DTV & Bad Weather

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by AUdubon5425

Well, I've been experiencing some very severe weather for a couple of hours now. This is the first time I've been able to witness what a DTV OTA signal would look like during high winds and severe thunderstorms.

I am using rabbit ears, which have pulled in strong signals with no problems. Well, as soon as the thunderstorms hit the DTV signal went to absolute crap. I'm very disappointed, and thankful I still have analog to fall back on during this flooding and tornadic activity.

It really surprised me how bad the signal deteriorated, considering I'm less than two miles from the transmitter tower of the station.

Thank God we still have power - I've had a fever for 3 days and am having to stay up to monitor the flooding.

I didn't realize you were having problems with floods and tornadoes at the same time North Dakota is in the middle of a major flood.

As far as DTV signals being unusable in inclement weather goes, I'm not surprised, as many stations are not yet transmitting at full power on their DTV channels. However, if you are that close to the New Orleans TV transmitters, you should have much more signal than you need for excellent reception, even with rabbit ears.

Since I (and most other folks here) have cable, I'm not concerned about loss of signal in bad weather. (The cable company, however, does pick up the digital signal [they no longer pick up the stations' OTA signals via antennas], which is in turn fed to the cable system via fiber optic lines; the digital ATSC signals are converted to 4:3 NTSC on an as-needed basis.) However, for those folks in my town who are still using rabbit ears or outdoor antennas (there are still a few here, though most of us have either cable or satellite), I don't know. I do know that in my case, I get only one channel on an antenna well enough to watch (CBS channel 19), and the NBC affiliate on channel 3 doesn't reach here at all; the other five channels are fair to poor at best. I know of at least one other situation where channel 3 isn't watchable here; that is the grocery store three blocks from me, which has a Magnavox TV they used to use during football season. That set didn't get channel 3 on an antenna, either, so they got cable for a short time; however, the cable service has long since been disconnected.

But I digress. My point is that the village in which I live is some 40 miles from the Cleveland TV stations, which transmit from a southwestern suburb of the city, and analog reception is awful, as I mentioned above. Heaven help those few folks here who are still using antennas come 06.12, as digital reception here is probably iffy at best, except as I said for CBS channel 19. Without cable or satellite, these folks will be up the creek during inclement weather conditions as far as reception of digital TV (or, more accurately, the lack of it) is concerned. I suspect Time-Warner Cable, not to mention Dish Network, will have a few more installations to do in this town before June 12. I can envision this village being almost 100 percent wired for cable in the near future; it's close to that point already.

As has also been mentioned in other posts, radio is not the best medium for emergency information (the Emergency Alert System notwithstanding), as weather radar cannot be seen in radio weather reports. All we can hope is that the TV stations get their full-power DTV signals on the air by June 12, but even then there will be some dead spots where, given DTV's all-or-nothing nature, OTA reception may be iffy or downright nonexistent.