DTV station identification; are local TV stations still analog on digital cable?

[45rpm]

"FIOS" simply stands for fiber-optic cable.

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by 45rpm

"FIOS" simply stands for fiber-optic cable.

Ah, so! Thanks for the reply. So starts my (re)education on the brave new world of digital TV. I was raised on analog (I worked on analog TVs for years and had a large collection of old sets in my basement back in the '70s) and understand it quite well, but I admit that I have a lot (an awful lot) to learn about DTV.

[NowhereMan 1966]

Originally Posted by Jeffhs

I'm curious to know what "FIOS" cable service is. You mentioned in one of your posts that you and your family now have this service instead of Time Warner, Comcast or any other cable service. How is FIOS different from any standard cable television system? You also mentioned that FIOS gives you a better picture with no dropouts, freezeups, etc. Is this system anything like AT&T U-Verse, which is a hard-wired TV service, or is it more comparable to satellite?

FIOS is from Verizon, it is a fiber optic cable that goes directly to your home and you can get TV, phone and internet on it. We get all three and so far, it had been great. Cable TV still uses copper cable from the company to your house bit FIOS uses fiber optics that goes to a box in your house and then foes to a copper cable to your TV, computer and so on. Theo nly drawback is if you lose power, you have 8 hours of battery backup. We have the FIOS on the 1982 Zenith.

[MelodyMaster]

Originally Posted by Jeffhs

A I am very, very seriously considering getting a converter box and dropping the cable altogether, although I don't know how well it will work since I am in a poor signal area, 35-40 miles from the Cleveland TV stations, and got only one station well enough to watch in analog. I may or may not have better digital reception--I'll just have to experiment and see just what digital channels I do get here. Channel 3, the NBC station in Cleveland, did not reach here at all in analog, 5 and 8 were fair to poor at best, 25, the PBS station here, was also fair to poor, as were 43 and 55. How well these stations come in here in digital is anyone's guess;

I live west of Toronto and all the Buffalo channels, Toronto Channels, and a few from surrounding areas, come in FAR better (and with crystal clarity) via ATSC using an electronic dish on the chimney, compared with the analog stations using a stacked yagi with rotor on a 36 foot tower. Some of these stations are over 70 miles away and not very high power. Chances are that with a proper antenna you will find a huge improvement in channel choices. In Toronto (Canada) only two stations, CKVR and TVOntario, have not yet started broadcasting in digital. You Americans are lucky, it's done, no more procrastinating; many Canadian viewers are chomping at the bit to get the transition over with.

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by NowhereMan 1966

Theo nly drawback is if you lose power, you have 8 hours of battery backup.

Why would that be a drawback? I would think eight hours of backup power would be better than nothing and would be more than enough to keep your telephone service going, as most power outages (except in very rare instances, like the blackout five years ago or so that left five states, including Ohio, without power for 24 hours) don't last much longer than a couple of hours at most. I have Time Warner cable (basic cable TV service only); I understand, however, from reading the fine print on my cable bill and in the company's ads that show up in my mail every now and then, that with their digital telephone service, there is no battery backup, so when your lights go out your TW digital phone service goes down as well. I think this is a design flaw in the system which absolutely must be corrected, because when your digital phone service goes down, you lose access to 9-1-1 as well--and there is no excuse for that. Nine-one-one is a very important number that everyone needs access to 24x7 in case of emergencies, even if the electricity is out. I am surprised Time Warner didn't think of this when their digital phone system was in the design stage; they should have designed an emergency backup battery (or some other type of emergency power source) into the system so that subscribers would, at very least, have access to 9-1-1 if and when they needed it.

[NowhereMan 1966]

Originally Posted by Jeffhs

Why would that be a drawback? I would think eight hours of backup power would be better than nothing and would be more than enough to keep your telephone service going, as most power outages (except in very rare instances, like the blackout five years ago or so that left five states, including Ohio, without power for 24 hours) don't last much longer than a couple of hours at most. I have Time Warner cable (basic cable TV service only); I understand, however, from reading the fine print on my cable bill and in the company's ads that show up in my mail every now and then, that with their digital telephone service, there is no battery backup, so when your lights go out your TW digital phone service goes down as well. I think this is a design flaw in the system which absolutely must be corrected, because when your digital phone service goes down, you lose access to 9-1-1 as well--and there is no excuse for that. Nine-one-one is a very important number that everyone needs access to 24x7 in case of emergencies, even if the electricity is out. I am surprised Time Warner didn't think of this when their digital phone system was in the design stage; they should have designed an emergency backup battery (or some other type of emergency power source) into the system so that subscribers would, at very least, have access to 9-1-1 if and when they needed it.

True, plus there is an emergency button where you can press to dial 911 since when it shuts down ,the battery still has "enough juice" for a 911 call. I also have a cellphone plus the FIOS box runs on 12 VDC from a wall-wart, I can rig up a 12 VDC supply, even using my automobile jumper if I really, really had to.

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by MelodyMaster

Analog TV in general is 80 years OLD! Think of that. Even the current NTSC scanning standards were codified in 1946. We have to move on. Everything else is digital, not that that's necessarily a good thing. But with the population of the planet and bandwidth requirements to feed that population being what it is, the much more efficient use of bandwidth provided by digital rather than analog is now a necessity.

Baseband cable is still analog, the cable provider uses digital receivers for the front end and converts the signal to standard NTSC for old fashioned viewers like yourself.

High Definition TV is very pretty, a movie screen in your home. If you had a digital set and convertor you wouldn't raise these questions. Of course there will be hiccups over such a radical change in technology.

Why shouldn't they add the suffix "-DT" for their Digital service? After all, stations have long used the suffix "-TV" to distinguish between television and radio service.

There are more so-called "old-fashioned" TV viewers in this country than you might think. Not everyone can afford a high-definition flat-panel TV and some cannot even afford a converter box. I am one of those who cannot afford a large flat-panel, although I could get a smaller set tomorrow if I wanted one with a 15" picture. There was an article in the paper here a week or so before the DTV transition in which a man in a suburb of a large U.S. city said that he could not afford a converter box for his old analog TV because he is on disability, which means he must now go to a friend's home if he wants to watch anything (even the news) on television.

Even those folks who can afford a converter box are not always able to hook up the box correctly or set it up, and some are incapable of understanding that an external antenna is required for proper operation of the box, despite the incessant warnings and everything else in the days and weeks leading up to the transition. The idea of disturbing the wiring in back of their televisions scares some people (they are afraid they might be shocked or killed by electricity on those cables) and puts off a lot of others. Most non-technical people do not know anything about their televisions other than how to turn them on and off, change channels, turn the volume up and down and mute the sound. Digital television has managed to thoroughly bamboozle these people, many of whom have no idea what DTV really is (and let's face it, most non-technical viewers couldn't care less about the behind-the-scenes side of digital)--despite all the PSAs (public service announcements) and print ads about the transition in the months leading up to it. I can imagine the scene in a lot of American living rooms from coast to coast the day after the transition, when they turn on their old (or not so old) analog television sets and see nothing but snow on every channel, even those channels which are supposed to be local to their areas. I can also imagine the large numbers of telephone calls TV repair shops across the land must have had up to closing time on 06.12 from people who found that they could not get their local TV channels anymore, and they wondered if the TV set was broken or if lightning had hit the antenna, the antenna itself was bad, etc.

The digital transition is still causing enough problems for some viewers in large cities such as Chicago and Philadelphia that the TV stations in those cities have applied to the FCC for temporary authority to increase their transmitter power, so their digital signals could reach viewers using antennas in far-suburban or fringe areas. I sometimes wonder why these people don't get cable or a better antenna, as it is not easy for a TV station to get FCC permission to do anything to its signal, and the stations certainly cannot simply raise their transmitter power on their own just because some small number of viewers in far suburbs or in the fringes out in the middle of nowhere are not getting them in digital. Most non-technical viewers do not understand that, thinking that all a TV station has to do is turn a knob on the transmitter and presto, the station will instantly reach from Maine to Miami with a city-grade digital signal.

We AKers know and respect this (that such a scenario as I just described is utterly impossible), but trying to explain this to most non-technical people will get you nowhere, in many cases. Many people will not get cable (even basic, what I call "bare-bones" basic, which is local channels only and is the lowest, least expensive level of service offered by all cable operators) because they claim it is too expensive. Don't try to sell these people on satellite, as you will probably get the same response (even though, in many cases, satellite is even cheaper than cable), possibly being followed by an adamant "No one's gonna put that ugly dish thingamajig on my house!"

What can you do? If someone can't afford or doesn't want cable or satellite, and doesn't understand why their TV doesn't work with just the antenna, there's nothing we can do. Many people refused to believe, in the last weeks of analog TV, that the day would come when their televisions would no longer operate with just an antenna connected, despite the warnings in the PSAs and even a few actual half-hour programs produced by the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), detailing what viewers had to do to be ready for the digital transition on June 12 this year. A television station in Cleveland, a year or so before the transition and continuing until the bitter end, really pulled out all the stops to be as certain as humanly possible that everyone here in northeastern Ohio was aware of the digital transition by 06.12; its public-awareness campaign used the phrase The BIG SWITCH which showed on TV screens across the area, in letters darned nearly impossible to ignore; a banner carrying that phrase was shown, I swear, every chance the TV station got. I must say, I got tired of seeing this after just a short time (it ran on Cleveland's CBS affiliate and also on another local station owned by the same company) and am glad the whole thing is over. Except, that is, for the shouting, meaning the loose ends the FCC is still trying to tie up with reception problems and assisting those folks having trouble hooking up their converter boxes.