MVTVD Board Discusses Fixing Outages

By VERNON ROBISON

The Progress

Moapa Valley residents who tune in to free-to-air television signals may have experienced several channel outages over the past several weeks. The Moapa Valley Television District (MVTVD) board members have been scrambling to diagnose a series of problems that have arisen at their Beacon Hill site and to get the programming back on the air for the public.

“We have had several different problems that have occurred to the equipment up there since that last big windstorm,” said MVTVD board member Roy Wilmer at a board meeting held on Tuesday evening, April 5. “We have been able to fix most of them. But there are still a few that need work.”

High winds caused a break to a connection on the incoming receiver antenna for the district’s Channel 13. This caused a fuse to blow in the power supply which took down the antenna for a time, Wilmer said.
“We have been able to get that back up again,” Wilmer added. “Even though finding the problem took a little bit of time.”

But more persistent problems are occurring on Channel 8 and Channel 3. Wilmer explained that he believes he knows the fix for those channels. But it is not an easy fix, he said.

The large bank of antennas that receive TV signals from the Las Vegas valley were installed back in 2009. Those antennas are mounted to a structure of four-inch steel pipe that are vertically anchored to the ground and are tied together. The antennas are mounted on that structure at about 15-16 feet off the ground, Wilmer added.

“Over the space of many years, and a lot of wind blowing up there, the positioning of those antennas have changed a little bit,” Wilmer said. “So instead of pointing over the mountain toward the Las Vegas source, the lower antennas have dropped a bit so that they are now pointed into the side of the mountain.”

To add to the difficulty, the Beacon Hill site presents some rather challenging topography. It is a rugged hilltop approached only over a very narrow dirt road. Access to the antennas by heavy equipment is not possible.

“There is just no easy way to get to them,” Wilmer said of the antennas. “We are trying to work on them off of an eight-foot stepladder which is really not the best idea in the world. But there is no way to get equipment in there.”

“If it was someplace where you could just drive to, we could hire a bucket truck to come up there and use that to fix the problem,” Wilmer added. “But it is just not quite that easy.”

But Wilmer said that he was working on a plan to install scaffolding around the structure and allow for easier maintenance in the future.

In the meantime, the board talked about finding a contractor that could do the repair job in the interim.
New MVTVD Board member Arthur Villezcas, who works at Overton Power District (OPD5), suggested that the OPD5 has a pickup truck equipped with a small lift bucket. He said that he could inquire on whether the OPD5 would be willing to contract with the MVTVD on the job.

“The problem is that we are really swamped right now with projects and things that are going on,” Villezcas said. “But we could ask.”

Given the urgency of the situation, MVTVD Board Chairman Lance Mortensen suggested that they would even be willing to pay extra to have an OPD5 crew come up on a weekend to do the job.
Wilmer said that he and the other board members were doing all that they could to bring the stations back up again.

“There are some challenges that we will get over,” Wilmer said. “But people should remember that we are just a small volunteer board and we are doing the best we can with what we have.”