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Final Days For Australia's Analog TV
jones_supa writes "The switch to digital TV broadcasts in Australia has entered its final few days, with Sydney's analog signals being fully switched off today, 3 December. That just leaves Melbourne plus remote central and eastern Australia — and those areas will be switched over on 10 December, completing the country's transition to digital TV. The government runs an information site to assist the remaining crusty luddites with the switch-over."
Analog degrades better if you're on the fringe.
Digital is pretty much "all or nothing", with freezes, posterizing, etc.. if you've got a bad signal.
If you've got a bad analog signal, you'll get snow and static, but you'll still be able to see what's happening.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Well, on a good night I can tune Wollongong digital channels from Elizabeth Bay. I could never get Wollongong analog channels at all. But it's very much all-or-nothing - either I get Wollongong or I don't, never get a snowy but watchable picture. I don't actually have a digital-capable TV, only a USB tuner that I rarely use. I don't really miss TV.
I live in Australia and they shut of analogue in my area back in 2008.
New Zealand's Analog TV has just been turned off
We can see what's happening in all its grainy, 576i goodness.
For those who don't know... digital tv is this thing that superseded analog tv too long ago to remember in your country...
I've had more signal problems with digital TV than I ever did with analog -- things like a Charter cable commercial talking about its quality when the image of the spokesman's face had been broken and reassembled more than any synthetic cubist painting, or channels simply going missing for hours (albeit I think that one's a bug in the unit decoding the signal, not something everyone would necessarily experience). I suppose one of these days I'll appreciate the wonders of this particular technological progress, but for now it just seems like being handed shit and calling it chocolate ice cream.
Moved down in 2004 and they were talking about the imminent shut off then.
Digital - everything has to go through their pipes.
Analog - you can get an antenna and tune in to non-official sources.
Don't take my word for it, come to Singapore and see if you can view Malaysian or Indonesian channels via the digital channels. (hint: you cannot).
even though I haven't lived in Australia since I was a kid, nor do i watch TV at all, it made me a little sad to see:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8q_S0Fk3dyM
I especially like how they played the 'go to bed kids' b&w clip and then the simulated 'switching off the CRT' images. Can't imagine how many grannies in sydney are bashing their TV trying to figure out what made it switch off.
Everything is on the internet without adverts.
Especially the Sunshine Coast Region, where I live. The cheapskates put in Single Frequency Networks and some channels just aren't working. There's other problems, too. Even people with a clear line-of-sight to the tower need masthead amplifiers. At least I can get the ABC and SBS channels, but I mostly watch streaming stuff from ABC's iview and SBS OnDemad, anyway.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
Here in Athens Greece we are in a transitional stage where most of the city have only digital but for some few places the analog signal still exists; few day ago i was watching a football game (the real one, where they play with the ball mostly with the... foot!) in a friend's house located in a neighborhood with both signals available where my friend's tv was tuned in digital and a neighbor watching the same game was tuned in analog - we kept hearing that neighbor cheer or boo almost a minute before we could see in our tv the reason, totaly destroying our experience (by the way, we soon understood that he was supporting the opposite team - they lost, we won!).
Because some niggers will lose their 4:3 aspect ratio.
I thought you Aussie Stormfronters called them abos?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Something tells me a website wont be much help to people luddite enough to not know about upgrading to digital...
Analog degrades better if you're on the fringe.
Digital is pretty much "all or nothing", with freezes, posterizing, etc.. if you've got a bad signal.
If you've got a bad analog signal, you'll get snow and static, but you'll still be able to see what's happening.
But digital goes further, so if you're on the fringe of an analogue signal, you'll get a decent digital signal (well, as long as they're being transmitted from the same approximate location).
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
And yet another slashdot article on TV where half of the comments are reminiscent of a 13 year old Onion article. We get it; you're a hipster dipshit. Go tell someone who cares.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Imagine your comment on an "analog internet", some letters could be missing or replaced with others.
This is interesting to watch for anyone like me who doesn't have a TV, and therefore, didn't catch the end.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJaft0a5VXc
I didn't/wouldn't notice.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Now if only the broadcasters would use the HD stream to carry HD content we might have some net gain out of the process. The little 1080i material is generally upscaled SD and/or crippled by a low bit rate to accommodate yet another SD TV shopping/trash TV stream. ABC News 24 is 720p, SBS HD is upscaled SD simulcast, Gem is upscaled reruns and shopping, 7Mate is trash TV for "blokes", One HD is M*A*S*H and Get Smart reruns in glorious 1080i
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
Its not really gone. Where I live (Canada) digital came about 2 years ago, but 80-90% of tv watchers are on cable, and cable doesn't make you buy a new tv (read: cable is analogue baby), and they don't know what all this digital stuff is about. Having seen digital vs analog, I would never switch back, but to people on cable, antenna means 'fuzzy picture'. The reality is that I've seen their analogue over cable, and its sucky, their tv is 'fuzzy', but you can't tell them anything.
Reports from Australian electronics stores tell an all-to-familiar tale: shelves emptying over the past few weeks as the stragglers finally get around to stealing their own digital conversion box. Crikey!
But it's much less of an issue with people casually watching videos for fun.
Wow, that will spoil CHRISTMAS (yeah, fuck you political-correct-hollydays-morons) for a lot of people. Or is it intention, to give a "stimulus" to the starving electronics industry??
Looks like the broadcasters had some fun with the switch off. This guy caught the Channel 7 message, with some other general reminiscing: http://goughlui.com/?p=5238
Get a better amplified antenna and aim it correctly. Putting it in the window will help.
Seriously, how is this worth space on the 'front page'?
What's next? Lost pets in the Melbourne area? Brisbane school sports results?
But digital goes further, so if you're on the fringe of an analogue signal, you'll get a decent digital signal (well, as long as they're being transmitted from the same approximate location).
Indeed. I don't know what they'll be using in Australia, but here in the US, 8-vsb transmits 1 error correction bit for every 2 data bits. I live in a small town in a valley that's 30 miles from the nearest television transmitter. Previously we had television signals so weak you couldn't stand to watch them for more than 15 minutes before the static drove you insane. Now that we've gone digital, the channels are crystal clear.
It is annoying when MythTV records a show on one of the weaker channels at a bad time of day and so the signal drops out constantly making it unwatchable, but if we were still on analog, it would have surely been so full of static that I'd be straining to try to follow what was going on. Still, I understand how some people might look at that and think that digital sucks just because they don't understand how the signal can alternate between crystal clear and unwatchable every minute.
You just have to remind them that it isn't that the digital encoding is unable to tolerate a poor signal, but that the digital encoding makes a poor signal as usable as a good signal, and so when channel cuts out its because your signal has become worse than poor.
"information site to assist the remaining crusty luddites with the switch-over" Yeah, lots of luddites on the internet.
I live in a small town in the western US. I used to get four channels over the air on a good day with analog. Now, I get one. Not saying you're wrong, but I think people in more rural areas suffer more when the analog signal is cut.
How come New Zealand's analogue switch off didn't make news? Boo!
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
I live in a small town in the western US. I used to get four channels over the air on a good day with analog. Now, I get one. Not saying you're wrong, but I think people in more rural areas suffer more when the analog signal is cut.
Referring to Australia only. The digital signal has a greater range than the older analogue signals (different frequencies and signal strengths). This may be different in your neck of the woods, as they may use worse frequencies (or probably in your case, change the transmission sites completely).
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
"The government runs an information site to assist the remaining crusty luddites with the switch-over."
I'd not call a person a luddite if he/she is:
* watches TV
* wants to switch to digital signal
* looks for help on the internet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
An electronic billboard with an endless stream of commercials, constantly doing noise banging interruptions about buying something. No amount of surfing channels will cure the fix and alleviate the boredom created by not at least a sliver of a decent amount of content -- in analog or digital.
No, no, no, no!
As someone perpetually out in the fringes, allow me to correct this misconception once again...
Before the analog went away, nobody around here used an antenna. I bought my Winegard 8800 and Antennacraft Y10-7-13 antennas during the long transition. Of course I checked out the analog stations while I was at it... They were horrendous. Sure, you could tell that there was a signal there, but it was only barely perceptible that there were sharp edges and lines burried somewhere in the static if you focused hard enough. I TRIED watching news on the strongest of those awful analog stations, but after fives minutes I had a headache from the loud static over the audio and very quickly gave up straining to try and see anything. It was an immensely miserable experience.
After the transition to ATSC, most digital stations in the market come in strong and clear most of the time, with minimal breakups. While those are annoying, it's an occasional annoyance intertwined with PERFECT picture and sound, rather than a constant annoyance that nobody in their right mind would tolerate.
I have some criticisms of the current situation... A couple major broadcasters have cut down their signal power in the process, and the FCC stupidly allows another broadcaster on the came channel from almost the same direction (from here). Those two major channels missing might be a deal-breaker for some who would like to be rid of the crazy cable/satellite TV bills. However, it's infinitely more practical to use an antenna than it was with analog, and the proliferation ofnetworks on sub-channels has greatly increased selection.
Most people's complaints stem from the switch of some stations from VHF to UHF spectrum, which only propagates 2/3rds as far, and requires a different antenna than the old stations. My big complaint is that, if HALF the VHF spectrum was going to be abandoned, the FCC should have forced the rest to jump to UHF, too, so consumer antenna systems could be half as expensive, eliminating the need for VHF-hi antennas entirely (outside of Alaska). That might have gotten more people putting up antennas, and more incentive for stations to continue broadcasting at full power levels. Instead,the FCC is planning to turn the UHF band into swiss cheese, selling off bits to telcos for cellular services, forcing some back onto VHF-low where modern VHF antennas don't even work, and leaving some on UHF, again necessitating expensive antenna systems.
Problems with the transition to digital broadcasts are self-made, and makes me think we should have skipped it and dropped broadcast TV entirely. Either let it improve and succeed, or kill it entirely...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Digital fixes tpyos? Sweet! Where do I sign up?
Problems with the transition to digital broadcasts are self-made, and makes me think we should have skipped it and dropped broadcast TV entirely. Either let it improve and succeed, or kill it entirely...
The problems aren't self made, they disappear when they are self solved. The GP is right, but yet so are you. In many implementations digital does have better coverage than analogue but that has far more to do with technology enhancements, changes in transmission power, and changes in spectrum than anything else. An analogue signal is intelligible for a longer distance than a digital one with all other elements staying the same and cause less interference to neighbouring bands too.
Places which like for like replaced their gear get screwed, places where the transition is managed and the limitations are worked around (like in Australia) is where the real successes come.
You mean "imagine Teletext".
Only big ligs use sigs.
New poster here. I'm not one of the other A.C.'s.
I think "digital cliff" is the term for which we're looking.
It doesn't have to be a rural area. It can be any area where the signal isn't good enough.
While there are digital portable TV's, it's not good enough. We should have kept just one analog channel for a local news station to broadcast on, amping it up in emergencies, for when there are storms and the like. Local channels on cable can be problematic if you can't power the digital box that decrypts the local channels (if the cable provider has started encrypted the OTA channels). Used with a portable (battery-powered of course) TV during the power outage.
Do you think the frequencies were sold out of greed?
Get or build a better antenna. And put it up higher, and point it in the right direction. Use a signal amplifier. These things work.
They're semi-politely called abos, but for maximum affront the term boongs is preferred.
Just because I learn something new every day doesn't mean I learn anything of value.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
It's about a technology switch-over. Slashdot isn't a USA exclusive site.
They're semi-politely called abos, but for maximum affront the term boongs is preferred.
Lol. The words appear to be universal. Try saying that one here in the States in a dark neighborhood if you're into suicide.
New Zealand switched off analogue TV in the last zone on December 1st.
Broadcast TV went to digital a few years ago in the US, but for cable TV it's on a system-by-system basis. My town's Comcast cable went digital a year or so ago; it gave them room to squeeze more channels onto the cable than analog. I didn't have a digital-capable TV at the time, so for me the difference was that I now had to make room for a cable box, which fed analog to my TiVo, and program the TiVo to talk to that cable box. More recently I got an HDTV, so until I do something about the cable box, I've got a choice between getting all the channels on non-HD through the TiVo, or getting a subset of the channels directly from the cable into the TV (but not all of them, and the TV guide information knows about the regular channel numbers, not the digital ones.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
But digital goes further, so if you're on the fringe of an analogue signal, you'll get a decent digital signal (well, as long as they're being transmitted from the same approximate location).
Might hold true in some places where either if you're on a hill, or it's very flat. In say most of Southern Ontario outside of a major city like London, K/W, or Toronto most people lost 1/3 to 1/2 of the US stations they used to have and picked up some they never had before. I know a few people who are able to get 40 channels in digitial in Toronto, my friends down in Brownsville/Verschoyle Woodstock/Ingersoll/Beachville used to get 15 US, they get 3 US now.
Om, nomnomnom...
How much range you get depends on how much power the broadcaster is using. Maybe it's that way for you in Australia, but not generally in the US. My mom had a weak analog signal for the channels she cared most about (US public broadcasting), but the sound was ok and if the pictures were fuzzy, most of the programs were just talking heads anyway. When they switched to digital, they were probably putting out less power, but the important problem was that the audio would cut in and out; the pictures were also blocky, but the parts that didn't change actually looked better some times.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
"Digital killed the analog star..."
Table-ized A.I.
It is all about the payload of that signal. The big Australian media companies are deliberately making sure that the programming they show OTA (Over The Air) in DVB-T digital quality is actually inferior to the quality of the same programming shown over paid-for (satellite, cable) feeds. Typically the subtitles and surround sound are stripped from the OTA signal, and there are claims that downconverting is taking place as well.
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
...the 1's and 0's are reversed. Digital TV watchers think Obama is white and Bush is black.
Table-ized A.I.
Thus confirming the stereotype.
Final moments in Sydney, Channel7 actually says farewell http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJaft0a5VXc
I live in a small town in the western US. I used to get four channels over the air on a good day with analog. Now, I get one. Not saying you're wrong, but I think people in more rural areas suffer more when the analog signal is cut.
Tell us more about your antenna.
I wonder if your "old" antenna is tuned for channel bands that are
not the bands used for digital.
There are some darn fine antenna designs on the internet
that can be made with Cu wire and a tape measure. The
first step is knowing the frequency bands you wish to watch.
A well tuned antenna is the first band pass filter to select the
signal for the receiver to dig data from.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
In Australia we have an government initiative called VAST (Viewer Access Satellite Television). Essentially, If you live in a rural area and have trouble getting OTA signals, they'll subsidize the cost of a satellite dish+decoder.
All the OTA channels are put up on the Optus C1 satellite and depending on your location they'll unlock the channels you're meant to get in your area.
I see no reason why this can't be extended to non-rural areas on a house-by-house basis.
In many implementations digital does have better coverage than analogue but that has far more to do with technology enhancements, changes in transmission power, and changes in spectrum than anything else.An analogue signal is intelligible for a longer distance than a digital one with all other elements staying the same and cause less interference to neighbouring bands too.
But all other elements are not staying the same, Digital television uses QAM64 or QAM256 with a scrambling code (to ensure pseudo-random distribution of symbols), ensuring a constant mean spectral density and envelope power output. Analog TV uses an AM vision carrier and (in Australia) an additional AM color carrier, where over 50% of the total transmitted power is simply used for synchronisation (as was required in TVs of the 1940s), and has a varying spectral density by image frequency, and varying envelope power by power.
Also it's dubious to claim Analog TV has less RFI on adjacent bands, as the large power peaks that analog TV requires are more likely to overload the frontend of a receiver with poor filtering than the spread spectrum of a digital TV transmission (in my experience), though both will cause interference, exarcerbated by TV transmissions being of such a larger total radiated power than most other transmissions.
Terrestrial broadcast TV sucks. It requires a fixed installed antenna to work reliably, and with the falling cost of DTH satellite dishes and LNBFs (fuck, I can get a complete DTH system for under $200NZ), it makes no sense to operate terrestrial national broadcasts (as in Australia and NZ) with high power transmission sites throughout the country, AND THEN transmit every channel AGAIN, TWICE, FOR EACH REGION, on both FTA and Pay satellite services (there are 8 of each channel in NZ on Optus D1 at 160.0E, you can't make that shit up!). Where I live, I can receive 8x 8MHz DVB-T transponders (two complete sets of the national service), and there are additional DVB-T2 transponders for terrestrial paytv (Igloo). That is over 64MHz of spectrum (more like 96MHz with guardbands) wasted repeating what many people receive off satellite, that could be used for hundreds or tens of thousands of cellular or CSMA stations. Add to that most of the country is getting GPON optical fiber installed, which has far in excess capacity to deliver television (there is even a reserved wavelength in the GPON system specification specifically for this) via multicast or dedicated wavelength (cable tv), which will probably soon be activated to support UDTV or better HDTV (the current MPEG4-AVC service is abysmally low bitrate).
It's a massive clusterfuck, and waste of massive amounts of public money for a service that will be short lived and even at inception was of questionable utility. Oh yea, we're paying a private company public money to build the above mentioned GPON system, who will retain private ownership when it's complete.
Here in Athens Greece we are in a transitional stage where most of the city have only digital but for some few places the analog signal still exists; few day ago i was watching a football game (the real one, where they play with the ball mostly with the... foot!) in a friend's house located in a neighborhood with both signals available where my friend's tv was tuned in digital and a neighbor watching the same game was tuned in analog - we kept hearing that neighbor cheer or boo almost a minute before we could see in our tv the reason, totaly destroying our experience (by the way, we soon understood that he was supporting the opposite team - they lost, we won!).
Its even worse than that. If you have two digital TVs of different brands there is a slight difference in the time taken to decode. So if you have a TV in the kitchen with the same program as you are watching in the lounge you get an annoying "echo" effect
this.
How do you get "one" ? The analogue channels are broadcast separately, often with lower signal power for less important channels because power costs money and the frequencies chosen for less important channels may conflict and be subject to power restrictions. But digital channels are distributed as "top hats" or multiplexes containing several channels, because you can squeeze a lot more digital video into the same bandwidth as the uncompressed analogue channel.
So e.g. there are people in the UK who are angry because they used to receive 4 or 5 analogue channels, albeit some were barely watchable, and now they're getting say 8-12 digital channels whereas most people are getting 40+, but you know, that's still like twice as many as they used to get.
I guess maybe the crazy US commercial networks thing means you might get like 3-4 channels that are all CBS branded or something instead of one channel from each of several different commercial providers?
Not really. My parents (rural Australia) got OK-ish analog reception pre the switch-off, plus or minus a bit of snow and static depending on weather and time of day. Now they either get great reception or bugger all with a little freezing, blocky, noisy mess in between, again depending on weather and time of day. Doesn't worry them too much as they never watched much TV but it does illustrate the problems some people are having.
In Norway they used the digital switchover as a chance to turn all (3 or 4ish) channels but the state broadcaster into payed channels, and they added a lot of new channels. They turned a somewhat credible free TV system with no setup cost into something useless. Now, either you like TV and have to pay, or most others don't really care and won't even bother to set up the free channel.
Digital is probably good overall, if it can free up some spectrum, but new technology certainly exposes how people can be greedy assholes. At least DVB-T can still be received with a passive receiver, which helps with privacy and stability
Analog TV is long gone in Poland. I don't remember the ./ thread so just to let you know.
If you wonder what is Poland it has much larger population (38 vs 23 milion) than Australia, it's noticeably smaller (yet was "discovered" centuries before) and last but not least Poland is the home country of boomerang (not Australia to common believe), see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boomerang :)))
A year ago they swiiched from analogue to digital in Ireland. I looked on it as a golden opportunity to free myself from tv. I haven't regretted it.
Did you submit it?
Slashdot is now a forum for Aussie community news?
I would say Australia shutting down analog TV is quite important tech news.
Not here. They took that into the calculations when they decided the power output of the transmitters. As a result, if you had an almost static free analogue picture, you'll get dropouts on digital. If you had moderate amounts of static, you'll get "no channels found".
My parents had to replace their antenna to get working digital TV, and they had just enough signal to not have any noticable static on analogue.
Here in germany, the transmission power has been reduced significantly when switching to digital. I have no idea how that affected the range.
Come to that, since they're building an nbn with high capacity land based connectivity, all broadcast is unnecessary.
The worst is when you almost lose signal for a fraction of a second. No pixelation, just a slight screen freeze, but now the video and audio are desynced by that fraction until you reboot your television.
Yea but you can get many more digital signals with the energy of a single analogue signal. Which means with the energy of a degraded analogue signal you can still get a perfect digital signal. In the reverse case, by the time the digital signal is failing, had you had an analogue signal there you would be getting absolutely nothing.
Analog degrades better if you're on the fringe.
Digital is pretty much "all or nothing", with freezes, posterizing, etc.. if you've got a bad signal.
If you've got a bad analog signal, you'll get snow and static, but you'll still be able to see what's happening.
But digital goes further, so if you're on the fringe of an analogue signal, you'll get a decent digital signal (well, as long as they're being transmitted from the same approximate location).
In theory. I live probably less than 10 miles from a major transmitter farm, but since it went digital, I have to be a lot more careful about fiddling with the antenna or the whole thing blues out, audio and all. And hi-fi audio is usually the last thing to go.
Sadly, shortly before the digital switch I'd discovered an interesting analog channel from a distant metro area. It was just at that point where you could get a snowy-but-watchable image. All gone now.
Seems improbable. Digital TV channels are multiplexed together, so one frequency carries multiple channels. If you can receive one okay then you should be able to get all the others on the same multiplex okay as well, since they are just different chunks of data in the same stream.
What is your explanation for this?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
A lot of that has to do with the channels being moved around more than digital vs. analog. During the move the FCC sold off a large portion of the VHF spectrum to the cellular companies. This moved a lot of the high-propagation stations to UHF with much smaller viewing areas. At the same time, the FCC sold off the higher end of the UHF spectrum which moved all the channels that had sketchy portions of the frequency down, causing their areas in some cases to double. In our area (Lansing, MI), we lost all of our VHF except one -- the rest moved to UHF (meaning I now have a hard time getting them when I live downtown due to the shadowing effect). I ended up having to put three antennas on my house, isolated from certain directions to avoid the multipath.
The NBN is finished. They've got Ziggy lined up with the axe and he's started chopping just like when he was brought in to hack up Telstra. The objective now is to make it fail and pin the blame on the previous government.
not true. I used to get a good image from analog, even picking up signal hops from other regions with the right weather. Now half my local channels don't work right. Digital would be great if it worked as well as analog. I even bought a big directional antenna, which helped compared to my older bunny ears. I can see the transmitting towers from my house. I live in the city so I'm not at all on the fringe of the signal range.
Australia can start to break the TV habit now too. I stopped watching all together, but moved to the computer for about the same amount of time. No health benefits, just have to download stuff to watch that used to be free on the tv.
Disagree, in the UK we got a good analogue signal. Now with digital, we are lucky to get any channels on digital without constant cutting out.
I hope their analog to digital conversion goes better than it did here in the USA. I've been quite disappointed. With analog I could get by with rabbit ears on the TV, with digital I had to put up a tower outside to get the same stations reliably (I went ahead and made it high enough that I get MORE channels now though, lemons/lemonade). The other issue is all the artifacting. You can see the compression blotches. You get used to it on SDTV, but it's absolutely horrible on HDTV.
I have two TVs of the same brand and they still aren't exact. It's close enough that it's more of a reverb than an echo, though.
"We should have kept just one analog channel for a local news station to broadcast on"
My guess is that there are many such channels available in your area. You may know them by the names FM and AM.
That sounds like a problem with your receiver. Back when I was using the free boxes, that would happen sometimes, but it was cleared up by changing the channel.
Because someone has an analog tv that is "good enough" doesn't make them a "crusty luddites" (holy crap ... really?). How many times does /. bemoan upgrading or changing just "because", and now someone who has analog is slandered? Besides that, luddite was someone who feared change and/or technology; so please use a different crusty insult. Thank you, come again.
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
In the US, the digital switch-over was poorly handled on the FCC's part, which resulted in your inability to get the same signals you got before.
Stations are issued a license specifying their transmitter power limit, and that power is based on the amount of area they cover. During the switch-over, a station with, say, a 100kW license was required to 1) still cover their assigned area with the analog signal, 2) run a digital signal in parallel to the analog one, and 3) not exceed their transmission power limit.
Since the digital signal is much more fault-tolerant than the analog ones were, most stations did a 90/10 split of their power limit, with 90% going to the analog signal and only 10% going to the digital one. They didn't lose much coverage on the fringe of their area, and the majority of their area (50-60%) got a spotty digital signal as well.
Fast forward a couple of years, and analog is EOL'ed. Now, the other 90% is free for the digital transmission, right? WRONG. If 10% is good enough to cover 60% of the area, then 30% should be more than enough, right? Well, no. Not that either. But 40% seems to be good enough. Except on the fringe, where static is replaced by an undecipherable digital stream. But it meets the FCC's coverage requirements, which are poorly enforced anyway.
The FCC should have issued parallel transmitter licenses for full power digital transmission, then revoked the analog license at the end of the switch-over. They didn't. But to fix the current mess that we have, they need to tell the license-holders to "use it (to its full power) or lose it". But they won't. They're mostly-incompetent government bureaucrats. They don't have to care.
With these channels moving around, it is also feasable that the broadcasting power is not as high, to keep from bleeding over onto channels aired from other areas. This was especially true before the transition, when you had both analogue and digital channels. After the switch over, only a couple of channels do I get stronger signals on - some are still giving me less than 60% of the signal (although most are now at 98% or better). What is sad is I live less than 15 miles from "broadcast hill" with a clear line-of-sight. I can see the antennas from my balcony. You would think that all I would have to do is point my antenna at the towers and I would have perfect signal.
Before the transition, a lot of my local stations were actually broadcasting the digital signal from their backup transmitters at the station, not from the transmitter on "broadcast hill". I know this because I called up the engineers of a couple of stations as I was having issues receiving their signal. So, they were broadcasting from a different location, at a lower power, on a different frequency, with a smaller tower, plus, before the transition, they might take the signal down completely for a while to do maintanance.
An example of channels moving is shown at this chart:
http://www.rabbitears.info/market.php?request=print_market&mktid=5
Before, DFW had 6 channels in the VHF range, now there are only 2 (BTW, I have no clue what that KSFW is, I don't get it, I have one channel "2.1" and it is Daystar).
What was worse is, after the transition, a couple of channels moved again to their new broadcast home, meaning that you had to rescan.
So you really cannot say that digital transmisison is worse than analogue, because there are many other variables that are in place.
I will say, however, that if you are living in the US and haven't rescanned in a couple of years, try that, and see if it helps. But as the parent said, you may have to end up putting up multiple antennas and repositioning them. It is not because digital doesn't go as far, it is because different frequencies and broadcast powers are being used now. About the only thing you can really do is to call up the station engineer at the station and ask if they have plans to increase their broadcast power.
I use the exact same 'rabbit-ears' for digital that I used for analog, the frequency range in US & Canada is identical. What's mainly happened is the need for a more directional antenna to pick up the US stations, for where I am anyway.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
They just need a directional antenna. I have line of sight to the CN Tower, so the Canadian channels come in fine. Buffalo's at least 90 degrees out from there where I am. Use the mapping tool on http://www.tvfool.com/ to see what you need.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Maybe there is something about the Australian digital standard which makes this true. But in the US, it simply is not. Right now, there are thousands of low-income working people in the NY metropolitan area who cannot watch TV. The WTC hosted antennas for the major networks. After 9/11, these networks had to go to inferior backups, making thousands either lose signal or have a marginal signal. The digital transition exacerbated this, such that those fringe people who were happy to have something snowy to watch now got nothing. So if you don't have cable (or Vudu) in NYC or northern NJ, you don't watch TV. Ironically, most of the people who have enough to afford cable in these areas STILL aren't seeing any of the digital benefits, because cable companies charge extra for the privilege of viewing shows that are supposed to be broadcast for free in HD.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
"I wonder if your "old" antenna is tuned for channel bands that are
not the bands used for digital."
This is a very common problem. Analog TV was mostly broadcast on VHF, with a couple of fringe/local channels on UHF (And they were latecomers)
Digital is pretty much only broadcast on UHF. The older antennas are all VHF only, with those in the last 10 years or so VHF/UHF.
A lot of people that were happy with mild to moderate snow on analog, now have issues with digital. However if they get a new antenna, they're highly likely to have a better digital signal than they ever had with analog.
They switched off OTA analogue here in Canada a little while back causing a lot of problems for people living in rural locations.
Cable & Telecom companies bought up the bands but they aren't DOING anything with them.
So what was the point?
(also as has been mentioned by MANY others the Digital signal is atrocious in bad weather, at least with the old antenna I could still hear and see some things...)
If I had mod points, you'd have one.
Our local PBS affiliate (the only channel I watch) switched early and broadcast at full power initially --- I was able to get the signal in my basement w/ rabbit ears --- until the other stations switched over and they also reduced power --- can't pick up the signal in my basement so had to run a line up to the living room and build a digital TV antenna:
http://www.current.org/wp-content/themes/current/archive-site/ptv/ptv0821make.pdf
When the weather is bad I have to pick it up from behind the couch and place it in the window.
If you're in Australia, beat the rush and grab any parts you need before the rush (or go into business making and selling them).
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Also, audio works too if it is bad.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
We should have kept just one analog channel for a local news station to broadcast on, amping it up in emergencies, for when there are storms and the like.
Why would you keep the entire analog infrastructure in place for one channel "for emergencies"? We have an existing medium just for that purpose. It's called radio. Emergency radios are cheap, long lasting and can sit passively and unobtrusively until needed.
And put it up higher, and point it in the right direction.
and point it in the right direction
in the right direction
ATSC can be very directional. I have to go up on my roof and adjust my antenna every few months after wind blows it off angle. Although now that it's been up there over 10 years, corrosion may be causing some problems.
You can even use a piece of scrap wire as an antenna if you point it in the right direction. I know because I did it over Thanksgiving. New TV in a room that hadn't had TV for a while, two cable outlets in the room, neither of which had a signal, but a nice fat roll of speaker wire that I stuffed into the end of a gender changer. After a few seconds holding it at arms length and rotating myself, I quickly found the direction. Then I hid it under the rug. And I said let there be football*, and there was football.
*handegg actually, but no matter how it's played, everyone still wants to watch it
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
This, and UHF is less forgiving of obstacles. UHF is pretty much LOS. When NBC and CBS moved from VHF(RF3 and RF5) to UHF, I lost them because I've got buildings between the antenna and Mt. Mansfield.
The only advantage is the antenna is *way* smaller than the old fishbone monsters.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
A good preamp with a low noise floor will help (something in the 3dB or lower range), just make sure it doesn't have too much gain and includes an FM trap if they are some near stations.
SN/R is more important than signal strength with digital OTA (at least with 8VSB)
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
analog channels were mostly on VHF (better propagation around obstacles). Digital is mostly on UHF where it's pretty much line-of-sight
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Get or build a better antenna. And put it up higher, and point it in the right direction.
I think you're missing the point. I live in a small city halfway between the two major markets. With a small whip inside antenna I used to get all the networks. Today, I get two channels of OPB (PBS). That's only because there is an OPB station on top of the hill just north of my house.
Having to put up a high, directional antenna instead of using a simple piece of wire inside is pretty good proof that the digital signals don't go as far or cover as well as the old analog ones.
I could actually live with a bit of snow on the signal. There wasn't that much that needs crystal clarity of 1080p HD. And since the solution to the "little bit of snow" is now "nothing at all", I think "little bit of snow" was better.
analog channels were mostly on VHF (better propagation around obstacles). Digital is mostly on UHF where it's pretty much line-of-sight
There's still lots of digital TV on VHF. In Las Vegas, for instance, five of the local broadcasters are on VHF. One of them (KSNV) is even on low-band VHF.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Seems improbable. Digital TV channels are multiplexed together, so one frequency carries multiple channels.
CAN carry multiple channels. Doesn't mean they have to or that they always do.
If you can receive one okay then you should be able to get all the others on the same multiplex okay as well, since they are just different chunks of data in the same stream. What is your explanation for this?
Perhaps the simplest explanation really is the simplest explanation: four different analog channels migrated to four different digital channels, not four data streams on the same channel.
Out here in the wild west, most of the big network stations were too enamored of all the digital real estate they were being given by the FCC to ever let anyone else play in their sandbox. It was only the wanna-bees like CW and FOX that combined channels in one transmitter. Yeah, wouldn't it be a great system if every transmitter was required to carry data streams for all the analog channels that used to be covering an area? That way four transmitters could be spread out to cover a large area and nobody lost anything, instead of four transmitters carrying one channel each that can't be received by everyone.
I know that I have some channels with 10 subchannels, and some channels with just 1. Maybe the frequency they're receiving is one of the ones that doesn't have multiple signals multiplexed into it?
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Yes, that was the problem with my mother's TV in the US. She could get several channels wtih analog, and most of them had a bit of snow but still very watchable. Switch to digital broadcast and suddenly she was only picking up a couple in English. The surprise is that some channels that previously had come in well were not coming in at all in digital. I think some broadcasters just weren't bothering to optimize their coverage. So she went with satellite TV just to watch "local" shows.
I'm suspicious of broadcasters though. They may not be converting all their transmitters in order to save costs, or not optimizing coverage areas, especially with declining ad revenue from more remote areas because so many former viewers have switched to cable/satellite. You see this with mobile phone service and internet too, the "last mile" is often ignored.
You can build the best TV antenna on the planet because it is free and free:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/08/03/14/2021223/hobbyists-create-gpled-diy-super-tv-antenna
Several variants have been developed that suit specific needs, such as UHF-only, UHF with VHF, and a variety of other local and International requirements.
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
Plus putting up better antennas is a non-starter for many people who rely on broadcast, poorer people who can't afford it, renters, or the elderly who can't go up on the roofs.
Okay, technically, I do get two channels that are multiplexed. They're both the same public TV channel, but one fills the whole screen and the other has a wide, black box around a smaller picture in the middle of the screen. Same shows and everything, just two different sizes of picture, for some reason. And those are the "two" channels that I get. The main networks are all gone.
Sounds like 16:9 plus the same signal letterboxed into 4:3, which your box/TV convert into 16:9 by padding the image with vertical bars.
Those guys who owns that channel are complete morons because if the watcher has a box converting digital to analog signal, he already have function in the box to output the image in letterboxed 4:3
In Australia the move to digital has meant they could consolidate channel frequencies. Previously we had channels 2, 7, 9, 10, 28 and 31. Now all broadcast happens in the frequencies of channels 6-12. I'm in Brisbane which has been digital only for a while. This means one can get a smaller antenna with better gain as it only listens on a narrower range.
My parents used to receive one station on channel 0 and the rest in UHF. Digital has moved all stations to the same 6 channel UHF block, so they can now take down the old VHF antenna completely.
--
no sig for you. come back one year.
Bullshit.
Bad weather knocks out our digital signal worse than our satelite... and we are in town, very close to the tower.
Farther shmarther. There is no static. If you rely on over the air and hope to get Thunderstorm Warnings or Tornado Tornadoes, you are SOL.
Put your sales pitch back in your pocket, my real life experience is enough to prove it wrong.
noone cares if sheep cant watch tv?
A major change when the US made its digital transition is that many stations moved to UHF. Stations operating on UHF are allowed to use more power and the UHF signals have better penetration of buildings and suffer less interference from household devices, so urban reception is generally superior, but reception at the edges of the station's fringe area may suffer.
Most high VHF (channels 7 through 13) were allowed to return to their VHF frequencies after the full digital transition but some chose not to, and some stations were allowed to relocate to high VHF frequencies. Low VHF stations (channels 2 through 6) in major markets were required to move to other frequencies; a few smaller markets still have stations on those channels.
Channel 7 here in Boston is an example of a high VHF station that moved to UHF. They briefly returned to their original channel but found that reception was problematic. This was in part because they were the only Boston station to return to VHF (Boston had also had stations on low VHF channels 2, 4, and 5, all of which were required to relocate to UHF) so most viewers had installed UHF-only DTV antennas. As a result, channel 7 got permission to go back to the UHF channel that they used during the digital transition (while analog and digital broadcasts were being done simultaneously) and shut down VHF operation.
Two stations that moved TO the VHF band are WNAC-TV in Providence (actual locaiton Rehoboth MA, formerly channel 64, now broadcasts on channel 12) and WWLP-TV in Springfield MA (actual location Chicopee, formerly channel 22, now broadcasts on channel 11).
Here in America we are fighting to keep our free digital. Former Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson once told me In letter that because of the 9/11 Commission mandate, channels 14-68 (ultra high frequency or UHF) were needed as "emergency broadcast stations"! What a load of crap. And now the Huffington post at AOL.com no longer shows what's available on the airwaves. THEY WERE THE ONLY ONES DOING IT UP UNTIL 2 WEEKS AGO! Go to thefutureoftv.com and tell those idiot Dems & Republicans to LEAVE OUR FREE TV ALONE! Then go to TVFOOL.com & find out where you need to aim your antenna and stop paying high prices for a form of media that started free but may not remain free.
Constant alertness, and constant willingness to fight back are the "PRICE OF FREEDOM".
Radios don't have that visual aspect to them. A screen can convey so much more information than just listening to something. Local news may have a ticker with updates of school closures scrolling by at all time. They may show the weather system moving through or a projection there of. Someone may have hearing difficulties and need to see something, especially if they rely on closed captioning.
I don't think it would have hurt to kept one channel available. But I think the FCC is too much focused on revenue and commercial aspects to really care.
A "non-starter". Well, if watching TV is so fucking difficult for the challenged, perhaps they should listen to AM radio. Do you think they would be able to manage that? Buy a transistor radio at a yard sale, and pick up the cubs game? Maybe the US Government should be required to provide them free batteries, would that be better for you, darinbob?