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The HAAT of KSTW is 901'. The elevation of the land that the tower is on is around 400'. It would be a tall very obstruction indeed.
Here's another view of the facility:
Please help me identify signal glitch cause
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Here's another view of the facility:
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My search found a KSTW tower about two miles south of the LRF. I'll trust Rabbit Ears to have a better idea of where it is.
Back when I was paid to know about RF I had to deal with too much signal as well as not enough signal. I have used a paper clip to receive signal in a situation where the transmitter was too close and I needed that much attenuation. VHF at 25 miles? Sure you have line of site but you also have reflection from that ripply body of water the signal passes over. One might do better with a lower antenna. But the point is unless YOUR receive facility (home) is close to THEIR receive facility there could be sources of interference that affect their antenna and not yours. Hopefully nothing on the receive tower (frequencies are usually coordinated so new tenants do not interfere or get interference from other tenants).
It has been interesting to take a look at the LRFs. It appears DIRECTV has moved the one used in my market from the same tower site used by DISH to the AT&T building downtown. Probably a coincidence. Probably.
Back when I was paid to know about RF I had to deal with too much signal as well as not enough signal. I have used a paper clip to receive signal in a situation where the transmitter was too close and I needed that much attenuation. VHF at 25 miles? Sure you have line of site but you also have reflection from that ripply body of water the signal passes over. One might do better with a lower antenna. But the point is unless YOUR receive facility (home) is close to THEIR receive facility there could be sources of interference that affect their antenna and not yours. Hopefully nothing on the receive tower (frequencies are usually coordinated so new tenants do not interfere or get interference from other tenants).
It has been interesting to take a look at the LRFs. It appears DIRECTV has moved the one used in my market from the same tower site used by DISH to the AT&T building downtown. Probably a coincidence. Probably.
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The rabbitears signal search map result that I linked to clearly confirms that the distance from the LRF address that you offered to the tower is 25 ALM. Rabbitears also indicates that there are no translators. I'm less confident about the LRF location that you provided, but it certainly looks ideal on paper.
My information about KSTW's tower location came from rabbitears. The Google map was based on the rabbitears latitude and longitude data for the tower. If you click on the Technical Data link on the rabbitears link, you'll see (under NAD83 data) that the KSTW broadcast antenna location is "Capitol Hill, WA". Based on rabbitears and with the backing of official looking information from Wikipedia, I'm pretty sure about the Capitol Hill location of the tower.
While KSTW is licensed to Tacoma, the KSTW website says that the mailing address is the same site as the antenna. I'm guessing the tower in question is at the lower left.
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Calm down. I said I trusted RabbitEars.
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I was confused by your placement of the the Rabbit Ears support immediately following your comment about the two mile separation without any mention that your original research was likely misinformed. The comment about paperclip reception bolstered the idea that you hadn't left the proximity issue behind.Calm down. I said I trusted RabbitEars.
Given what we now believe to be the case, I'm thinking the problem has the best chance of being on the DIRECTV end (somewhere between their antenna and their downlink). Maybe the KSTW Engineer has more sway with DIRECTV and that's the best approach but I wonder.
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Seems like my original post has been hijacked, which is often the case here.
I heard back from the local NBC station engineer after I sent a second video of a rather long dropout during last night's Jimmy Fallon show. He acknowledged that he sees the dropout as well, and thinks it might have been a network issue, whatever that is.
I heard back from the local NBC station engineer after I sent a second video of a rather long dropout during last night's Jimmy Fallon show. He acknowledged that he sees the dropout as well, and thinks it might have been a network issue, whatever that is.
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The thread hasn't been hijacked, we're just trying to eliminate gremlins that don't exist.
Based on your new information, we can no longer ignore that the reception of the network feed by KSTW might be compromised. That's pretty extraordinary in my experience and doesn't mesh with earlier comments about OTA possibly being unscathed.
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I continue to record NBC programs on both the satellite feed and the OTA signal. Unfortunately, there has not been an occurrence in which there was a dropout on a program I was recording. I wasn't recording last night's Jimmy Fallon episode.
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I understand where you're at and appreciate the frustration.
I have lots of short glitches on my recordings of CW programming (mostly DC Comics stuff) so now that I think about it, The CW (as a network) may just be that rickety. I don't record them on my Plex system as I don't have enough OTA tuners but maybe I should be watching to see if there's a correlation. My TV receives both the DTV (SD subchannel of KATU) and NextGenTV (HD on their own channel) versions of The CW.
None of this explains the problems with KING but many of the same observations and diagnoses apply.
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Interesting update:
I am currently watching a recording of the NBC Evening News with Lester Holt from the DirecTV satellite feed. At the 12-minute mark, the video had a drop-out. I was simultaneously recording the program from my off-the-air antenna, and that recording showed a severe picture break-up at exactly the same spot. In other words, the problem is not limited to the DirecTV signal. I sent this new information to the station engineer for his comments.
I am currently watching a recording of the NBC Evening News with Lester Holt from the DirecTV satellite feed. At the 12-minute mark, the video had a drop-out. I was simultaneously recording the program from my off-the-air antenna, and that recording showed a severe picture break-up at exactly the same spot. In other words, the problem is not limited to the DirecTV signal. I sent this new information to the station engineer for his comments.
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Well done! It appears that you've substantially eliminated DIRECTV in both the KING and KSTW issues.
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I experienced the same picture dropout issue on Thursday with all four of the NBC programs that I recorded, the evening news, Blacklist, and both Law&Order shows. I was expecting that once the issue was reported, that some action would be taken to address the issue. I guess I will have to follow up.
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It isn't reasonable to assume that a fix is necessarily a simple matter of flipping a switch. Things are often complicated by the fact that station engineers often have to cover multiple stations.
They too have to pin down where the problem is before they can fix it.
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I've been reporting the issue with KSTW 11 for a couple of years now. It's still not fixed. Doesn't happen on my OTA Tivo recordings. Also doesn't happen with DirecTV Stream. Not sure if DirecTV Satellite and DirecTV Stream get their off-air channel feeds the same way. At any rate, it's either a very difficult issue to troubleshoot, or they just don't care.
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Are we talking about the same type of problem (I included a video showing the issue). I also confirmed that the issue was happening on the DTV feead as well as the OTA signal. Doesn't sound like what you have been experiencing.
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Good point. Your audio/video breakup is way worse than what I see on KSTW. What I see is a momentary (1-2 sec) video blank, followed a few seconds later by an audio dropout.
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I can't imagine that the LRF for DIRECTV Stream is different from that of DIRECTV DBS (though this might explain why the Stream LiL are most often a subset of the DBS LiL). It seems more likely that it is something in your setup that is causing these minor glitches. Maybe your satellite signal is being temporarily blocked (i.e. aircraft).
Doing parallel recordings of LiL and OTA on the HR44 would be a help in narrowing the scope of the problem. If both glitch at the same wall clock time (since AM21 should lead LiL by a few seconds), it may be pointing to a mass storage issue. If they both glitch at the same point in the program, that's perhaps an issue DIRECTV needs to work with the broadcaster on where the station is sending out a signal that DIRECTV can't handle.
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No, that would affect all of my satellite channels. This issue only happens on KSTW 11. And I have yet to see it on the Stream feed. Or my off-air antenna feed.
Not a big deal for me anymore. I've migrated to DirecTV Stream since trees in the forest behind my house have finally blocked my view of the 103ºW satellite. And I'm saving almost $100/mo with Stream vs. satellite.
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I received a call-back from the chief engineer for the local NBC station on Tuesday. He informed me that he had talked to DirecTV and that DTV had rebooted a piece of their equipment. He asked me to monitor the NBC broadcasts and report back to him if I were to see any more signal issues. Unfortunately, I had one issue on Wednesday evening, and three issues on Thursday evening. For the Thursday incidents, I verified that the picture dropouts occurred at the same time on the OTA broadcast, which I was also recording. Needless to say, whatever actions DTV took did not resolve the issue.
I still don't understand how the issue could be DTV's fault if it occurs on the OTA signal as well. Can anyone explain this?
I still don't understand how the issue could be DTV's fault if it occurs on the OTA signal as well. Can anyone explain this?
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