ANSWER: Yes, Sun Spots answered this question last December by emailing Gregory Roehr, WMTW’s director of engineering. He wrote:
“The Auburn-Lewiston area can be challenging for signal reception for our station, as you obviously already are aware of. One of my engineering staff lives in Auburn near downtown and doesn’t always receive WMTW clearly due to his living on the back side of a hill from our transmitter site. Sometimes there are terrain challenges; sometimes there are weather challenges.
“Here are some suggestions to improve reception of our station: My first recommendation would be to perform a channel scan on your tuner box or television to try and re-acquire our signal. If that is not fruitful, you might want to adjust your antenna for better orientation or check that there isn’t any new foliage between your home and our transmitter site in West Baldwin that might be blocking our signal.
“Also, an outdoor antenna will generally provide better signal reception than an indoor antenna. A re-scan for available channels should be undertaken after each antenna adjustment or change, as today’s digital receivers do not ‘pick up’ faint signals the way older analog TVs did to aid in antenna aiming.
“We transmit over the air from West Baldwin on VHF channel 8. The VHF channel that we use differs from other DTV stations who now transmit on UHF frequencies in that it requires a VHF-capable antenna (usually has longer elements or ‘tines’ than UHF antennas).
“We transmit at the maximum allowable power per our FCC license requirements, and check that our output power levels are adhered to in our four-times daily transmitter logging procedures. We receive and monitor our off-air signal at our Auburn studios and master control center from an antenna mounted atop the one-story section of our building (no tower mounting, as we want to emulate what our off-air viewers would have at their homes).
“We have not recorded any significant changes in signal strength at our location in Auburn other than those caused by occasional weather or other atmospheric anomalies. While our transmission equipment is capable of sending out a stronger signal, we cannot exceed the power levels that were set by the FCC for the Digital Television Transition.”
And then the reader who submitted the question in December wrote back in January after finding a solution: “In order to get WMTW on any television get a digital box hookup to your television with rabbit ears, and lo and behold, you will get WMTW. The cost, depending where you purchase it, is about about $30 to $40 at Wal-Mart, Radio Shack, etc.”
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