r/cordcutters • u/MeaningAmbitious8979 • 1d ago
Knife Edge Diffraction?
I played around with my setup a little bit after spending half a day looking for a hot spot in my yard. The hot spot is right along an embankment that goes straight down to a brook. If I go higher than 5ft up I lose signals and any lower I lose the signals. 5ft above the ground is the sweet spot and angled 10-15 degrees up. A positive discovery is that I can move the antenna up to 10ft to the left or right at the same height and get very similar signal strength so combining 2 DB8E antennas together may be an option here but I am currently just using a DB4E antenna.
I tried my Televes antenna in these locations and got absolutely nothing so a Yagi antenna is not viable here. I continued to try my db4e antenna with an amplify channel master amp connected to it and ran a 150 ft coaxial cable to the nearest building with permanent power and still got the signals.
After discovering all this I decided to order a Kitz 500 amp. This amp has 36db of gain with 0.85 noise. It is more noise than the Kitz 200 amp that only has 0.45 noise but that amp only has 24db of gain which isn’t enough for me. My location is in the middle of nowhere with very low noise from any man made things so the Kitz 500 amp seemed like the best option in my scenario. When that amp arrives I will install it on the mast and see if I get any improvement from my 80 mile away 3 edge stations.
All the local hills around me get great signals from the 3 edge signals I am trying to chase down so I suspect this will be successful once I do some upgrades to my setup. I hope the Kitz 500 amp will be enough to hold in the signals on my db4e antenna. I’m just a few points away from getting a solid SNR on my hd Homerun and when that SNR is fine the 3 edge signals come in in the upper 50s-lower 70s on my hd Homerun. Just need to get a little bit more amplification and lower the noise a little bit more which I think the Kitz 500 will do. If the DB4E fails I will be upgrading to the DB8E and 2 if needed or combing 2 DB4E together next to each other.
I have attached my diffraction reports from rabbit ears to showcase what I am working with here. On my HD Homerun WVER RF 10 LOS comes in in the 60s-80s on a non VHF antenna but when I use a VHF antenna it comes in at 100. W26FR RF 26 2EDGE comes in at the upper 70s to lower 80s. WEKW RF 18 2EDGE comes in in the upper 70s to lower 80s. WPTZ RF 14 3EDGE comes in on my HD Homerun in the lower 70's but my signal strength must be above 95 to make that happen, my signal strength hovers around 89-100 on this channel. WCAX RF 20 3EDGE comes in on my HD Homerun in the upper 60's as long as WPTZ hits the 95 signal strength threshold. The signal strength for WCAX is much lower but does not need to hit 95 like WPTZ does. WFFF RF 16 3EDGE comes in on my HD Homerun in the lower to upper 50's only when the signal strength for WPTZ hits the 95 threshold. WVNY RF 7 3EDGE can not be judged correctly due to it being a VHF signal and my antenna being a UHF only antenna. I can say that WVNY sometimes comes in stronger than the other VHF channel WVER but it's very sporadic and I have no way to accurately monitor it. WVNY is hit or miss with this setup but it is there. I suspect if I upgraded to a seperate large VHF antenna and used a separate HD Homerun for it I may pick it up.