RAYMOND, MAINE—Antenna maker Dielectric today announced the first two of nine new antennas for Quincy Media Inc. will be delivered to the broadcast group’s KTIV in Sioux City, Iowa, and WXOW in La Crosse, Wis., in spring 2018.
The stations are part of the first two phases of the Federal Communication Commission’s repack of TV spectrum. Both KTIV (channel 14) and WXOW (channel 28) will take delivery of Dielectric TFU-WB UHF broadband pylon arrays.
The nine QMI station deal includes a mix of UHF and VHF antennas, filters and transmission line customized for each station, according to a Dielectric announcement. The deal also covers primary and interim antennas needed to complete repack work.
“We have all of our primary and interim antenna designs for Phase One and Two ready to go and are now turning our attention to the later phases,” said QMI corporate director of engineering Brady Dreasler.
With KTIV and WXOW in the first two phases, the station group needed a relatively fast turnaround, and the experience of the station group with Dielectric over the years gave it the confidence to award the company the contract, he added.
Brady Dreasler
Using the Dielectric Antenna Systems Planning software program, Dreasler with the assistance of Dielectric global OEM sales manager Cory Edwards, designed the new side- and top-mounted high-power antennas for each station, a press release from the company said.
KTIV is moving from channel 46 to 14, which Dreasler described as “a remarkable difference in RF spectrum.” Achieving the same antenna gain required the new antenna to be longer than the original, which translated into additional weight, he said.
With the assistance of Dielectric, QMI has been able to minimize the work needed for the existing tower by “achieving the right combination of size and weight,” said Dreasler.
Most of the antenna arrays QMI will deploy have been designed with elliptical polarization to improve ATSC 1.0 performance and to prepare the stations for an ATSC 3.0 future.
To make the switch from old to new channel assignments easier, QMI is acquiring compact, high-efficiency band-tunable filters from Dielectric. Doing so, will allow stations to operate on their pre-transition channel assignments and retune to their new repack channel assignments when new antennas are installed, Dielectric said.
For more information on the repack, visit TV Technology's repack silo.
