San Angelo Broadcast Television Transmitters Locations and RF Frequencies

From Dave K5DCM:

Necessity is the mother of invention. I really wanted to watch a ball game on TV, and I was having a really hard time picking up the local FOX station. In researching what frequencies these stations get transmitted on, I learned that Virtual Channels (e.g. 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4 etc) are not the same thing as the RF Channels that the stations are transmitting from. So, if you go look up what “channel 3” RF frequency is, you’re already in trouble. Thank you to Danny Boyer K5AHN for pointing out the difference in virtual vs RF channels to me.

For this cheat sheet, I used www.channelmaster.com and www.otadtv.com to illustrate for any San Angelo area residents who want to know where the transmitter site and what RF frequency all the Over-the-Air broadcast TV stations are transmitting on. If you have success using this cheat sheet and want to share the story and pictures, email us at contact@w5qx.org.

This article isn’t about how to build your home-brew antenna, there are plenty of other resources for that. But this picture and the info on it, should help you avoid a major pitfall you might experience if you make the same mistake I did, and build your antenna for the incorrect frequency, because of the virtual channel vs RF channel confusion. This map also helps you know which direction your antenna needs to point for each transmitter site.

The double asterisk on the “purple” transmitter site is because they are actually two different towers close to each other, transmitting on adjacent channels. the listed frequency is the exact frequency that each transmitter’s bandwidth meet, so if you cut your antenna for that frequency, it should be close enough, and the directionality should be close enough as well. If you live close enough to not know which tower to point at, well, you probably aren’t having any trouble picking up that signal.