Thursday, March 20, 2008
Viewer DTV calls
We get very interesting calls occasionally from viewers with reception issues. There was one that came through yesterday that I want to share.
A gentleman in Clarence NY had just set up his converter box and had great results with most local stations. There were a couple he couldn’t receive, though, including WIVB. I tried to help him work through what can sometimes be a tricky setup problem.
He had a rotor-type antenna on his roof that he used to feed the converter. You remember the antennas you used to see on a lot of roofs before cable and satellite became popular? A rotating antenna can actually make it more difficult to tune a digital signal. The problem being if you’re sweeping through and pass by a good reception position, the receiver may not have enough time to lock to the signal. With analog you can easily see a picture appear through the snow on the screen and keep aiming the antenna until you actually see the picture improve dramatically. Digital television does not “fade-in” like analog. You will either have a picture or not. (Later, I’ll qualify this statement.) To further complicate the issue, the converter (or your new HDTV) has to do a channel scan to know a channel is there in the first place. So you have to do a kind of dance of aim/scan, aim/scan, aim/scan. This can take several tries. This is another good reason to get your converter sooner rather than later. After analog goes away in February of 2009, it will make the process that much more difficult.
My answer to his problem was to attach his antenna directly to his analog TV and rotate it until reception of analog Channel 4 was as good as he could get it. Our analog and digital transmitters are at the same site in Colden. Then he could put the converter back on line and do a channel scan again. This should have cleared his problem.
One of the important lessons from this is the channel scan. This establishes a baseline for the receiver - HD set or converter. If you ever find that one day WIVB or WNLO disappears from your set’s channel lineup (and we've heard of this happening), the first thing we recommend is to do a channel scan so the receiver can re-discover what’s out there.
A gentleman in Clarence NY had just set up his converter box and had great results with most local stations. There were a couple he couldn’t receive, though, including WIVB. I tried to help him work through what can sometimes be a tricky setup problem.
He had a rotor-type antenna on his roof that he used to feed the converter. You remember the antennas you used to see on a lot of roofs before cable and satellite became popular? A rotating antenna can actually make it more difficult to tune a digital signal. The problem being if you’re sweeping through and pass by a good reception position, the receiver may not have enough time to lock to the signal. With analog you can easily see a picture appear through the snow on the screen and keep aiming the antenna until you actually see the picture improve dramatically. Digital television does not “fade-in” like analog. You will either have a picture or not. (Later, I’ll qualify this statement.) To further complicate the issue, the converter (or your new HDTV) has to do a channel scan to know a channel is there in the first place. So you have to do a kind of dance of aim/scan, aim/scan, aim/scan. This can take several tries. This is another good reason to get your converter sooner rather than later. After analog goes away in February of 2009, it will make the process that much more difficult.
My answer to his problem was to attach his antenna directly to his analog TV and rotate it until reception of analog Channel 4 was as good as he could get it. Our analog and digital transmitters are at the same site in Colden. Then he could put the converter back on line and do a channel scan again. This should have cleared his problem.
One of the important lessons from this is the channel scan. This establishes a baseline for the receiver - HD set or converter. If you ever find that one day WIVB or WNLO disappears from your set’s channel lineup (and we've heard of this happening), the first thing we recommend is to do a channel scan so the receiver can re-discover what’s out there.
# posted by DJM @ 3:05 PM 
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