My first digital TV DX... ETV & Kalev Sport, E57 mux

[ES5NHC]

Hello.

This is my first post here so sorry if I am posting at a wrong place. Yesterday evening there was an opening everywhere in Estonia. I was able to catch first DX reception on digital television as well... Using a small logarithmic, indoor antenna I picked up channel 57, which has two channels, ETV(our national broadcaster) and Kalev Sport(a sports channel). The signal strength and quality was 20-30%, and there were even moments of smooth image and sound, although mainly it was breaking up since I had to hold the antenna below the ceiling with my hand to get the any images at all and my hand was a bit shaking due to the height the best reception was at. The transmitter is located at Koeru, about 93 kilometers from my home, so I guess that this is a good result for indoor antenna.

[Mike-CT]

Welcome to the Forums! I have to use an outdoor UHF antenna to receive any DTV stations past 60km, so you are doing well. Your terrain may have less hills than mine does and your ch57 must be running a higher power. Many of ours are running lower power with both analog and digital stations sharing the band until Feb 2009.

Digital TV DXing is definitely not like analog TV Dxing.

[ES5NHC]

We are using here DVB-T technology, MPEG4 encoding. I live atop of a hill 90 meters above mean sea level. Before Finland switched to digital, I even picked up Finnish channels during DX conditions with that little antenna.

[w9wi]

I would call 93km pretty decent DX for an indoor antenna. Do you have any idea how much power the station was running?

Over here, we had high winds last night which were causing some of my local DTV stations to break up. ATSC doesn't deal with a moving antenna very well. From what I heard the COFDM you use over there should handle that better?

(we have tested COFDM at 2GHz for OB (remote) work, and found it handles a moving transmitter VERY WELL!)

[ES5NHC]

All right, checked out the information for the mux I picked up. It's details are:
Antenna height: 337 meters
Effective Radiated Power: 2500 watts

[KC0LTV]

Not bad at all for 2.5 kW!

Most U.S. DTV stations are between 100,000 and 1,000,000 watts, so 93-km reception isn't particularly rare (though even a 1 MW station probably wouldn't provide good constant reception on most indoor antennas from 93 km away), but for only 2.5 kW, that's nice!