TV UHF DX?

[kenrayc]

An indoor antenna may cost you 10db of signal on VHF. 20db on UHF. In other words, an
outside antenna is a must for watching digital TV.

Stations that once had snow with analog are now crystal clear. I live 50 miles south of Indianapolis and
65 miles north of Louisville. Both these cities come in perfectly. Dayton and Cincinnati come
in when we have tropo.

It's not as easy to DX with this digital setup. But, when you get a station, it comes in clear.

What is the DX record for digital television?

With a outdoor antenna I can get all local Fresno stations, and 110 MILES away from Bakersfield I can get KBAK CBS 29 and KBFX FOX 58 all of the time.
During TROPO conditions I've recieved KERO ABC 23 (DTV 10, the only VHF in Bakersfield) KGET NBC 17, KUVI MNT 45, and KABE UNI 39, and all of the subchannels.
Has anyone gone beyond 110 miles?

 

[w9wi]

What is the DX record for digital television?

Has anyone gone beyond 110 miles?

(hope I'm not mixing two people's posts...)

The best DX I've had actual audio and video on is WMAU-TV (RF 18) in southwestern Mississippi, at 405 miles. (I'm 30 miles northwest of Nashville) I landed KNOP-TV (RF 2) via unattended reception* last June. That's North Platte, Nebraska, 804 miles.

That's not the record by any means. I believe the tropospheric record is on the order of 800 miles. The WTFDA's VHF-UHF Digest for January 2009 contains a photo of KCIT (RF 15) Amarillo, as decoded in Macomb, Illinois. That's 700 miles via tropo. The October issue has a photo of KOTA (RF 2) Rapid City, SD as decoded in Lexington, Kentucky. (1,062 miles) There's also a photo of metadata-only reception of KIVV (RF 5) Lead, South Dakota in Lexington (1,095 miles) via meteor scatter. I think that may have been the first reported instance of DTV reception via meteor scatter -- something I think a year ago, many of us suspected was impossible.

http://www.wtfda.info

(Oh, I'm not at all convinced the 1,095 mile reception is a record. I'm quite confident the record doesn't yet exceed 1,500 miles, but yet may be the important qualifier.)

* If you have an Insignia converter box, and you go into the setup menus to manually tune a RF channel, and just leave the box there with "no signal", if a signal does come in, its "short channel name" (usually the station's call letters) will stay in the box indefinitely. As long as you don't turn it off or change channels! That's what I did -- left the box on RF channel 2 & went to work. Found the "KNOP-DT" call letters when I got home...

 

[dx1ng]

Early this morning, I set a personal record for UHF DTV DX reception: with WLAJ-53 from Lansing, MI, broadcasting on channel 51. They are 547 miles from my DX shack in Poughkeepsie, NY. This was a PSIP decode only (call letters decoded by converter box, but I was sleeping, and didn't actually see WLAJ.) My previous record was WCWG-20 Lexington, NC broadcasting on channel 19, at 518 miles. Amazingly, reception was pretty solid for 2 hours or more on a late evening in October, and of course being DTV it was like watching a local.

Also this morning, I received a PSIP decode on WKBD-50 (on channel 14) from Detroit, MI. This is about 486 miles.

As far as regular UHF reception, day in and day out, it would be most of the New York City stations at about 71 - 73 miles.