Anchorage Daily News

If your version of heaven includes flat-screen TVs, cold beer and your favorite sports team, then the old song rings true in downtown Anchorage:

They took paradise and put up a parking lot.

More specifically, they put up a parking garage and it blocked the satellite feed at Humpy's Great Alaskan Alehouse.

The obstruction cost the popular bar and restaurant a football season's worth of Sunday business as fans realized Humpy's big screens couldn't give them anything they couldn't watch at home on cable.

Anchorage Assemblyman Allen Tesche, who represents downtown, said he knows of no laws or codes that protect the air space around a business or residence. If someone builds something that gets in the way of your thousand-dollar DirecTV package, tough luck.

"Do other cities have some sort of restrictions designed to protect a satellite signal? I don't know. Most assuredly Anchorage does not," Tesche said Monday.

"We should check with other cities to see how they've addressed it, other than just build away."

Problem is, this is a problem unique to the far north.

Most satellites travel around the globe near the equator, said Jason Gardner, owner of The Satellite Guy. In the Lower 48, that puts the satellite about halfway between the horizon and 12 o'clock.

In Alaska, satellites hover near the horizon.

"You're looking at angles as low as about 10 degrees for DirecTV and 16.5 for Dish Network," Gardner said.

Buildings, mountains and trees can easily block signals here, he said.

Gardner's customers include the Peanut Farm, one of the city's premier sports bars, whose satellite dishes point over Campbell Creek to the southeast. Every year or so, the bar has to trim trees by the creek or lose its satellite signal, Gardner said.

In Muldoon, the Chugach Mountains often block signals, he said. But until he heard about Humpy's lost signal, Gardner had never known of a new structure going up and blocking a previously existing business's ability to come through on its promise to customers to show all the games, not just those available on cable.

Bill Opinsky, the beer manager at Humpy's, said the loss of the satellite signal made for some very quiet NFL Sundays .

"It hurt," he said. "People would walk in and ask for a game and we just had to tell them, 'No satellite.' We lost all of those customers. They didn't come back. We lost thousands of dollars in sales."

The restaurant had to swallow the nonrefundable $4,500 it paid for a season-long NFL satellite package it never got to use. And then there's the matter of luring back customers who found other places to spend their Sundays this season.

Opinsky said Humpy's has moved its satellite dish all over its rooftop and the rooftop at the Pioneer Building next door. There's no place where the dish can see the satellite lurking behind the new 10-story Linny Pacillo Parking Garage, a project being built by the state for public parking.

The only fix is to lease rooftop space from another nearby building and install a line -- probably fiber optic -- to carry the signal from the dish to the bar.

Neither Opinsky nor Gardner knows how much that will cost, although Gardner guessed it could be as little as a couple hundred dollars if Humpy's finds a rooftop within a thousand feet or so. The cost "would be significant" if the fiber optic line needed to go underground, he said.

Opinsky said the hunt for rooftop space has been complicated. Just learning who to talk to about leasing, say, space atop City Hall takes a merry-go-round of phone calls, he said.

Even so, he hopes to find a place for Humpy's dish by the time baseball begins in six weeks.

Not having baseball won't hurt business the way not having football did, he said, because tourists keep the place busy in the summer.

Still, he hates to disappoint regular customers. And any day now, members of the Far From Fenway Fan Club, flush with their second World Series championship in four years after several lifetimes without any, will be showing up, expecting to see their team.

Find Beth Bragg online at adn.com/contact/bbragg or call 257-4309.

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