please help in pittsburgh

[jemroberts]

hello tigerbangs it is a honor to speak with you. I have learned a lot from you. I hope i did not make a mistake. I asked for advise elsewhere and on that advise i ordered a 91xg and a cm9521a rotor i have a radio shack cat# 15-2506 amplified splitter for my three digital tv's.my zip is 15101 Pa.and my longitutdeis 40.552820 and my latitude is -79.957264. my question is will a pre amp help me pick up wtae digital ? i get wtae analog kinda of snowy now. could i pickup abc from yongstown? also will the 91xg work for the vhs pbs station after the transtion. I live in a valley so I might never get wtae. Right now i have an old radio shack uhf/vfh outside antenna that works for all the local channels but 4 and 19 digital. the rotor does not work any more so when i replace the rotor i will replace the antenna and wiring and anything else at the same time. thank you for time.

[tigerbangs]

Boy, I guess that you ARE in a valley! I often forget how hilly Pittsburgh really is! Your transmitters are close, but are are weak because of the hills. After Feb 17, you are going to have 2 VHF digital stations, so I suggest that you go with an AntennasDirect XG-91 plue a Winegard YA-1713 VHF high-band yagi. As for a preamp: you will need one, but you get rid of the Radio Shack preamplifier, and get a Winegard HDP-269, which has high input capability, and low noise. The Radio Shack preamps are notoriously noisy, which makes digital reception worse. Try a Channel Master 9521 a rotator. When in digital, you should be able to get all of the Pittsburgs stations. I suggest that you mount the XG-91 above the YA-1713 by at least 4' and tilt the front-end of the XG-91 up by 20+ degrees to pick up the defracted signals from the top of the hills nearby.

http://www.wineard
http://www,channelmaster.com
http://www.antennasdirect.com

http://www.pctinternational.com/channel ... lation.pdf

[jemroberts]

thanks for the quick reply.I was hoping not to use two antennas but i will defer to your expertise. So will i need a uhf/vhf antenna combiner to join the two antennas? how will I connect the coax? thanks again

[tigerbangs]

Use a Pico-Macom UVSJ antenna joiner, which is cheap, and run it into the input of the HDP-269 preamplifier. I strongly uggest using the seperate antennas because WTAE is going to be very hard to get in your location, and you need the extra gain that the antenna will give you, as well as it's unique ability to tilt up to see the tops of hills...

http://winegard.com/offair/pdf/WC-809%20%20HDP-269.pdf

http://yhst-18278607509093.stores.yahoo ... -0389.html

[jemroberts]

thank you very much. it is making sense to me now

[tigerbangs]

If you go with this system, and install it properly, you WILL be rewarded...with good HDTV, for nothing more than the cost of the antenna. That's not a bad deal!