Sudden bad reception on one station in Portland Oregon

Anybody else in the Portland Oregon area having problems with the Public Television Station, OPB?

A couple of months ago, reception started getting bad. At first it was just an occasional problem in the afternoon, maybe for a short while in the evenings, with pixalation and maybe a loss of signal. But now it has gotten so bad that most of the time it just says no signal.

Nothing has changed in any of the other stations I receive, they all have stayed the same.
I have checked the antenna(it’s on a 30 foot mast) and the cable into the house all the way to the Tablo.

I tried connecting the antenna to my tv and am having the same problem, so I don’t think it’s the Tablo. One thing I did notice was that OPB was one of the stations that is testing ATSC 3.0, but I don’t think that would have anything to do with it.

Any suggestions?

edit: I did the normal stuff like rebooting and rescanning etc.

Your best bet is probably to contact the station: https://opb.force.com/Help/s/contactsupport

Or if you prefer telephone, that page gives 800-241-8123, which seems to be their main telephone number.

They’re one of the relatively rare stations still transmitting on VHF (channel 10), but that’s nothing new. They’ve always been on channel 10. So it’s nothing that changed.

Maybe you were picking it up via a translator station that is no longer working? Here’s a map of main and translator coverages.

I tried the support ticket route, telling them all the steps that I had done. All I got was the canned response of rescanning and checking the antenna. When I replied, pointing out that I had already gone passed that stage, I didn’t receive a reply. That’s when I decided to try here.

I live in Forest Grove, and have always received the signal from the main broadcast antenna. Plus, when I look at the link you gave, where I am at there doesn’t seem to be any overlapping signals.

Thanks for the suggestions.

Could your antenna have been damaged or moved out of position? Can you inspect the cabling and connections, perhaps there was damage or deterioration (e.g. weather). Finally, could a new source of electronic interference been introduced? Some have reported issues with things like a bad LED lightbulb or a microwave.

As I said, I checked the antenna and cabling. The antenna is a Antop multi-directional AT-415B,so direction isn’t that big of a deal, but it is still in the same position as before. No new microwave and I don’t have LED lightbulbs. :slight_smile:

The antenna supposedly has 4g/3g/lte filtering, but I added a filter to to see and it seemed to make it worse.

Thanks for the help.

Could it have anything to do with KOPB starting to broadcast ATSC 3.0 a couple of months ago?

While the Portland ATSC 3 stations broadcast on physical RF 30, many stations upgrade their transmitter, tower, and other equipment to support ATSC 3.0.

Hmm, I didn’t think it would affect things, but if they upgraded something it is possible.
@TabloTV, Could that have something to do with this?

Anyway, thanks for the help

Possibly… Stations that have started broadcasting via ATSC 3.0 signals are required to continue broadcasting in ATSC 1.0 for a set period of time. However, they don’t always use the same tower or equipment.

It’s certainly worth asking the station, or jumping on the AVSForum website for OTA in your area to ask if other folks are seeing something similar: https://www.avsforum.com/threads/portland-or-hdtv.168423/page-456

I haven’t had much luck with the station. They just send me canned responses to rescan etc.

I’ll check out the AVSForum and see what I can learn there.

Thanks for the pointer.