DTV Utah Scheduled Outage

[kenglish]

The eight member-stations of DTV Utah will be off the air for scheduled maintenance from midnight Saturday night, until approximately 6:00 AM on Sunday morning,

This is a scheduled replacement of waveguide transition components, where the output of the RF Combiner begins to fed the line to the common transmit antenna.
It will affect all eight full-power stations,,...,KUTV (CBS), KTVX (ABC), KSL (NBC), KUED (PBS), KUEN (Edu), KBYU (PBS), KJZZ (Indep), and KUCW (CW). Since most of these stations are fed to satellite (DISH Network and DirecTV) via the OTA feeds, they will also be interrupted during that time period.

Direct feeds to Comcast will remain available, from stations that use a fiber-optic link to their headend.

[CAwasinNJ]

Thanks for the info Ken. KSL-TV has an aux on a different tower, I think. Has using it been discussed for situations like this, or is it just not worth the bother?

[kenglish]

IIRC, the problem is that there is only one combiner, and this is where the signal leaves it, prior to the switches.

[CAwasinNJ]

According to the FCC database, the aux is a completely different tower which would be a completely different transmission system. That is, completely independent of the main system. There could be exposure issues though. I guess we'll find out.

Too bad I'll miss the return of 666 Park Ave on KTVX.

[kenglish]

I was thinking of something else when I wrote that....there really is a separate combiner. They just needed to have the whole RF system quiet for the testing. I was told that they came back on and off a couple of times (probably at low power) during that time.

They had to do retuning of the "match" between the rectangular waveguide and coaxial lines.
Wish I had a photo to post.
Here's a video, though: www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDUw3KsOiGU

[egnlsn]

Jun 22, 2013 23:12:11 GMT -6 CAwasinNJ said:

Too bad I'll miss the return of 666 Park Ave on KTVX.

It was a sad (sort of) day when it was cancelled. Rather enjoyed it. Too bad the episodes run this summer are just un-aired episodes, and don't signal a return of the series.

[CAwasinNJ]

Jun 23, 2013 22:28:17 GMT -6 egnlsn said:

It was a sad (sort of) day when it was cancelled. Rather enjoyed it. Too bad the episodes run this summer are just un-aired episodes, and don't signal a return of the series.

Given the ratings, there was no chance. But it was already up on Hulu very early Sunday morning, so I watched it there.

Don't worry KTVX. I'll watch the air version next week.