The Honolulu ATSC monitor is now live!
This is the second monitor deployed by Koherence – the first deployed in the San Francisco Bay Area (https://sfbayatsc.koherence.com). Unlike the Bay Area monitor, the Honolulu monitor presently monitors the ATSC 3.0 lighthouse only. If there is interest in monitoring other emissions please drop us a note.
OTA reception in Honolulu is in general a challenging proposition due to the ridges and valleys. It woudd be a great location to deploy a 3.0 SFN, but alas there’s just the lone tower in Akupu. Regreattably the monitor antenna location is in a valley – and on the wrong side of it to get a direct signal from the tower. For those of you familiar with the area, it’s on the Red Hill side of Moanalua Valley. The antenna is pointed at the opposite wall and receives a decent reflected signal. (The monitor is actually at my childhood home. Way back when, we had a yagi on the roof which got us watchable, if sometimes snowey and ghosty, NTSC. Back then the antenna was pointed to downtown Honolulu. While some broadcast towers remain in the “town” part of the island, it appears many have moved to the Akupu.)
The antenna in use is a Televes DAT BOSS Mix LR 148383 which is a rather large VHF/UHF antenna tht resemnles a Vorlon cruiser. That doesn’t deter the birds which seem to like perching on the rods. It also periodically ends up in the suffocating embrace of a lilikoi (passion fruit) vine if the gardeners don’t keep an eye on it.
3.0 and 1.0 reception isn’t nearly as prestine as in the SF Bay Area, but on the whole quite good. One annoying aspect of 3.0 which does rear its head is that while in 1.0 we see periodic and generally minor block noise, on 3.0 we see the occasional loss of entire segments. (The choice to use DASH instead of the broadcast-friendly MPEG transport stream with Annex B formatting is highly questionable…)