Michael & Liz are Bloggable

We mentioned over the Summer that we got rid of DirecTV and installed an antenna on the roof and digital converter boxes in 2 places in the house. Lately we have been having trouble with the signal being blippy or choppy. It doesn't happen a lot but enough that it's annoying. Today I worked from home and had the Country Music Network on for a while to listen to music and after a while I just had to turn it off because the choppiness was OBNOXIOUS.

One thing we have given absolutely no care for is the direction we aim our antenna. Right now it's pointed due West because I figured if there are any channels we don't get, it's the ones coming in from Greensboro. But even the closer channels with a tower located 25 miles Southeast of here are choppy, so I think it's about time to run an experiment.

The experiment is to write down our current signal strengths, change the antenna to point directly to our local station's tower, and then check the signal strengths again.

This post may not appear to be interesting to other people, but it's something I've wanted to do for a while now. I may be ignorant about antennas and these channels are coming from the exact same transmitter and a signal for one is the same signal for them all, but it seems like some channels are always better than others.

So I just watched the signal strength for a 30 second period to see what the range was, then went out and changed the antenna from aiming West to aiming Southeast, and then checked the signal strengths after. I only checked the important channels because we really only watch those.

Here are the results:

Station	Before	After
CBS 5	81 - 90	93 - 96
ABC 11	83 - 85	93 - 95
NBC 17	78 - 85	96 - 98
CW 22-01	73 - 85	95 - 96
Country Music 22-02	76 - 88	93 - 95
Fox 50	81 - 88	93 - 95

So I would say this experiment was a huge success. I didn't think that'd make that big of a difference, but clearly it does! I can already tell the picture is smoother and after about a half hour of having the TV on, there hasn't been any evidence of choppiness. Only time will tell though.