Social Feed

I'm trying to gather some information now in preparation for the shutoff of analog stations in February. As background, last year some incompetent tree trimmers managed to destroy our TV antenna, as well as a portion of our roof. Since we had to have the antenna replaced anyway we decided to kick in some bucks and erect a taller tower and get the best deep-fringe antenna that the installer offered (can't remember the model number offhand but I think it is a deep-fringe Winegard model). All of our local stations except one are about 30 to 70 miles away and pretty much in the same direction. The exception is about 20 miles away and puts in a fairly strong signal (so much so that we get clear reception even though the transmitter is at a side angle to the antenna!). This spring we added a Winegard HDP-269 booster, which was the most we dared add given that one relatively close station, plus a low-power repeater that is only a few miles away. The booster did improve reception on all channels.

Two of the weakest stations, which we have been unable to get totally reliably despite our best efforts, are the NBC and CBS affiliates on channels 8 (digital 7) and 3 (digital 2, but will be moving to digital 8 after February. This last one is significant, as you will see). On both of those we can just about count on losing the digital signal for a few seconds a few times during a half hour program. Often when it happens you can hear a plane passing overhead.

There is another CBS affiliate that (according to TVFool) will actually be putting a stronger digital signal into our area after the February transition, when it moves to its current analog channel which is 9. But it is in almost the opposite direction from the other channels (think of it this way, the others are at about the 5 o'clock position from us, this one's at 1 o'clock). I'm wondering if I could put up a separate antenna for that one channel and combine it with the signals from the other channels, without it costing an arm and a leg. Were it not for the fact that the OTHER CBS affiliate is moving to Channel 8, this would be easy - use a single channel Channel Master Join-Tenna to insert the single channel. But there is this note about those:

I even wondered if there is a way to feed the second antenna into something that would convert one channel to another (in other words, convert Channel 9 down to something like channel 6 before feeding it into the system). If you did that BEFORE inserting it onto the feed from the other antenna, it would eliminate all the other potential issues (such as multipath, etc.). But the only piece of equipment I could find that would do that (Pico Macom's DSP806) has such prohibitive cost that you'd have to be a cable operator to afford it, or at least a lot better off than I am.

I should mention that we are feeding two buildings (about 300 feet apart) and at least four TV's from this one tower, so using a separate feed and a switch at each TV is a non-starter for me - I'd do without CBS before I'd resort to that. But I'm wondering if anyone might know of a way to do this that I'm overlooking. For example, something like a Join-Tenna that has a sharper notch, so it doesn't degrade adjacent channels, or maybe a consumer-grade version of the Pico Macom unit (and if none exists, there is something that could be very useful if someone could come up with a consumer-grade unit in the $100 range-all it needs to do is convert one channel from an antenna to another without degrading signal quality, and allow that channel to be inserted into an existing feed. So it would need two inputs, one for the antenna and one or the "feed", be that another antenna or a cable feed or whatever, and then a combined output).

With all the posts I read in various forums about the problem of combining signals from multiple antennas without introducing multipath, or having one antenna cancel out the other, I'm really surprised there isn't a better selection of consumer-grade equipment to handle this. And then there are the folks who want to insert one "local" channel (be it an over-the-air channel or something from an in-home application such as a security camera) into a cable feed into their home, and I am just really surprised that Channel Master or Winegard or some similar company hasn't seen any need to create a unit that meets that need. If you don't need the reliability of a cable headend then I would THINK it should be possible to create such a unit that would sell for $100 or less. You can buy consumer grade Free-To-Air satellite receivers for $150 or less these days, and I have to think that the circuitry in those is far more complicated than the circuitry needed to upshift or downshift one TV channel in frequency. In fact, I'd bet the circuitry in a $50-$60 DTV converter box is more complicated than what would be required for this application. Any thoughts?

One other question: Assuming the other issues can be resolved, anyone know of a relatively inexpensive source for single channel antennas (preferably one cut for channel 9)?