So we don't have cable television, we stream or watch local TV over the air. We get 64(!) air channels, counting those we block for evil content. (Fundamentalists and 24-hour shopping get the boot.)
But there are some channels we REALLY want, like NHK World via KBTC-2 in Tacoma.
We're in a terrible location for over-the-air for a lot of reasons, some of which are very specific to our building, some of which aren't. We shouldn't be, according to most maps, but we are. For reasons.
So after fiddling around with various little indoor antennas, I finally put a good antenna in the attic, mostly UHF, and then added a second antenna and joiner for VHF-High. (We don't have any VHF-Low in range, so I could optimise.)
This mostly worked great. Where did it not work great?
Channel 46 1-7 (RF channel 12), 9 1-4 (RF channel 9), which we could sort out by adding the VHF-High antenna...
...and KBTC's Seattle retransmitter, 28 (RF 28), which we could not.
28.1 is KTBC main, 28.2 is NHK World, 28.3 is First Nations, 28.4 is TVW, the state legislature.
I want all of these.
And I got it to an okay point, but then the building needed new ductwork and that meant more stuff in the attic and messed up reception so I decided to move everything. That's also when I added the VHF-High antenna to solve 9 (RF 9) and 48 (RF 12).
Now, I know where KBTC's Seattle tower is. I've been there! But aside from that, it's not hard to miss giant ass TV broadcasting towers in Seattle. They're huge and on top of hills. Hard to miss.
And I have a compass on my phone and maps and reference data and I know how to aim.
There are two main clusters. From where we are, they may as well all be in the same direction, it's only a degree or two different.
If we aim right at the transmitter, all channels transmitted from there are stupidly powerful... except KBTC, which in the day is pretty iffy, and at night is gone.
(Well, also, KCTS 9 is a little iffy, though less so. Or was, until we got the VHF-High antenna and added that in. Now it's fine.)
But what I figured out is that if I aim it in this other direction, all the super-powerful stations become less so (while staying acceptably strong)... and KBTC gets much stronger.
I'm not talking a little off, I'm talking 60 degrees off axis.
(All this elides all the experimenting I had to do to find decent locations in the building for antennas due to This Fecking Building. It was hard, but take all that work as read.)
It's kind of a compromise, much weaker signal on most other UHF stations (tho' some are strangely unaffected), but still solidly in the 60s or better signal strength range in rain like today and NHK World comes in stably, so it's the good kind of compromise: one that works.
But being me, I gotta know what the hell is going on here.
So I plot it out. I print out(!) some maps because I don't have the right kind of software for this and don't want to find some, and I can do this well enough on paper, and I don't have reason to do that often.
And I draw the lines and at first I'm doing a pretty large-scale map because I'm honestly wondering if I'm getting the signal off Mount Rainier, but that's wrong by a good 20 degrees. It's not Tahoma, even if the station is in Tacoma.
So I plot it out again on a smaller map, wondering if it's bouncing off something on Seattle's eastside, and I draw lines and...
...it goes right through the middle of Tiger Mountain State Forest.
And then I go, "...where exactly is Tiger Mountain on this map?"
...oh. There it is.
yeah. xD
It's ... almost cartoonishly accurate. I hadn't even thought about Tiger Mountain. It wasn't even in my head until I saw this on the map.
To be fair, I don't know that it's not something else, maybe closer. It could most certainly be! But I'll be damned if my little angles and lines didn't absolutely pinpoint Tiger Mountain to within the accuracy of the map - and well within the specced range of my UHF antenna. And that would be a damned odd coincidence, I think most people would have to agree.
So I guess I am the latest person to (re)discover Tiger Mountain! And I found it via... RF and television antennas and a compass... and to cartoonish levels of accuracy... largely by chance!
Seriously I found the location and was just "you are absolutely shitting me." But there it is.
And that's how I can get NHK World over the air when I absolutely can't get it by pointing the antenna at the transmitter.
I can get it because Tiger Mountain exists.
Apparently.
...
RF is weird.
And if you're me, this... this is hilarious. xD
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