As our work continues on our over-the-air transmitter to provide you the best possible signal to watch NewsChannel 5 programming, we wanted to provide you an update on the work in process.
As you may know, we launched our new signal on October 18th, but because we needed to maintain the old signal, we could not put the new antenna at the top of our tower. That work began as soon as possible, and is happening at 1,100 feet in the air, meaning it is dangerous and slow-going.
As such, there are times we may have to turn off our current over-the-air signal temporarily to allow our tower crew to complete this work safely.
When this happens, please do not rescan your television. Rescanning simply tells your TV where to find our frequency -- if you rescan when our signal is down, your TV assumes that there is no signal there anymore. If you do not rescan, the signal will come back on 5-1 as soon as we're able to turn it back on. (If you did rescan while our signal is down, you'll just need to rescan once again once our signal is back up.)
We understand this is frustrating because you rely on us. Please know this channel change and the interruption was not our choice, it was mandated by the government.
We've gotten a lot of questions about this process, so we wanted to answer some of the most frequent ones:
When will our signal be at full strength? Right now, the crews working on the tower tell us their work will be finished in 7-14 days. We realize this is longer than our initial timeline we gave when the rescan took place, and we apologize for that. There are several factors we're not in control of: this past weekend's rain out, for instance, prevented our crews from performing much of their work for several days.
How will I know when the work is done? We would love to contact you and let you know. You can contact us two ways: email us here, our call our rescan help line at 615-244-5005 and leave your phone number so we and call you when the work is complete.
Why didn't you finish all this work before the rescan? Simply put: We couldn't. Every single thing that could be done in advance was done. Because we had to maintain our old signal, we couldn’t begin work to put our new antenna at the top of the tower until the change was made.
Thank you all for your patience. Please know we are doing everything possible to restore our programming to you.
