Tuesday, August 06, 2019

Had us over the air, then lost us? There's a reason

By Frank Macek

We have gotten many phone calls and emails from those of you who live in our outlying areas of northeast Ohio wondering why you've suddenly lost WKYC using their over the air antenna. This coming after we asked you to rescan your television sets last Friday.

WKYC Technical Engineers Randy Betke & Chris Rieithmiller firing up the
new transmitter in Parma on August 2nd, 2019
The good news is this is temporary.

On August 2nd, WKYC made the transition to a new digital channel with a brand new transmitter as part of an FCC mandate following a spectrum auction that allowed television stations to give up their channels or move to new ones.

As of Friday, the now "virtual" Channel 3 moved from digital channel 17 to digital channel 19 and this is when you would have likely lost us if you use an over the air antenna and live in an outlying area away from Cleveland.

During this transition phase, we are using a side mount antenna on the main tower, but lower to the ground and with less power. This keeps our signal from going as far as if it were on the top of the tower.

After the August 2nd transition occurred, we began work on the top mounted antenna. Once that work is finished, we'll be able to return to our main antenna and you'll once again be able to receive us in our fringe signal areas.

Keep an eye on wkyc.com or the Director's Cut Blog and we'll let know when we are ready to go at which time you'll need to again rescan your over the air television sets to get the new WKYC digital signal.

If you have any questions, feel free to email me at fmacek@wkyc.com

NOTE: A point of clarification was made to the original article regarding the location of the antennas.