I'm not really sure, but I have a theory.
I cut the cable, built my current system, and joined this forum, in 2010. I put a $150 OTA antenna on the roof, and was stunned with the clarity of the picture, better than DirecTV. Got all the local channels. But, after a couple years, I started having more and more issues getting PBS, then it wouldn't come in at all. Then, NBC started doing the same thing, then eventually lost everything (a couple months ago I tried the OTA once more, CBS comes in but is all digital-hashy, not watchable; no other channels. So I've been paying for dish service ever since.
The Theory: my dish on the roof has direct line-of-site to the broadcast TV antennas on top of the Oechre Mountains, west of here. During these past ten years a very large building was built at Hill AFB, about 2 degrees off that direct line-of-site. That building is the F-22 Radar Cross Section (RCS) Test Facility:
See those blue-grey cones lining the inside walls? They look just like the cones in an anechoic chamber, but these are made of RAM, Radar-absorbing materials. After an F-22 gets depot maintenance, the radar absorbing paint is re-applied, and the entire jet lifted on those two pylons and checked for any radar returns (indicating "they missed a spot"). I wouldn't expect this, but I kept getting worse and worse TV reception as this thing was being built.... and my antenna couldn't "wear out", gradually over time, could it?
As the MILCON (military construction) engineer for the ALC my last four years, this facility was a bugaboo. It didn't work!! Those two pylons in the second pic rise up from a huge turntable built into the floor, so the aircraft can be turned in any direction (the front of the bird was supported by a thick hemp rope you can see in the pic, tipping the plane during testing). The Army Corps of Engineers went with the lowest bidder to build the turntable, a company that builds rotating restaurants in skyscrapers, but had no radar expertise whatsoever. I guess the RCS engineers were raising red flags that this contractor was unacceptable (the restaurant company even asked what a "decibel" was, during the Source Selection) but the ACE selected them anyway. A $26M facility, that never worked. Bids to correct all the mistakes hit $115M (Lockheed Martin knew they had us over a barrel) and Materiel Command finally decided to repurpose that building and start from scratch; I was heavily involved with that end process. After four years in MILCON, I finally did get $24M approved by Congress for a similar structure that just tests radomes (the nose cone of the F-22/F-35), but those funds were diverted for a certain "wall". And that's kinda why I retired at 59, guys. Oof-dah.
