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Complaints Pour In After Digital TV Test
djupedal writes "'Even if all goes smoothly, next February's digital television shift is likely to generate hundreds of thousands of complaints from television viewers around the country.
A major problem during a test run in Wilmington, N.C., was the inability of over-the-air viewers to receive new digital signals, according to figures collected after the test.'"
Propagation curves(PDF warning) for Analog and Digital broadcasts and a do-it-yourself calculator here.
So it wasn't a problem with the receivers or the tvs, it was the stupid TV station not putting out enough juice.
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This has to be one of the biggest waste of tax dollars I have ever seen.
It's not tax dollars. The government made $Billions by selling off bandwidth to private telco monopolies, breaking my TV in the process. The coupons take some of those *sale proceeds*, NOT tax dollars, to partially compensate me for the hassle and expense of having to fix my TV.
Based upon my own experience, I suspect "they're doing it wrong" is the right answer here. If you're getting digital signals too weak to be usable, the chances are your analog signals are no better. Yes, digital has a fairly hard floor, but analog has a floor too. I spent several years with rabbit ear antennas and various amplifiers, and found that my ability to receive a watchable signal, as opposed to one where the screen would jump up and down and the audio would fade in and out of white noise, to be dependent on a variety of factors and a game of chance.
All that's happening is that people are getting their box throwing its hands up and saying "This isn't watchable" when they'd like to make the same decision themselves, even though - actually - for the equivalent analog signal, they would actually be saying "This isn't watchable" anyway. The "No lock" message is replacing a dancing screen and white-noise infested audio channel. Because the decision is being made for them, they're believing they've been deprived of something.
You fix both issues - poor analog reception, poor digital reception - the same way. You get a better antenna. You get one on the roof if possible.
Our household's switch to digital meant we immediately started receiving high quality signals from TV stations OTA with an unamplified indoor antenna that were unwatchable on analog with an amplified unit. It actually was so good that we saw a benefit in going the whole way and installing a roof-top antenna and making OTA work, whereas we'd previously just stuck with cable and satellite feeds of the same channels.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
From the gov't's perspective, it frees up a part of the spectrum useful for signals that can penetrate walls easily (useful for emergency services).
From the public's perspective, the reception is generally better with digital (with a large radius of near perfect reception, followed by a drop to nil signal outside that radius) as opposed to analog which has a relatively small high fidelity radius with slow dropoff over distance. This also allows bands to be reused a little more easily in nearby markets, since the signals will cross less noticeably, and the digital aspect allows easy filtering of the weaker signal. And of course, 1080i signals beat 480i signals quite handily in picture quality.
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I live in Wilmington, NC and receive all the stations with an indoor antenna, a two bay bow tie with reflector. It is an old model once carried by Radio Shack. I think Channel Master still makes them. Likely a lot of the problem is that two of the stations moved from VHF to UHF, and I haven't found a decent indoor UHF antenna for sale in town.
Three of the stations are transmitting from a tall tower at Winnabow, NC, about 15 miles from downtown Wilmington. The ABC affiliate is on top at about 2000ft. I don't know where the NBC and Fox antennas are, but those stations are running fairly low power last I knew. The CBS affiliate, which converted from a LP license, is somewhat farther away, at Riegelwood, NC, but it is watchable, although not quite as strong. The PBS station is still transmitting both analog and digital; analog from Winnabow, and digital from Delco, NC. They appear to have the strongest digital signal here, even from somewhat farther away. They also transmit four streams during the day and three during prime time when the HD stream is operating.
One problem I did note, and could never solve, is that an Element 19in receiver cannot decode the audio from the ABC station. After a lot of flailing around and calls to the station, the importer and the FCC, I finally gave up and traded the set for a different brand. This seems to be a problem with all instances of that model, but not to larger screened models by the same manufacturer.
The problem I have with OTA digital is signal strength (I'm between 12 and 20 miles from the various local stations as the bird flys). Analog was watchable in my house with indoor rabbit ears. It didn't look good (fuzzy and ghosting and whatnot), but the image was continuous and comprehendable. Digital OTA though on some pretty good indoor antennas stutters for me. Some stations it's minor (a "blip" every now and then), and some I'll get an image for 2 seconds and then a freeze for 5 seconds before the cycles repeats. Don't get me wrong the picture is GREAT, but I'm afraid that a lot of "country people" who were making do with indoor antenna are going to have to transition to outdoor antenna to keep watching.
Could also be the tuner I'm using too though. My parents live less than 2 miles from and they get far less disturbance with a $10 antenna I bought them from Big Lots. It's still there, but not quite as bad on as on my TV. I'm almost thinking of grabbing one of those converter boxes with the free coupon and seeing it it's tuner (piped to component inputs) works any better for me.
Either way I've got my local stations through DirecTV so it's not incredibly important, but those feeds are not HD so I still want the OTA to work too :).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
The lines outside the Best Buy won't be bad until everyone realizes that Best Buy carries nothing that will help them.
Lowes and Home Depot are the only major brick and mortar chains that I have seen which carry decent TV reception (antenna and preamp) equipment. The antennas sold by Best Buy, CC, and such are crappy little antennas which claim to have all this preamplification that will pull in lots of signals.
Yeah, they have preamps, but garbage in garbage out. The dominating factor in a reception system's noise figure is going to be the antenna first, and THEN the preamp.
My parents are basically screwed when the changeover occurs unless they sign up for cable. They've got one of the largest V/U combo antennas available and a good Channel Master preamp, but still can't get reliable NYC HD reception thanks to the local terrain. Their analog reception isn't too hot, but it is watchable. Their digital reception for most channels is nil.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Yeah, but all of the digital stations are power-reduced to compensate.
The problem is that the official definition of "good enough" analog SNR that was used to calculate the needed digital transmit power is way above what many people consider watchable.
i.e. probably every NYC station is not considered "watchable" by the legal standards at my parents' house, but my parents have been watching TV for years there.
It doesn't help that NIMBY is keeping the Seacacus TV tower from getting built, and all the NYC stations have been forced to run reduced power ever since 9/11 knocked out most of their primary transmitters and everyone had to go to backups on the ESB. Only stations that had the ESB as a primary to begin with still have good reception.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I've never noticed power differences for FM stations based on time of day, and I don't think such a thing would even be legal for them. If you're in a fringe area, you might be observing propagation differences that APPEAR to be transmit power adjustments but are only changes in atmospheric phenomena (mainly tropospheric ducting at VHF, which is heavily temperature dependent).
Power adjustments for AM based on time of day are a legal requirement due to changes in ionospheric propagation phenomenon depending on night vs. day.
The only consistent degradation of broadcast signals I have seen is when the majority of the primary TV broadcast transmitters for the New York City market were destroyed on 9/11/2001.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
HD is not the same as Digital (DTV).
... but for us, since getting a digital TV converter box we are able to pick up many more channels then before. In fact, with analog there was really only two or three channels we got that were watchable. Now we get far more channels, all of which look perfect, plus digital exclusive variants of some of those channels, such as two 24-hour local weather channels and two new PBS channels, one with different programming in english and one with different programming all in spanish.
The one real issue I have with it is the handling of 16:9 HD broadcasts. The converter box has the option, and it's on by default, to obey what the program tells it do with regard to whether to letterbox, zoom (aka crop) or stretch to 4:3, but the programs don't seem to be using this intelligently, often having 4:3 shows letterboxed anyway, for example, plus the converter box has a bug where after a while it just starts stretching everything, regardless of what the program tells it to do. In the end you end up having to make the decision yourself and manually switch between letterbox or zoomed. It's a nuisance, and probably one that most people wouldn't know what to do about anyway. They'd just end getting everything stretched (ack!)
--- What?
It's not a myth. I receive analog TV with a fair bit of snow and ghosting. The audio always comes in perfect though. It's plenty watchable. I rarely feel like getting up and moving the antenna.
With digital TV, I am constantly moving my antenna in order to stop the frequent drop outs of picture and audio. I don't even care about the picture dropping out, I just want the audio to be listenable. Do you have any idea how hard it is to hear speech constantly cutting out?
Your assertion that this is a myth does not stand up to my first hand experience with digital converter boxes. I've lived here for 3 years needing nothing more than rabbit ears. I'm going to have to build an antenna once the change over occurs. Digital OTA TV does not degrade gracefully, and the signal floor is well above that of analog TV.
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the article is digital vs. analog, not HD vs SD. There is already HD over analog if your TV can handle it. The thing going away is the analog broadcast spectrum that the FCC is auctioning off for other use. This is not a forced upgrade in all of your equipment, this is a new decoder that can interpret ones and zeroes, and is much MUCH cheaper than replacing all of your gear to view HD.
Being angry and offtopic and slurring names of retailers is easily seen as trolling .
They probably aren't as screwed as you think if their analog is watchable. The stations currently are mostly broadcasting digital at a tenth of the power they are licensed for to avoid interfering with the analog signals. Once the switchover occurs, they are suppose to go up to 100%. If you can pull in a watchable analog signal, then in theory you should be able to get the digital equivalent once that happens.
Don't sweat it too much until after the transition, the channels are all going to switch around (and I think go to higher power). TV Fool can give you some idea of the pre and post signal levels:
http://www.tvfool.com/
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
No, you want a diplexer, not a splitter. You'll find they are a bit more expensive than splitters but will do the job well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combiner