Director's Cut Blog with Frank Macek

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...

Ever wonder how our television pictures gets from the WKYC Digital Broadcast Center's control room to your tv set? The whole process starts with our over the air signal for those of you without cable or satellite (those services are fed directly via fiber links to the individual companies). We asked WKYC Transmitter Engineer Dave Kushman to give us a tour of the transmitter facility in Parma & explain how it all works. Be sure to check out Dave's website: www.k8dav.com THE PROCESS: The program video and audio from the studio come to the transmitter site in two formats, analog and digital. The analog video can only carry a limited amount of information. I'm sure you have noticed the lines across the screen. There are 525 of them. At the top of the screen, hidden from view, is an area that contains, closed captioning information, an occasional test signal and precise time information. Each on its own line. The audio has its own processing and path to the aural transm...