Friday, November 06, 2009

The Water Tower Bounce

There's not a TV Photographer out there who hasn't positioned a Live truck knowing it's only going to tune in to a certain recieve site....and then with a deadline approaching, the engineer back at the shop says those 5 dreaded words..."Another truck is on that site", followed by, "Let's try the other sites"

Water Tower Bounce

Yeah...that happened to me today. I needed a certain neighborhood for my Live shot and I found the look, parked the truck and knew I could only hit our transmitter tower site....only to be told to tune in to the station short stick site. Ugh!

Water Tower Bounce

After a few minutes of pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan with no signal seen on the other end it struck me that I was right next to this water tower...and it's height and large surface may just bounce the signal right into our reciever's dish.

Water Tower Bounce

I panned and tilted up to the water tower and bingo...they had a signal. A little bit of fine tuning and we were good to go for a 5 o'clock shot.