[BC] Commercial Station Feeding A Commercial Translator Question

[Mark Humphrey]

The cable headend in Alfred, NY (in the hills south of Rochester) has
remnants of an old half-parabolic they once used to receive Canadian
TV from Toronto.  Someone recently sent me pictures of the leaning
towers, still in place, that originally supported the reflecting
screen.  The CATV system in nearby Dansville, NY had a full parabolic
military surplus dish of maybe 16-20 foot diameter to receive Channel
11 from Hamilton, Ontario, but it was too small to be effective in
theVHF low band.

These semi-parabolics were also used south of the US-Mexican border in
places like Ensenada, to receive US stations from San Diego.

Mark


On 10/18/07, R A Meuser <rameuser at ieee.org> wrote:
>
> I looked after a cable operation where one of the head ends used a
> rhombic to receive channels 2 and 4 Buffalo over a distance of a few
> hundred miles At another there was a ground mounted semi parabolic 300
> feet across which also pulled in stations from over the horizon. Other
> similar systems were known to have parabolics up to 1000 feet. One site
> had a pair of 1000 footers, phased to suppress a somewhat local channel
> 3 while receiving chs 2 and 4. Those parabolics were really troposcatter
> systems. The could bring in stunning pictures, but when they faded, the
> fades were very deep slow fades.
>
> All these systems worked better in Winter than summer, skip being one of
> the reasons.  However UHF is the opposite, especially over large bodies
> of water. You could pull in stations that looked local all summer long
> only to have them disappear completely by late November or December.
>
>