The Tampa television market can be a challenging location to pick up off air television. For many years both Winegard and Channelmaster had made "Tampa Bay Special" versions of off air antennas, but as off air reception has dropped due to cable and satellite, finding these antennas new is becoming difficult. The problem in our area is that the lion share of broadcasters in the market broadcast out of Riverview in Hillsborough county, with the exception being WTSP Channel 10, which broadcasts in Southwest Pasco county in Holiday. I've had many ask how I am successfully watching off air perfectly glitch free while living so far from the Riverview tower farm, so I decided to put it here. Click on Contact Us at the bottom of the menu with any specific questions.

A fellow broadcaster I have known for years told me when I first started working in broadcasting "It is all about the antenna". Indeed, today, this could not be truer. With some broadcasters in our market running circular polarization, some with horizontal and a small percentage of vertical polarization, and one having gone back to horizontal only polarization, it can indeed be a mess picking up these stations from a distance given 8VSB's multipath performance. As a ham radio operator, I already have a 50ft tower at my home (no deed restrictions here). On my tower, at 35ft, you'll see on the top of the above image a Blonder Tongue Model BTY-LP-HB High Band VHF Antenna designed for channels 7-13. The next antenna down is a Blonder Tongue model BTY-UHF-BB UHF Broadband Antenna for channels 14-69. Finally the bottom antenna is a Wade Antenna model 5Y10 Channel 10 5 element yagi which sadly they discontinued shortly after I puchased this one. I do indeed have some pattern distortion from how the VHF antenna is mounted to the tower, but it is not enough to radically affect performance. I am trying to keep lateral wind loading on the tower structure down as much as possible with how I mounted it, so it's a compromise.

Here's where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. Having these antennas all on the same tower is great, but putting them all on the same coax run is where the fun begins. A few years ago I had a FM translator that had a very unique reception issue and in the process of looking for a filter for this site, I found a company called Tin Lee up in Canada. What a find! They produce some of the nicest filters and components I have worked with for applications such as this. What you see in this photo is their Single Channel insertion combiner on the left and their ultra-low noise PHEMT preamp on the right. The Antenna Signal Injector model AC-7 takes a broadband antenna (vhf 7-13 in my case), and combines a single channel antenna (10 in my case) with a set of bandpass filters internally to a single output. My unit came in with 35dB of port to port isolation, which was more than enough to work right. Winegard makes a product called the Jointenna, which essentially does the same thing, but only has 15-20dB of isolation, and is in a plastic unshielded box, which was not what I was looking for on this setup. The MA-25-UV77A preamp is the low noise preamp, but I had them make it custom with a very tight model UV7 VHF and UHF diplexer built into it. I wanted the VHF side to only pass 170-222mhz, and the UHF side to only pass 470-700mhz. I transmit on HF, 2 meter and 70cm amateur frequencies on this tower and this diplexer's filter design blocks out my ham transmissions 95+%. Additionally, the channel 10 antenna has a 12dB attenuator on it, as I am only 7 miles from their transmitter, putting WTSP near the same signal level as everyone else as seen on my Anritsu Spectrum Master analyser. All coax is Times Microwave LMR400-75. It is a very low loss RG-11 sized coax with slightly better specs than standard RG-11 and is about 3/8" in diameter. The coax is grounded here at the preamp, at the bottom of the tower, and as it enters my home.

Inside, on my master ground bar where all my ham radio coax runs terminate, I have a Polyphaser MDS+24-F-F protector (bolted to the copper bar). This protector passes DC on the coax for powering the preamp. It's labeled as DC to 2.5ghz, and tests as such, but their website shows it as being 300mhz to 2.5ghz, not sure what's up with that. At any rate, this protector is then connected to the DC injector for the Preamp (the gold box). Coming out of the injector, I go into a 4 way splitter, where it then feeds the 4 8VSB off air tuners I watch TV on. These tuners are called HD Homerun's (available online). Each box has 2 tuners in it, and it takes the MPEG2 data from the station in question and dumps it to Ethernet. So with 4 tuners, if I am recording 4 channels at the same time, it can occupy nearly 80MB/sec of data on my network to the home theater PC. These tuners work with a ton of different DVR software, I specifically use Windows Vista Media Center as my DVR software of choice. The video card I use has HDMI output, so I watch TV, literally, on a PC, in high definition with 5.1 Dolby Surround. The one nice thing about these tuners as you can put them closer to the antenna, and carry the data over CAT5 to the destination, meaning less concerns of coax losses to all your TV locations. You can also watch TV live on a laptop with WiFi with these tuners too! TV station engineers can also use a special version of the HD Homerun's TECH version with diagnostics, troubleshooting, and site wide multicasting of the station over the network.

Signal strength and quality as you can imagine in a setup such as this are very good. The HD Homeruns configuration software report all Tampa DMA stations as 97 to 100% signal strength, and the even more important number, the signal quality at 94 to 100%. It's easy to forget I am located 45 miles from the transmitters in Riverview, but even with 100ft pine trees all around my property, this setup just works as it needs to. A setup such as this is not for the faint of heart as everything in this installation is commercial quality gear; there are no consumer brands anywhere in this setup. Some ask me why I went to the trouble of doing this, given I have Satellite with HD now. The answer is that I want the highest quality picture I can get. A picture that is not "HDTV Lite" as has been described by some locally with our cable provider from their compression rate. A picture that requires zero concern of rain fades from a bad thunderstorm. Add to that with 4 tuners, I never run out of the ability to record my favorite network shows, no matter how many are on at the same time. Finally, there is something to be said for watching TV off air. Add to that I'm an Amateur Radio operator and a broadcast engineer, and it's easy to see why I chose to setup a system such as this. Again, if you have questions regarding this setup, just click on contact us on the left and I'll get back to you.

Regards, Dave Anderson (KG4YZY) 07/22/09