Back in June, I uploaded new TV station maps and county-by-county listings. One of the prompts for making the update was finding out that KYOU, the Fox station in Ottumwa and the only standalone Fox station in Iowa, had added NBC as a digital subchannel.
The main effect of this addition, besides creating a gray area in “what counts as coverage”, is filling a space in the Ottumwa area for NBC programming. It’s on the fringes of multiple markets, and the counties in the area had been orphans for a while. I got the map from a video weathercast, and for some of you the graphics might look familiar. KYOU doesn’t have a weather desk, and it’s actually the KCRG team doing the weather for them, as the stations are now both part of Gray TV.
I updated and uploaded the graphics, figuring I’d get a blog post out sometime — and then things went pear-shaped for me computer-wise. The good news is, my iBook still works as long as it’s plugged in, and that’s the refuge for the few things that must be done in an application that stopped being updated nearly two decades ago.
I have taken the “opportunity” to start from scratch by doing a full evaluation — not just the minor tweaks I made in June, but building every network map from the ground up and catching any changes I may have overlooked. One of those other changes was also on the fringe, as Sioux Falls’ ABC and NBC stations merged in a first-of-its-kind operation. KGAN threw me for a loop: Its regional radar and county-outlines-only forecast map are slightly different!
A note also must be made of coverage champion Carroll County, currently 9-for-9 on station maps in Des Moines, Omaha, and Sioux City. The full county-by-county station-by-station listing is here.