News Channel 7's New Hogback Tower Expected to be Ready in a Few Weeks

By: Tom Crabtree | News Channel 7
Published: August 20, 2009 | 0 Comments | Post a Comment

We are just weeks away from having News Channel 7's new tower on Hogback Mountain beaming our signal.

Edgar Woodfin, the station's Engineering/Transmitter Supervisor, tells me the new tower hopefully should be transmitting by September 15th. General Manager Phil Lane told station employees at a staff meeting today that the target date remains September 1st.

The construction consists of a primary tower that will hold News Channel 7's new main and new back-up antennas.

The tower will be 459 feet high, same as the old one, but designed stronger.

Hopefully that'll mean no more disasters like the one we encountered Sunday, March 1st, the day apparent ice buildup and strong winds brought our tower to the ground. Our engineers utilized everything at their disposal to quickly restore our broadcast signal to as many viewers as possible.

I don't understand engineering lingo very well, but Woodfin tells me the new antenna is better and "will have both horizontal and vertical components of polarization. This should help increase the signal density in the valleys and fill in where we might not have with our earlier horizontally polarized antenna. The increased height and gain over the current antenna will make a huge difference to all areas more than 30 miles away and especially those trying to receive us with rabbit ears."

It means you're going to get a terrific TV picture, one that's especially better for those of you living in valleys or living more than 30 miles from our transmitter site.

That's a really good thing.

Our engineering staff and private contractors have overcome huge logistical challenges (i.e., bringing all the pieces of the new tower to the top of a very high mountain aboard very big trucks and assembling them, and bringing the pieces of the old tower to the bottom of said mountain), braved the elements and worked as quickly as possible.

When the new tower is in service, of course we'll let you know.

Just in time for football season!

Just in time for lots of new programming we are soon to announce!

Just in time to see Victor and Nickie on "The Young and the Restless" reconcile for the ????th time (I've lost count, haven't you)!