I am posting this in hope that it may help a few folks here who are experiencing reception problems and will save them some steps in troubleshooting, wasting money or general frustration.
Let me start by saying I have never raised the Sensar while the RV is parked/stored at my house and didn't even know what to expect it would pull in for local channels until about 7 days ago. In the last couple of weeks I installed two new TVs in the RV so I raised the batwing to see how things were looking. As it turns out I was very disappointed by the reception of the local channels here in Sacramento. My house is 23 miles from the Walnut Grove "antenna farm" where almost all the local stations are located. I thought I should be getting everything crystal clear but I was only getting 3 digital channels (and their subs channels) and even those were breaking up occasionally.
I have a Sensar III head so my first step to try and improve things was to add a Wingman. I didn't see any change after that project (which only takes about 1-2 minutes to do BTW). Because Winegard claims this antenna is good for 55 miles I thought there must be more to the story and decided to do some further checking. I checked to make sure my power supply was getting 12V and it was. The power supply for the antenna in my case is a Winegard switcher (Model #VS5312A). Before resigning myself to the fact that either I am in a weak area at my house or something else isn't working I thought I would call Winegard. I spoke with a very helpful tech who suggested that I take the coax off at the head and make sure it was testing for 12V. He said if it was that I probably had a bad head and since I already had the Wingman just get a new Sensar III head.
I climbed up on roof this morning and tested the coax going to the Sensar. It did indeed have 12V and the fitting looked like it was in good shape so my assumption was it is time to replace the head. Just for good measure I sprayed electrical contact cleaner on the coax fitting and screwed back on.
I bounced down the ladder and just for ducks I re-scanned the channels on both TVs but not expecting much. Holy Shmokes! I went from 6 channels to 50! I am not only pulling all of the local channels but even a handful as far away as San Francisco.
To wrap this up... I would suggest checking for 12V on the coax at the antenna head, putting some di-eclectic grease or contact cleaner on the connection before re-installing then check your aim and see what you get.
Wooo Hoooo! Kinda has me all happy and excited to make something work so good with such an easy solution.
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