Cable or sat over ota?

[Van]

Im not sure where to post this but here goes.

2 years ago I was in the st cloud area of minnesota doing install work for a sister office about to open. I had a job up in fargus falls area outside of town, the home sat on 40 acres in the middle of a nice size stand of medium growth pines. The new customer had a 35 ft tower with a huge antenna on it, rg - 6 was used and he had a 15 ampr on the line. While I was checking out the routing of his existing coax line behind the living room tv I heard the weather channels signature weather on the 8's tune pop up. I looked at the screen and sure enough there it was, I asked him if he had cable and he said no that he was to far outside of town to get cable but that he was getting other cable channels on his tv. I ran through the stations and came across, usa, a & e, cartoon network, bravo, and a few others all coming off of his antenna. Is anyone here up in that area of minnesota or just outside of Fargo that knows anything about this? Im asuming that either there is a small provider up north there thats pumping out cable channels over the air or someones doing something not so legit somehow.

 

[raymo721]

Sounds to me that someone is rebroadcasting the cable or sat sig, which I'm guessing is not to legit. You are pretty far north, but I can't think of any atmospheric anomoly that would cause anything like this, and being a former COMINT specialist, I've seen some weird sh*t in my time.--Ray

 

[Van]

It was odd, came across just like a normal ota signal and some were fuzzy, said that he had had them for years.

 

[hdtvtechno]

Isn't that the USDigital Service, or whatever its called ?

 

[Van]

Honestly I have no idea, I was only in the region for 2 weeks helping out a sister dns office for dish to open up a second office and to handle the excess that was taken away from a subcontractor who's services they terminated.

 

[darvocet]

I've heard about this type of thing a couple times before from friends. It always seemed to be either in or very close to a good size city (Louisville and Chicago for example).
They too, had no ideals about where this was comming from. The only thought I have is maybe something to do with wireless cable??? Although the folks getting the channels claimed they had no such service.

 

[Shawn95GT]

I thought I read someplace that this could happen if analog cable was injected into a line with an OTA antenna connected.

Maybe they got cable, they never took the OTA antenna down, and just have a splitter connecting everything together. They could be un-intentionally broadcasting out their OTA antenna... and you friend just so happens to be both in the path of the signal and close enough to pick it up.

I think I need to test this theory

 

[TuxCoder]

Isn't that the USDigital Service, or whatever its called ?

No... since by definition (and by name) that is a digital service.

This was being received in analog (keyword "fuzzy").

 

[Lorenzo]

I think Shawn is on the right track. If there's lots of channels up into the 40's and 50's including worthless shopping channels and tv guide channels it could be a franchised cable system. If there's only a few channels and mostly major ones it's more likely to be a nearby SMATV system at a hotel, hospital, rest home etc. Turning the receiving antenna would be a major clue to which direction it's coming from.

 

[mudder1310]

It makes me wonder how what they'd be using to boost their signal and why so much. Any analog output can be broadcast, but to actually send it any distance takes some power.

 

[Van]

Fargus falls is a tiny town, nearest large town would have been fargo nd wich was about an hour away. This is a very rural area and when I was there I found out that the cable in the village was analog and only within village limits. The customer lived about 15 miles outside of the village with no cable service available, the only thing I was able to come up with was wireless cable such as what bell south used at one time but that required a specific antenna shaped like a diamond. If someone was pumping an analog cable signal into an ota how much amping would it require to output it to say a 15 mile radius, would the average ota unit be adequate for such an undertaking?