# Dropouts Channel 27 Madison, WI



## wingnut1 (Nov 10, 2005)

I have a rooftop antenna for OTA. The two towers that my stations come off of are 45 degrees apart so I aim right between them and they are about 10 and 15 miles away. I get around 90% or above on all the stations. The last few days I've been having trouble with channel 27 ABC in Madison WI. The meter says that I'm at 90%, but I'm getting terrible blocking and pixelating and sometimes the top and bottom half of the picture don't match up. Any ideas what is causing this and what I can do. By the way it is happening on both my 622 receivers on worse than the other.


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## Bill R (Dec 20, 2002)

You are most likely having multipath problems. One solution that would cure your problem is to put up antennas for both stations and use a signal combiner to route them to your 622. Another solution that may work for you is to put up an antenna with higher gain but is less directional. http://www.antennaweb.org is a good place to start to see what type of antenna you need.


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## wingnut1 (Nov 10, 2005)

Thanks for the reply Bill R. I chose the antenna using antenna web although it said that one of the channels was located in another city and not on the two candelabras. I moved about two years ago and is now on the two towers that I'm splitting. One of my stations is in the VHF band and the others are in the UHF band.


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## Bill R (Dec 20, 2002)

wingnut1 said:


> One of my stations is in the VHF band and the others are in the UHF band.


I would aim the existing antenna towards the UHF stations and buy a VHF antenna and a combiner. You can buy antennas cut to one channel. Before you do that you will want to check with the station and see what channel they are going to be using once analog shuts down. Two of our local digital stations are moving once analog goes away.


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## Badger (Jan 31, 2006)

wingnut1 said:


> I have a rooftop antenna for OTA. The two towers that my stations come off of are 45 degrees apart so I aim right between them and they are about 10 and 15 miles away. I get around 90% or above on all the stations. The last few days I've been having trouble with channel 27 ABC in Madison WI. The meter says that I'm at 90%, but I'm getting terrible blocking and pixelating and sometimes the top and bottom half of the picture don't match up. Any ideas what is causing this and what I can do. By the way it is happening on both my 622 receivers on worse than the other.


Wingnut1,, I'm 56 miles from the Madison towers and get 100% hd from all but Fox which is high 80's to low 90"s. I tried to watch the little league world series on Saturday and 27 was just as you described. I think either ABC national or 27 or maybe both were having problems. 27-1 would have side blackbars then have the "HD" logo with side blackbars then full 16x9 and the worst pixilation and macro blocking I've ever seen. Sometimes the whole top half of the screen would be a different color and the bottom would be pixilated. Same when they showed replays on Sunday during the rain delay.I haven't tried anything on 27 HD since so I don't know if their still screwed up. By the way I didn't check signal strength while the problem was happening. I don't think I would change anything right away as I think the problem was ABC/27 not our OTA setups.


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## wingnut1 (Nov 10, 2005)

I called 27 on Monday and they called me back last night. They said the problem was on their side, it was fixed and I shouldn't have any more problems. I watched GMA this morning and everything looked fine.


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