I live close to an airport. When smaller planes fly over my house, I loose the DTV signal for a few seconds. Is there any was to resolve this? From Todd in Sanford, Florida
Hi, Todd, thanks for asking!
In the old analog days, the effect you’re seeing would have caused ghosting or vertical rolling of the picture and was referred to as “airplane flutter” interference or dynamic multi-path interference.
With digital, we still can get the same signal problem when the broadcast signal bounces off the moving aircraft and arrives slightly out of time with the desired signal. It’s up to the tuner to try to sort out the problem but, many times, the tuner can’t handle the distorted signal. This is when you see the loss of your digital broadcast.
From the antenna side, there’s really only one thing that we can easily do that might remedy this problem: Select an antenna with the narrowest possible beam width in the vertical axis. An antenna such as our DB4 Antenna (range: up to 55 miles) or the DB8 antenna (range: 70 miles or more) has a more narrow reception window in the vertical direction than do many other antennas for UHF reception. This helps to reduce the signal strength of the reflected signal off the aircraft while still receiving the desired signal from the towers. Hopefully, you can find an antenna aiming point that will allow this to be accomplished.