Between two cities

[Shagphil]

I live 45 miles from Wilmington NC and 51 miles from Greenville NC. I am almost at mid-point on a direct line between the two. If I point my antenna toward Wilmington, I get those channels great but two of the channels from Greenville fade in and out. If I do the reverse, then the Wilmington channels fade. Is there any way I can put up two antennas pointed in opposite directions and get channels from both sources? The channels #s are different for each city; ie Wilmington is 3,6,10,&20 whereas Greenville is 7,9,12,&14. These are all totally digital now.
Thanks,
shagphil

 

[dodge]

yes you can put up two antennas and you should use a combiner like this one

Winegard Direct.com - Winegard CC 7870 2-Way TV Antenna Joiner Coupler (CC7870) | Winegard [CC-7870] CC 7870 CC-7870 CC7870 CC-7870

just make sure the lengths of the two coaxes from both antennas are the same length that will help in phasing.

 

[JB Antennaman]

The real answer is NO.

Without a real street level address, there is no real way for me to advise you as to which antenna set up you need. But, because some people do not understand virtual channels vs. real channels, the digital mapping of channels might not be the same as the virtual channel numbers that you just described.

UHF suffers from many anomalies such as co channel interference and multipath.

Multipath is where your signal bounces off a nearby object and the signal reaches the tuner in your television multiple times with the same data. In the old days of analog, you would have some ghosting and some static and snow. But with digital, it would be like taking your favorite CD and dropping it in some gumbo mud and then rubbing that mud into the plastic of the CD. Then washing off all the dirt and drying the CD with a clean rag and trying to play that CD in your CD player.

The information on the CD would become corrupt and corrupt information is worse then no information at all.

If you send me your address, I will advise you which antenna / antenna's you need to receive your stations properly and which pre amplifier you will need to compensate for long runs of wire. Depending on where you mount your antenna's and how many ways you split the signals.

 

[Jim5506]

We have an approximate location, so we can get started.

It looks like you have the following:
Toward Greenville
ABC - 12.1 on channel 12
CBS - 10.1 on channel 9
FOX - 14.1 on channel 47
NBC - 7.1 on channel 32

Toward Wilmington
ABC - 3.1 on channel 46
CBS - ??
FOX - 26.1 on channel 30
NBC - 6.1 on channel 44
I do not see channels 10 and 20 virtual or real toward Wilmington.

I'd get a Winegard 7694 and a rotator or a 7694 toward Greenville and a PR-8800 or other 4 or 8 bay bow tie type UHF antenna toward Wilmington and run seperate cables to your tvs with a/b switches since several of the channels are adjacent frequencies direct combining might cause problems.

It might be interesting to use one of those joiner couplers with two 7694 here to see what happens, they're less than $25.

 

[JB Antennaman]

The problem still is that with UHF, the antenna needs to be pointed in the right direction and using two antenna's would increase the likelyhood of multipath due to the fact that the one antenna would be looking forward, while the other antenna would be looking back. You would need about 8 feet of spacing between the two identical antenna's for the one to reject the image off the other one.

If the antennas were different, such as a XG 91 and a VHF antenna, then the spacing would only have to be about 4 feet. One option that would work would be for the one antenna to be on the one end of the house and mounted 10 feet above the roof and the other antenna to be at the other end of the house and mounted 10 feet above the roof, but then you would have your own little antenna farm and the cost of the two antenna's and the mounts and the wires and the AB switches would be cost prohibitive. It's easier to just mount one really good antenna and use a antenna rotor to turn the antenna then to combine several antenna's pointed in different directions and expect them to work as good as the one really good antenna due to the fact that as the signals gets dragged around by weather, they may or may not always come in - as the weather changes - because unless they were a line of sight signal, the signals might move around as much as 30* from one day to the next and with a UHF signal, 30* might or might not make or break the signal.