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

[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.