Probably very few tradespeople with the patience or know how to get these things right first go. I think your follow up plan is good.
Looking at the TVCL North TEF & antennas & Central Coast stations I discovered that 94.1, 94.9 & 96.3 are best received on the North antenna. 92.5, 101.3, 104.5 & 107.7 are best received on the NE antenna as expected.
Such are the peculiarities of trying to make a simple Yagi cover such a wide bandwidth & behave with consistent predictable radiation pattern I guess.
Will be interesting to see the results again after the adjustments.
Yep, I suppose my install is a particularly difficult one to get right. With the TV installs that they usually do, they can use their signal meters to find the right direction to point in, but with my FM antennas, I just gave him a list of compass bearings overlaid on an aerial image for reference that he just had to try to match by eye.
Also, beacuse of how high up the antennas are on the mast, he had to put all the antennas on and point them in the right direction whilst the mast was just lying flat on the roof. I’m not sure how he managed to get them (roughly) in the right direction like that, honestly😅. I think he did reasonably well given the circumstances.
I also couldn’t really give him feedback in real-time as I need to get an aerial image of the new install and do the calculations before I could check the directions the aerials were pointing in. Especially since the install had taken almost 5 hours to do.
I assume this is because they are in V polarity while the antenna is in H. RFBurns told me this would result in a 20–30dB reduction in signal. I think they come in better (with RDS) on the vertical omni that I’ll hook up once I get the connector for the antenna.
I’d love to be able to get the antenna tweaking the antennas’ directions one by one, testing different heights and switching between H/V to see what yields the best signal – but I don’t think any installer would want to put up with that hours of that😅. Unless I’m lucky enough to find an installer who’s also a DX’er.
I did pretty badly at maths in school, actually . But spatial analytics is exactly what I do for work, haha. You got me there.
That probably explains why reception for Orange wasn’t improved that much via TVCL West. Hopefully that’ll be fixed soon (I know it’ll still be weak, but hopefully the signal strength will be enough for RDS and Stereo when it’s fixed).
The west antenna isn’t far off from pointing directly at Orange right now, actually. I’ll be shifting it a bit more south from Orange to optimise for other reception coming in from the west, like sproadic Es from SA, where the targets are a bit more to the south of Orange. But you never know, maybe the reception will be better after. The vertical setup I had before pulled in Orange at similar levels to now even though it wasn’t pointing at Orange so much.
I have two different USB sound cards for the east and omni servers. The one connected to the omni server is mono, but acceptable quality. However, the one connected to the east one is horrible – 22 kHz sampling rate, distortion, mono + no bass.
I have ordered another USB sound card that’s the same model as the one connected to the omni server and will use it on the east server once it arrives.
The USB sound cards are a temporary solution for ther east and omni servers until I find a more permanent solution.
Note that the purpose of the east server is to pick up any potential SpE from NZ, so it doesn’t really get any additional fringe stations compared to the antennas for the other directions.
The west one is connected to the Dell desktop’s integrated audio input jacks. They have two audio input jacks (one on the front and one on the back), which is a nice bonus. South is also connected to the Dell’s internal audio, while the north one uses the headless TEF’s built-in audio output.
There has been another update pushed to the web server Github, for those that aren’t in the fmdx.org discord I’ve posted the changelog below. This one fixes the bandwidth switch being missing, one of which I had noticed being a sore spot on my node and a few others here also.
Version 1.3.3.1
Changelog
Updated the libraries for better security, you should do npm install !
Fixed an issue where admin lock didn’t work properly
Chat button now flashes on desktop when a new message comes
Adjusted the transmitter search score weighting for better accuracy
Adjusted the behavior of modal windows (such as chat) on phones
Adjusted the phone design of the admin panel (it should look more usable)
Fixed an issue where chat logs didn’t have the proper color in the admin setup
Fixed an XSS related security issue
Fixed an issue where the region name wasn’t shown on connect
Fixed an issue where the server would crash on client join sometimes
Fixed an issue where the webserver logo might not have displayed properly in some cases
Fixed an issue where some config options didn’t get saved
Fixed an issue where the bandwidth switch couldn’t be toggled
Fixed an issue where IP list could sometimes be accessible to non-admins
Fixed an issue with the chat still blinking after messages have been read
I noticed the distance of the dipole from the mast looks to be only around 25cm. If you can be bothered you can try potentially improving performance by increasing the distance to around 65-75cm (unless it already is, and it just appears that way from the angle of the photo). And also tidying up the coax so it doesn’t run in between the dipole and the mast.
The news aren’t always happy, but we have to inform you about all the important stuff.
Due to a critical security exploit present in the older versions of the webserver, users are advised to update to the latest version (1.3.3.1 as of writing this post) as soon as possible. This issue allowed the attacker to run JavaScript code on the browser of every client connected to the webserver.
For the time being, any public servers running an older version have been temporarily removed from the map. If you still see your webserver on the map, that means you are running the proper version and therefore this exploit doesn’t affect you.
If your webserver is not public, the update is not mandatory, but you should always keep your webserver up to date anyway, so you can have all the newest & greatest features.
Hi,
I can’t seem to find an easy way to download the new webserver version and keep my plugins. Is there an easy way to do this or do I need to reconfigure everything from scratch?
All I do is go to the folder of the server in Command Prompt and type “git pull”. Then the rest of the update is automatic. But maybe it’ll be different for your setup – I’m not sure how you installed it in the first place / what OS you’re using.
I’ve got my directional Yagi webserver setup, but I can’t manage to list it and the other omni directional server on the map at the same time. Does anyone know how I could get them both to show up?
. But spatial analytics is exactly what I do for work, haha. You got me there.
