View Single Post
  #13  
Old 01-28-2015, 02:44 PM
Jeffhs's Avatar
Jeffhs Jeffhs is offline
<----Zenith C845
 
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Fairport Harbor, Ohio (near Lake Erie)
Posts: 4,035
Quote:
Originally Posted by Electronic M View Post
Why not just put the DTV box and antenna near the windows (or better yet try it in various locations to see if there is a signal sweet spot someplace in your apt.), and run the video out of the box to your TV...It is the next best thing to moving the TV and the rest of the works to the best place for reception.
I do not use a DTV box, as my TV is a flat panel which has a built in DTV tuner. (BTW, my CRT sets do not work at all with my Zenith antenna; I tried it with my RCA CTC185 set, and the tuner just went from channel 2 to the highest channel it can receive and looped back to 2, repeating the cycle, without stopping.) I am just about ready to give up on this experiment, since everything I've tried has not worked, well or at all.

The translator I mentioned is not intended to cover the area in which I live. That translator, as I mentioned in my previous post, was installed to cover the Akron, Ohio area, which is about sixty miles southwest of here. Channel 19 even increased its ERP transmitter output power so that its signal will reach that area, until such time as the station can move to a UHF channel. I read some time ago (not long after the DTV transition) in a TV technology newsletter I get in my email that there was a similar problem with a station in Philadelphia. The station's owner finally had to apply for a power increase so that the station's DTV signal would cover the entire metropolitan area.

I wonder why DTV stations cannot transmit at the same high ERP power level as when those stations were operating as NTSC analog stations. Channel eight in Cleveland, for example, had a 312-kW ERP NTSC analog signal. Channel 19 had a 3.7 kW ERP analog signal, but even before DTV that station had problems reaching some far-suburban areas east and west of the city, including the Cleveland suburb in which I lived at the time. The problem was made much worse, IMO, when a lightning strike took the station off the air six months after it initially signed on; the station's signal was never the same after that.

Now the station is having the same problems with its DTV signal's coverage area. No, the DTV transmitter was never struck by lightning that I was ever aware of, but the nature of DTV signals is such that they are much weaker than analog ones ever were. This means better antennas and/or cable or satellite must be employed to receive a decent signal from any station transmitting in this format--meaning every TV station in this country, including translator stations later on this year.

I would think that, since channel 19 is a CBS network affiliate, they would have had a commanding signal from the first day they hooked up with the network; after all, CBS is a major U. S. TV network viewed by tens of thousands of people every day. CBS, indeed, every U. S. television network, should have a requirement that any station affiliated with that network must have a signal that covers the station's entire broadcast area, or else it won't get the affiliation in that station's area.

On the other hand, channel 43, the other UHF station in Cleveland, had a 5-megawatt ERP analog signal and had a chance to affiliate with CBS after channel 8 dropped that network in the mid-'90s and went to FOX, but for some reason they turned it down. I believe this was a terrible mistake, considering the fact that 43 had a much stronger analog signal and would cover a larger area (including Akron and the surrounding area) than 19 could ever hope for. I don't know how powerful 43's DTV signal is, but I think it must be much more so than 19's 3.7 kW ERP one.

Where is it cast in stone that a UHF DTV signal cannot be at least as powerful (in the millions of watts) as the VHF analog NTSC signal it replaces? Television broadcasting, after all, is a big-money business; the networks depend on their affiliates reaching the largest possible audience, which translates to more advertising revenue. The networks cannot afford to have affiliates that cannot, for any reason, reach every corner of their viewing area; in fact, some stations have lost network affiliations because of signals that are far too weak to cover their entire broadcasting area.
__________________
Jeff, WB8NHV

Collecting, restoring and enjoying vintage Zenith radios since 2002

Zenith. Gone, but not forgotten.
Reply With Quote