DTV transition "Soft test" on 11-20-08 in Chicago

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by ChrisW6ATV

I agree that a digital signal converted to analog locally can look very good.

Ooops! I spoke too soon when I said all of Time Warner's channels were being broadcast in digital. I spoke over the phone with a TW customer service representative yesterday who told me that the broadcast channels were still being carried in the analog NTSC format, and will be until the digital transition is complete in February. (The image freezing and pixelization I referred to in my last post were being caused, most likely, by loose connections on cables which were being whipped around during our very windy weather last weekend.) However, the pictures still look much sharper and clearer on this cable system than they were before it was converted to digital, even if some or even most channels are still analog, so I am expecting nothing short of razor-sharp pictures after the transition. I think TW, and probably many if not most or all other cable systems in this country, are more than ready for the day when analog TV ends for good in the U.S.

As far as people "dreading" the digital transition are concerned, I don't believe it is worth getting upset over as it will happen on 02.19.2009, like it or not. I personally do not see why anyone should dread this change anyway, as we will still be able to use our old antique (and more modern, of course) analog TVs after the transition if they are on cable or satellite, or used with an ATSC converter if one still desires to use an antenna after the digital switch. The only differences will be that the pictures will not fill the screens of our 4:3 TVs, and that the channel selection will be done at the cable box or ATSC OTA (over the air) converter, with the television's own tuner set to channel 3 or 4 (whichever is not used by a local television station) and left there. We will no longer be able to change channels at the TV itself, but the use of a digital cable box or ATSC OTA converter box will allow us to have remote control on our treasured old sets, even if they are currently non-remote models. Most ATSC converters and cable boxes have remotes which control volume and mute as well as up/down channel selection, not to mention favorite channel memory and other features which will vary by manufacturer, so with an ATSC box or digital cable your old TV can be better than it ever was in the "old days" of NTSC analog.

As to the reception problems some of you have reported with ATSC OTA converters, I would say wait a while. Many of the digital subchannels of existing analog TV stations are not yet transmitting at full power, have antenna issues or both, which will limit transmission range. As an example, I live in an area of northeastern Ohio where analog TV reception on an antenna is fair at best, with one channel (WKYC-TV, NBC channel 3) not reaching here at all. This area is 610 feet above sea level and 35+ miles southwest of all Cleveland TV transmitters. (The city of Cleveland itself is only 660 feet ASL.) Given this situation, I don't hold out much hope for folks in my town who still use antennas; that is, their analog reception isn't all that great, and digital reception may well be worse or even non-existent on some channels. As it is, the best analog OTA signal in this area is on the CBS affiliate in Cleveland, WOIO-TV, channel 19 (the station comes in well here even on rabbit ears), so its digital subchannel should look fairly good as well even using simple antennas. However, the digital signals of the other seven channels (5, 8, 23, 25, 43, 55, 61) could be iffy or downright unwatchable, unless a very high-power antenna is used. Since cable and satellite offer much better reception, more channels, and no conversion worries, however (all digital-to-analog conversions will be done at the cable headend, and satellite is digital already), I would think anyone whose TVs are connected to these services will have absolutely nothing to "dread" or be concerned with when analog goes dark, as the transition will be completely transparent and seamless to viewers.

[zenithfan1]

I dread it because where I am the reception is TERRIBLE! if a drop of rain falls the signal goes away! The other day, some effin birds landed on the antenna and it dropped the signal, this crap sucks! I hate to depend on a GARBAGE chineese made box that disgraces the name Zenith to watch the best American televisions ever made. In my opinion, these boxes aren't worth wiping my *ss with. I have a GIANT rooftop antenna with a rotator. I can pick up stations from MI and IN on analog but I cant get Chicago for sh*t on digital. I also like to use ultrasonic remote sets, not much fun unless you can change the channel to something other than 3! That is my rant for the day.

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by zenithfan1

I dread it because where I am the reception is TERRIBLE! if a drop of rain falls the signal goes away! The other day, some effin birds landed on the antenna and it dropped the signal, this crap sucks! I hate to depend on a GARBAGE chineese made box that disgraces the name Zenith to watch the best American televisions ever made. In my opinion, these boxes aren't worth wiping my *ss with. I have a GIANT rooftop antenna with a rotator. I can pick up stations from MI and IN on analog but I cant get Chicago for sh*t on digital. I also like to use ultrasonic remote sets, not much fun unless you can change the channel to something other than 3! That is my rant for the day.

Interesting. How far are you from Chicago? I watch WGN-TV's midday news on cable and see/hear Kenosha mentioned every once in a while (mostly during the weather forecast), so you must not be too terribly far from the Windy City's television transmitters. As I mentioned in my post, however, the reason you cannot receive the digital subchannels of Chicago's analog stations may be and probably is due to the fact that the digital stations may not yet be transmitting at full power, and even if they were, they probably would be in the 100kW+ ERP (effective radiated power--actual transmitter power in watts multiplied by antenna gain in decibels) range. You can receive analog stations from Michigan and Indiana because their VHF stations likely run hundreds of kilowatts ERP, giving them wide coverage areas; most of the UHF stations may be and probably are running ERP outputs in the megawatt range as well, with comparable coverage. The maximum ERP for U.S. analog UHF television stations is five megawatts or five million watts; most stations run at least two megawatts, but some, such as Cleveland's MyTV affiliate, WUAB on channel 43 (analog), are operating at the limit, for maximum coverage.

I don't know how reliable or unreliable, good or bad, any of the OTA ATSC converter boxes are, beyond what I've read about them here in AK and elsewhere on the Web, as I don't have one (both televisions in my apartment are on cable). Like it or not, however, Chinese/Japanese/Korean-made OTA converters (and darn nearly everything else) are the rule, not the exception in this day and age of outsourcing.

Some of these converters are made and perform better than others. I hate to say this, but it may well be that the Zenith box you have is indeed a dud and not worth much. Why do you say your box is "garbage"? Reliability issues? Not receiving all the channels you had hoped it would (even with your deep-fringe antenna on a rotor), or receiving them with lower quality than you expected?

Again, as I mentioned in my post, if you are having trouble getting decent (or any) digital reception from Chicago or any other city in your area, forget the antenna and get cable or satellite. If you don't want to pay high rates for expanded basic cable that gets CNN, ESPN, etc. there is a level of service on most cable systems that gives subscribers only their area's local channels, a local access channel and possibly a local weather channel as well. The service is known by different names in different areas of the country; I don't know what the service is called on the cable system in your area, but here in northeastern Ohio, Time Warner Cable calls its bare-bones cable service "Lifeline Basic". This level of cable service costs something on the order of $12 a month in most areas, although I know
someone who only pays roughly $5 a month for her cable service, which is the Lifeline Basic service I just mentioned.

I'm sorry to hear about your problems with birds on your antenna spoiling your digital TV reception. As to the problems you mention with rain attenuating or downright eliminating the digital signal....well, that's a problem I guess we'll just have to live with until or unless the stations increase their signal output power.

I seriously doubt that DTV stations will ever be as powerful as today's VHF and UHF stations, but I think, in time, the digital stations will have signals powerful enough to cover their entire primary reception area, eliminating aggravating dropouts or other artifacts in the received picture. Digital TV is a very new technology with more than a few bugs to be worked out, one of which is reception range. DTV stations may never run anywhere near a megawatt (one million watts) of power or more, but eventually they will have signals that cover their intended area with city-grade reception.

[zenithfan1]

I think the ten years it's been around has been more than enough to work the bugs out. I might be a little more accepting of it if the do in fact boost the power but only time will tell. I think they should keep things the way they are and give people the choice of analog or digital, the transmitters are already in use so why get rid of them. The stupid FCC made it law that they have to switch, I have yet to hear a good enough reason to shut it down, everyone says something different. All I hear are lame excuses to shove this up our *sses.

[zane]

I am looking forward to it! Cable will be a thing of the past as networks start broadcasting from cell towers, one less bill(I hope)! Goverment working on free internet, sweet! I may be able to afford gas in a few years. All my TV's are 91 and newer so I did not need any boxes, let's do it now! Well, maybe a few weeks, I still wanna buy a rotator for my 15' beast and raise it 10'. I get dc, baltimore and some penn stations right now. Less than 5 months for local to fall in line.
Thx for all the reading material, enjoyed it.

[3Guncolor]

Nothing is going to be free even the internet somebody has to pay the bill. I hate the thought of the goverment controling the internet or worse providing the service.

[ChrisW6ATV]

The one thing I was worried about after the NTSC shutdown is "blind" reception of TV signals when arriving in a new location, as when camping in my motorhome. This worry has now gone away. A few days ago, I was at my neighbor's house checking out his digital TV reception because he could not get some channels. His house is a single-story, with a bunch of three-story townhouses maybe 50 feet away between him and the direction of all the San Francisco TV stations. He has one of the tuners I have recommended here on AK (a Hughes HTL-HD), and it has a key on the remote control to bring up a signal strength meter. All I had to do was display the meter and move his rabbit-ear antenna around a bit, and when the signal went from 10% to above 60% on the scale, the channel came in fine. We did the same thing for another channel. One channel was VHF, the other UHF, so I found good positions for both. I don't know if my "Zenith" tuner has a similar meter, but if it does I figure all I will need for "blind" tuning is a list of channels from Antennaweb. The key is, the meter never went to zero on a channel with a digital signal. Manually selecting the actual channel (not the PSIP "pretend" number that matches the old NTSC channel) is the first step.

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by peverett

I am not against change that actually works for the better(i. e. fuel injection for automobiles), but am against change that is just driven by greed(as I believe this one is). I believe the average person who depends on broadcast TV will be worse off with DTV, especially in poor weather.

The DTV transition is not something that was proposed (and eventually enacted) entirely out of greed. This country's communications frequencies are badly overloaded and often unusable in dire emergency situations, as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina showed us. The freeing of 700 MHz of spectrum space will allow the FCC to reassign these frequencies to public safety and other services, so that communications problems such as I just mentioned will not happen again.

Whether or not the average TV viewer will be worse off with DTV than with analog, that's the way things will be starting next February (except for low-power and translator stations). There will always be radio for dissemination of emergency information, which I think is a better medium for such than television ever was. How many people, after all, are going to be able to see emergency warnings from the Emergency Alert System and/or local stations, weather radar maps, etc. on TV when they are forced from their homes by a tornado, hurricane or other natural disaster? This is also why Conelrad (the predecessor of the Emergency Broadcast System of the '50s-'80s and today's Emergency Alert System) never broadcast emergency alerts over TV, and does not do so even to this day (except for very short screen crawls from the EAS)--after all, again, no one should be thinking about watching television, even for emergency warnings or information, in the middle of a disaster. The first and foremost thing on anyone's mind in an emergency must be to get out of harm's way as soon as possible. In the 1950s, people in bomb shelters heard emergency information over battery-operated portable radios, not televisions, as the TV stations (what few there were back then) were probably all off the air. Today's EAS is no different. The EAS broadcasts over all stations in the affected area (no more fiddling with trying to find 640 or 1240 on a radio which may be out of alignment or does not have CD markings on the tuning dial), so anyone with a radio tuned to any of his/her area's local stations will get the emergency info they need to hear. No one is going to be trying to get a signal on DTV in the midst of an emergency; their homes, including the TV antenna (if they even have one) will be either severely damaged or destroyed anyway, so what is the use? Again, an emergency is definitely no time to be fiddling around with a DTV box, trying to get a signal that may or may not be there.

[Jeffhs]

[QUOTE=zane;2129638]I am looking forward to it! Cable will be a thing of the past as networks start broadcasting from cell towers.

I'm not sure I'm following you. Where did you hear that?

The TV networks do not broadcast directly to the public (unless you can get their direct feeds via satellite; however, I think many or even most of those feeds are protected, by passwords or other means, from unauthorized reception), but through affiliate stations across the country. Not everyone has satellite service; in fact, most people in my small town still have cable. There are, however, a few folks here who do have satellite TVROs (television receive only) dishes, either on the roofs of their homes or, in one case, on a short pole in the front yard, probably not more than three or four feet above the ground.

I do not think cable will disappear any time soon, though I won't stick my neck out and say it will never do so--advances in technology may well spell the end of cable eventually, so your predictions may have some merit. Satellite is nowhere near universal (yet) as a means of receiving TV programming (there are exceptions, however, such as small towns in sparsely populated states not served by cable, and too far from standard television stations for decent reception), and there will always be areas where reception of signals from these satellites (or installation of a dish) is difficult or downright impossible, so I think there will be a market for cable television in America's cities and small towns for years to come.

[zenithfan1]

Originally Posted by Jeffhs

The DTV transition is not something that was proposed (and eventually enacted) entirely out of greed. This country's communications frequencies are badly overloaded and often unusable in dire emergency situations, as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina showed us. The freeing of 700 MHz of spectrum space will allow the FCC to reassign these frequencies to public safety and other services, so that communications problems such as I just mentioned will not happen again.

Not to sound like an a-hole but they use "9/11" for an excuse to take away everything. I'm tired of hearing about "terrorists". They use it to scare us and take freedoms. The only real terrorist I see is George W Bush. Sorry to get political.

[bgadow]

Watch it now, zenithfan, thems fightin' words!

I did my little digital test the other night up at our headquarters building. It's an old place with a metal roof. With my rabbit ears (well, the loop part of it) I could get the strongest of our local stations, but...I had to hold it upside down in mid-air about 3' from the TV while standing on one foot and singing "Macarena"...or something like that! And even then, it kept locking up. So, on to the next step. I'm going to try mounting a small reflector UHF antenna (about the size of a phone book) up on the flat roof and see if that will work.

[zenithfan1]

Yeah, I suppose you're right Bryan. Just to clarify, my problem isn't with our country, just the people running it. Now, back to the original topic, politics can get ugly. My reception is getting a little better, It seems it is different when the box is in different locations, although I'm still hooked to the same rooftop antenna. I find this interesting. I think when I hook up in the different locations in the house it changes the length of wire causing me to lose a few Db. That can make a big difference. I noticed the garage is the best and also closest to the antenna which is on top of the garage. I also noticed the reception, like analog is much better at night. I will make with it the best I can but no one nothing can change where I stand on the death of analog. It is my favorite, I don't mind the snow when it has it. I think that is much better than dropping out altogether. I watched it all my life without minding it. I will post a pic here of the picture quality I can get at my house on analog from Chicago when I get home.
Mark

[peverett]

Cable/Satellite a thing of the past? I do not think so. So far I have gotten only one new non-weather station from DTV. Cable/Satellite will still be doing quite well.

As to using radio for emergencies-have you had your head in the sand? Show me a commercial radio station that broadcasts warnings for local emergencies such as tornados. I am sure that if we had a national emergency, it would be different, but for local weather emergencies, TV is what is used now.

I even have a weather radio. The way it is set up makes even it pretty much useless. The alarm fires for both watches(which you do not need) and warnings(which you do need). You either have an alarm when you do not need one, or if you turn it off, you do not have one when you need one.

[zenithfan1]

This is an example of what a lot of the analog channels look like with the rooftop Winegard antenna. Tv is a 1978 13" RCA XL-100 CTC 87 tuned to Fox 32 WFLD Chicago.

[NowhereMan 1966]

Originally Posted by zenithfan1

Yeah, I suppose you're right Bryan. Just to clarify, my problem isn't with our country, just the people running it. Now, back to the original topic, politics can get ugly. My reception is getting a little better, It seems it is different when the box is in different locations, although I'm still hooked to the same rooftop antenna. I find this interesting. I think when I hook up in the different locations in the house it changes the length of wire causing me to lose a few Db. That can make a big difference. I noticed the garage is the best and also closest to the antenna which is on top of the garage. I also noticed the reception, like analog is much better at night. I will make with it the best I can but no one nothing can change where I stand on the death of analog. It is my favorite, I don't mind the snow when it has it. I think that is much better than dropping out altogether. I watched it all my life without minding it. I will post a pic here of the picture quality I can get at my house on analog from Chicago when I get home.
Mark

I've experienced that too where I get signals better at night. Sometimes I can receive Youngstown, OH and Altoona/Johnstown, PA on my DTT-900 box using a set of 1959 Rembrandt rabbit ears and a Commodore 1702 monitor as a TV.