Does anybody want to buy an LPTV station?
For several months now, I have been taking care of an LPTV station in Syracuse and the owner is looking to sell. It is in a pretty good location; on a tall building downtown. It has a newer transmitter and antenna, EAS gear, located in a conditioned space, etc.
If you are interested, contact me for details: info (at) engineeringradio (dot) us
We recently put an LPTV on the air in Brookfield, Connecticut. WXGN-LD signed on on Friday, September 6th.
This is UHF station with a 15 KW ERP (the limit for LPTV). This station has an elliptically polarized antenna with 4.5 KW in the vertical polarization.
The transmitter is made by a Spanish company called TRedess
This has been installed in a former Sprint cell building. The wire ladders are left over from them. Still, it makes a convenient place for the mask filter, which is up and out of the way.
I also swept the antenna and filter.
This station is associated with these folks: XGN Network LLC
One of the many projects we are currently finishing up. Over-The-Air TV is making a comeback.
A few things about LPTV; These stations usually have an ERP of 15 KW or less, and they are a secondary service, like FM translators, which a full-power TV station can displace.
This is an ATT microwave site built in 1977 according to county records. This may have been one of those VHF Mobile Telephone sites which existed before cellular telephone systems. ATT owned it until 2022 when it was sold to a private business.
This station is on channel 31 or 575 MHz center frequency. UHF TV stations often use slot antennas, which have gobs of gain. Slot antennas are simple designs that have a broad bandwidth and until recently were mostly horizontally polarized. This particular antenna is elliptically polarized which is becoming more common as TV providers are looking at mobile video applications.
Slot antennas are the inverse of a dipole antenna. A dipole is two conductive poles approximately 1/2 wavelength surrounded by free space whereas a slot antenna is 1/2 wavelength of free space surrounded by a conductive plane. The width of the slot determines the bandwidth of the antenna. Radiation from a dipole is in the plane of the two poles versus the radiation from a slot that is perpendicular to the slot. At UHF frequencies, many slots are placed on the radiating plane, giving large gain figures.
All TV transmitters require a bandpass or mask filter. This is to keep out-of-band emissions out of the tightly packed TV spectrum.
These filters need to attenuate the upper and lower shoulders of the digital carrier by 46dB +/- 3.25 MHz from the center frequency.
These are fairly straightforward filters, this one has six cavities with plungers that slide in and out to adjust the tuning. I watched one of these get retuned in the field, it takes quite a bit of time and patience to complete and requires a two-port network analyzer.
With the TPO of 400 watts, the ERP is 4.7 KW horizontal and 2.35 KW vertical.
So, why bother with all of this? Indeed that is a good question. As cable companies continue to raise their rates (the average cable TV bill is $250 or so) people are looking for alternatives. Cord cutting is a thing and OTA (over-the-air) TV as well as OTT (over-the-top or direct streaming) are popular alternatives.
This station will run France 24 English service and NASA TV to start. Other things you can find on Low Power TV stations; Heartland (mostly country music with some cooking shows mixed in), Retro (old movies), Rewind TV (Old TV shows), Buzzr (old game shows), Court TV, Weather Nation, News Net, etc. More information on OTA TV networks can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_over-the-air_television_networks
Rabbit Ears has a good signal search page if you are interested in OTA TV: https://www.rabbitears.info/searchmap.php
More information on Low Power TV (or Local Power TV) and be found here: https://www.lptvba.org/
For a sometimes interesting discussion on cord cutting in general, try this: https://old.reddit.com/r/cordcutters/
GatesAir contracted me to go to Utica, NY, and do some repair work. WKTV has a ULXTE-50 UHF transmitter which burned out an RF elbow between the UHF combiner in cabinet 1 and the UHF low pass filter for cabinet 1.
There was a bunch of burned debris in the bottom; little bits of melted metal and plastic.
We first vacuumed out as much stuff as we could get. Then used an air compressor to blow the rest out and wiped everything down with clean rags and Windex.
Once that was done, the unit was reassembled and reinstalled in the transmitter. A new elbow, UHF low pass filter, and direction coupler were installed and the transmitter powered back up.
The transmitter site is actually located north and slightly west of Little Falls, NY. The station has been on the air since 1949 and the original GE transmitter is still in the garage. It was difficult to squeeze in and get a look at the transmitter, however, the operator’s console was out in the open:
In most places, this would have been thrown out years ago. Now, it is a museum piece. Lots of interesting history in the Wikipedia article, too.
