10 miles away from 2000 foot towers you are only subtending an angle of 2.4 degrees, that hardly gets you to the Southwest Freeway. 20 miles away you are subtending an angle of 1.2 degrees. That gets you to I-10, but you come up short of downtown. So the difference between aiming at the horizon and aiming down is almost non-existent. If the beam width is really that narrow, you are going to have to pick a very narrow ring of people you want to serve. But - that ring gets wider and wider rapidly as you aim closer to the horizon. You might as well just have a string of translators or LPFMS in an arc over the area. It seems to make much more sense to aim it straight - you aren't going to lose people close in to the tower, signal strength is inverse square law so the people closer in have plenty of signal. The ONLY time I have seen a situation with no signal at all was some friends who lived right under a TV tower. They were literally at the base. I have no idea how they rented that trailer, it seems to me the station wouldn't want people living there. But they did, and couldn't get the TV channel. But their neighbors a quarter mile away had it fine. Seems to me that one low power bay aimed downward would cover that small group of people who live right in the shadow of the tower, and let everybody else have their signal back.
I wouldn't be harping on this if I got good reception of local stations. Good car radio - Pioneer Supertuner 3D, with a 31 inch whip - dropouts on all Houston FM's all over town. I lived here for a time in the 80's, I never had issues like this! And not just in my car. It is so bad in my daughter's car with the shark fin antenna that she gave up and went to satellite. Dropouts under overpasses happen much less often. My wife got tired of dropouts on her favorite station, and uses bluetooth to play music from her phone. My sister in law tolerates dropouts but is annoyed as heck. She remembers how the same station used to have a good signal and is convinced they powered way down to save money on electric bills. I used to think this all started when HD did - but now I think it is all due to beam tilt - an idea that sounds good but really isn't. We are talking Cypress - we can see the darn towers 20 miles away and I remember having stronger signals from Detroit when I lived 70 miles away in Jackson. This beam tilt stuff is crap!