB (OH PBS) are compressed signals sent over the internet. You will note that WOUB experiences quite a few drop-outs, which are a result of the low bandwidth nature of the signal.
When all of the signals are received, DirecTV then sends them via landline to a regional uplink center. The outages are generally just somebody needing to hit the reset button at WSAZ or just a plain old power outage in downtown. WSAZ runs on automation from the end of the 11 PM news until the start of the 5 AM news, so there is nobody there to fix the problem.

Thanks for the info, Sam. I got up at 4 to go to work and they were all back on by then.

I thought that the fact that D* knew they were down and put up the slide, might have meant something.