On Tue, 18 Mar 2008 10:54:25 -0700, "Paul Hovnanian P.E."
wrote:

Does your HOA forbid solar arrays? Some of them can be pretty anal
retentive. Mine won't let me put up my thermonuclear clothes dryer. :-(

No home owners association in my neighborhood. (However, I am the
self-appointed chair person and bill collector for the private road
committee). If we had an HOA, I would be the first to be lynched as I
have 2 dead cars in front of the house, a huge mess ready for
recycling, and an antenna farm on the roof.

However, I have friends that bought into the "planned community"
philosophy and are stuck with CC&R's from hell. Basically, anything
that can be seen from ground level is unacceptable. In the CC&R's
I've read, solar arrays are certainly not allowed, especially on the
roof.
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/ate/story?id=45648
I've found the local cities and county bureaucracy on behalf of
various homeowners. Batting average is about 50%.

Ghosts are a big problem where I live. Or multipath and the resulting
dropouts the case of DTV broadcasts. That's why I like highly
directional designs (both horizontally as well as vertically). Other
than that, I can get all of our local stations with rabbit ears and a
UHF loop.

I live too far away from the local digital TV xmitters to get reliable
reception. My rule of thumb is that if OTA analog TV reception is
marginal, digital TV will be worse.

Highly directional antennas are the right way to eliminate ghosts
(reflections). However, I keep running into problems with f/b (front
to back) ratio problems, where the ghosts are reflected from behind
the antenna. That's where the lower gain, but higher f/b ratio
antennas, such as a barbeque grill backed bowtie array, makes more
sense. My preference is to use single channel narrowband yagi's for
maximum gain, but that gets really ugly as one per channel is
required.

All of our DTV stations broadcast on UHF as the VHF band in the Seattle
area is pretty much filled up with the legacy analog stuff.

We have Channel's digital 10 (KSBW) and digital Channel 12 (KNTV)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KNTV
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KSBW
I once did a paper design for a trapped yagi, designed solely for
channels 8 and 11 (the analog channels) and no others. It probably
would work, but nobody was interested in buying one.

I'm not
certain what the stations plan on doing once the digital cut over is
complete.

All of them. The station owners would need to be insane not do do
digital. It's a free extra channel with the oportunity to sell
additional services (i.e. data broadcasting).

They might move their digital signal down onto their analog
slot or abandon the analog slot altogether. That will be a factor in
what kind of antenna I put up.

Duh... I never thought to ask the local broadcast engineers what the
channel lineup is going to be after the Feb 17, 2009 fire drill. I'll
ask.

Every day, I go on an extended exercise constitutional. One day, I
decided to count outdoor TV antennas in my mountain neighborhood. My
guess is that I passed about 100 houses and only saw three outdoor
antennas (which looked ancient and inoperative). I'm wondering if
anyone watches OTA TV in my area.

--
# Jeff Liebermann 150 Felker St #D Santa Cruz CA 95060
# 831-336-2558
# http://802.11junk.com
# http://www.LearnByDestroying.com AE6KS