King Jack antenna

The friendliest place on the web for anyone with an RV or an interest in RVing!
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.
See posts with no answers
C

clockdrfla

Well-known member
Joined
Jan 15, 2012
Posts
206
Location
Ocala, Florida
I have a King Jack antenna that has been working fine.  I am currently camped about 35 miles from Ft Wayne and the unit is picking up about 15 Ft Wayne stations but they keep going off and says weak signal.  Have rotated antenna head and signal meter is showing all lights on so have a strong signal.  Any suggestions why every station is fading in and out?  Thanks
 
Stations "Wax and Wane" (Fade and get stroner) due to many things.
Sun spots and other solar activity
RF interference (A CBer running POWER for example)
Weather conditions
Time of day (See sunspots)
and more. hard to say..

What is easy to say is the Winegard Sensar IV outperforms the JACK and even with the JAXK using a SENSAR PRO to replace both your "Sur-Lock" hunk of junk and the wall plate with the light, switch and 12 volt outlet will improve performance.

I run a Winegard S-III with Wingman (Basically an S-IV) with Sensar Pro.. and the results are much like you see. goes from 80%+ on the receiver to 50% and broken.  but not as broken as with the Jack.
 
Many of the tv stations now utilize the UHF frequency band and 35 miles is long distance for UHF tv. I suspect you are seeing a combination of signal reflection and distance, where the average signal strength may be OK but it varies continuously. John gave several other factors that could easily apply as well.  The bottom line is that those signal lights don't mean a whole lot.  The tv tuner needs a steady and reasonable strong signal, so any fluctuation is likely to cause it to drop out. This is especially noticeable on modern digital broadcasts, where the screen gets pixelation or just goes blank, rather than slowly eroding in quality as analog tv did back in the day.
 
Side note.. When I checked in here.. NADA TV wise
Then I finally lowered, yes LOWERED the antenna and picked up one station.

Well I put it back up today. Did a bit of work so it's "Level"er (A bracket is broken and I finally reinforced it properly and another is bent and I straightened it) and now I have 3 stations, and each of them has sub channels.. So I may have trouble keeping up.

At least I've gotten a few movies off the hard drives.

I suspect however that the change has more to do with "Space Weather Dot Com" than the work I was doing today.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Latest posts

Members online

Total: 1,170 (members: 24, guests: 1,146)

Forum statistics

Threads
131,986
Posts
1,388,689
Members
137,735
Latest member
MoeHoward
Back
Top Bottom