Complaints Pour In After Digital TV Test 537
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.'"
Re:Just get a better antenna! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Mmhmm (Score:5, Informative)
So it wasn't a problem with the receivers or the tvs, it was the stupid TV station not putting out enough juice.
Re:It has to be done sometime (Score:3, Informative)
"but I think the TV industry (whoever they may be) would be running a whole lot of PSAs on what is going to happen and how to make sure your TV still works."
Yes, they are.
There are commercials on almost every channel, many done by the local news stations and tons by cable and satellite companies that are educating people about the switchover, what they'll need to do and where to go to get more info. Obviously in the cable and satellite cases the solution is buying cable or satellite, though some are surprisingly honest. "You'll either have to buy a converter box OR you can buy our wonderful product and it'll be so much better!" Wouldn't have expected them to even mention the converter box option.
Bad Analog Signal? (Score:2, Informative)
With analog, poor reception will give you snow, and a fuzzy picture. You can still make out most of the image, but it looks like crap. With digital, poor reception will give you choppy video and pixelation.
Re:What a waste (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Mmhmm (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, I read that and sort of went "well, duh". Talk about a non-issue.
Personally, I have one of those gub'ment subsidized boxes on my old analog TV and I've never had this many channels or this clear a picture - but I'm in the city.
Re:I expected as much... (Score:3, Informative)
there ain't nuttin ta stop y'all from trying out the newfangled digeetal thingy before the anylog tranmishun goes dark.
Untrue. Currently, almost all DTV signals are broadcasting UHF. Post-transition, many stations will shift digital signals to VHF, which has notably different reception qualities than UHF.
UHF also requires a different antenna than VHF.
Re:It has to be done sometime (Score:2, Informative)
You must watch even less TV than I do. The only TV I've watched in the past 6 months was the Olympics on NBC, and I saw a dozen announcements being done by the local NBC station about digital over-the-air. They hammered on it. I haven't watched any TV since the Olympics ended, but I'm sure they're still at it. The over-the-air stations have a heavily vested interest in making sure every single broadcast-only viewer has a converter box. If they lose viewership because people didn't get converters, their commercial advertisement rates drop, and they make less money. As another post pointed out, the rate of TV viewing has dropped 50% in the lower age categories, with no signs of recovery. They're already hemorrhaging viewers. They can't afford to lose Grandpa too, now that his grandson is a loss.
Re:What benifit anway? (A landfill full of TVs?) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:What benifit anway? (A landfill full of TVs?) (Score:2, Informative)
I Live in Wilmington (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Informative)
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 :).
Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Mmhmm (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Let the pain begin! (Score:2, Informative)
Digital channels have sub-channels, so you'll usually get several originating from one place (they have names like 14.1, 14.2, 14.3 etc). The .1 feed is the main network feed, and if it's a news channel, they tend to have a weather subchannel (.2 or .3) and the third channel is usually community programming or infomercials.
Digital TV reception is very directional, you should try pointing your TV antenna slightly askew and starting channel search again. You might get some completely different channels. The worst thing about it is that it doesn't degrade gracefully, so you will have to have close to 100% reception to get anything watchable.
Re:Hmmmm (Score:2, Informative)
Try the Silver Sensor Antenna for UHF reception [amazon.com]. It's cheap and widely reputed to be the best indoor HD antenna out there. Digital TV reception is very directional though, you will have to play around on it and you might have to get several antennas hooked together to get all your channels depending on where you live.
Re:Mmhmm (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Informative)
HD is not the same as Digital (DTV).
Re:I expected as much... (Score:3, Informative)
Your overall point is correct. However based on my experiences with the degradation of a digital signal on a noisy cable line, I would say that a digital signal is not necessarily a binary "perfect picture or no picture at all." (I'm assuming it would be similar for a noisy or weak over-the-air signal. Am I wrong?)
Depending on the noise source, a poor signal can mean seeing occasionally blockyness in the image, or getting frames intermittently (so that the image freezes from time to time), or getting audio but not video. Beyond a certain error rate, the converter box will probably just display a "no signal" message. But it is possible to build boxes that show a "best effort" reconstruction of the signal, even though some data/frames are missing.
However your original point is still correct in a variety of senses. The boxes are probably designed conservatively, so that they report "no signal" rather than display a low-quality image (how much error-correction are they designed to do?). And the degradation of a digital signal is less forgiving than an analog--rather than fuzziness and noise gradually entering the image, you get very ugly and distracting artifacts (blocks, freezing). The picture quality goes from "perfect" to "unwatcheable" over a narrow range in signal-to-noise.
Not that it's universal... (Score:4, Informative)
... 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!)
Re:I expected as much... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Mmhmm (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hmmmm (Score:3, Informative)
External antennas are the way to go anyway, preferably coupled with a good masthead amplifier. I use a Televes DAT75 with an FTE masthead amp. I'm 70 miles from my transmitter (in the UK) and get absolutely perfect reception on the TV's internal DVB tuner (slightly less good using the twin Hauppauge in my mythTV box, but that's Hauppauge for you....)
Re:I agree (Score:5, Informative)
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 .
Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Hmmmm (Score:3, Informative)
If that doesn't work, the Channel Master CM 4228 [solidsignal.com] is the best UHF antenna out there, and also covers high VHF much better then other "DTV" antennas.
That antenna, plus a rotator and decent height will give you best possible reception in most areas.
Note that the receiver sensitivity plays a large part also. I have two different DTV receivers, one for my MythTV box and one analog converter. One of them gets a lot more stations then the other, and less dropouts on the marginal ones. The Zenith DTT901 is the analog converter, and highly recommended for it's reception. Also cost me $10 after the FCC coupon.
Re:Hmmmm (Score:3, Informative)
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/ [tvfool.com]
Re:A mistake on many levels (Score:3, Informative)
Given how touchy satellite service is in even the slightest amount of rain, I can only imagine just how touchy some the local stuff will become to any form of interference. And unlike the satellite stuff, the local stuff is only being obtained from a single source.
I think a lot of the problems with satellite reception come from the directionality of the dish, the frequency in which it's broadcast, and the fact that the transmitter is up in the sky and not down on the ground (relatively). This causes satellite signals [wikipedia.org] to have problems with objects between the transmitter and receiver while terrestrial broadcasts [wikipedia.org] have the benefit of the signal propagating in all different directions as well as the ability to pass through objects.
Hey, I'm no electrical engineer.
Re:GPL DTV antenna? (Score:3, Informative)
I think most antenna designs fall into the category of public domain:
http://www.arrl.org/catalog/?category=Antennas%2C+Transmission+Lines+%26+Propagation [arrl.org]
Re:Hmmmm (Score:3, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]
Re:I agree (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I expected as much... (Score:2, Informative)
Keep in mind that rabbit ears do very little for digital TV. You need a high quality UHF antenna. That is why your analog is nice, and your digital reception sucks.
Remember, the analog spectrum is being auctioned off. A channel may advertise itself as 4, 6, or whatever, but it's actual band is in UHF.
Re:Hmmmm (Score:2, Informative)
Re:A mistake on many levels (Score:3, Informative)
- I don't see ANY signal degradation AT ALL, even with extremely heavy cloud cover, and pouring rain. It sounds like your dish isn't pointed very well, and/or isn't mounted firmly enough (moving in the wind).
- Ku-Band satellite signals are at FAR higher frequencies than are used for terrestrial TV, which makes them far more susceptible to interference, like moisture.
- The modulation, error correction, polarization, antennas, etc. used to broadcast/receive satellite signals are completely and totally different than those for terrestrial broadcasts.
- Satellites are broadcasting about a thousand miles further away than terrestrial antennas will be, and at FAR, FAR lower power.
- All these issues have next to nothing to do with "digital" versus "analog".
I'm utterly confused. There are multiple broadcasting antennas, just as there are multiple satellites. In both cases, you're only "obtaining" a signal from one at a time.
A DTV Sucess Story (Score:3, Informative)
I see so many bad experiences on here that I just have to chime in with my own personal experience.
I filed the forms, got my 2 coupons, and bought the cheapest 2 boxes I could find, at an online store for $43 each, shipped.
I live in metropolitan Seattle, ground floor of a 2 story building in a hilly area, and my TV antenna is an unamplified Radioshack bunny-ear antenna, sitting on the windowsill.
Without tweaking the antenna direction, I get all 6 channels that were relatively snow-free on analog, with a drastic improvement in picture quality. With the help of the on-screen signal strength meter, I can adjust the antenna to pull in the 2 other channels which had heavy snow on analog, now completely snow-free. And I now have on-screen TV listings!
I also get 2 spanish-language channels which I never noticed before.
All the UHF stations which were unwatchable before, are still unwatchable.
2 problems I have found: The proximity of the antenna to my CRT TV really matters. It seems like the TV causes a lot of interference, If I get the antenna with a yard or so of the TV, the picture goes away very quickly. On analog, I don't recall having this trouble.
The other issue is that if I leave my converter box powered on for over 48 hours (i.e. if I don't turn the box off when I turn the TV off), it loses signal on it's own, apparently from overheating. The Artec box I have is the cheapest box I know of, and the case has no vent holes. Simply remembering to turn the box off when I turn the TV off keeps everything happy, although it means that the program-guide takes a few seconds to update when I turn it back on.
Re:Mmhmm (Score:1, Informative)
Absolutely not. I have been a broadcast engineer for over a decade and currently serve as the Chief Engineer for major stations in the number one market in the US. The only stations that vary power during the day are AM stations which may be required to do so by the terms of their license at local sunrise and local sunset to prevent skywave interference.
Running less than 90% or more than 105% of authorized power for an extended period or as a matter of routine practice without Special Temporary Authority from the FCC is cause for issuance of a Notice of Violation. The FCC can and does cite stations that fail to replace a deteriorated power tube or have other transmission issues. (Yes, many broadcast transmitters, particularly those with 20kW+ output, still use a vacuum tube final.)
On occasion overnight maintenance or failures occur that may require use of a lower powered auxiliary transmitter or transmitter site, or reduced power operation may be necessary while operating on a standby generator. But as a general rule, it's not a problem to keep the transmitter at exactly 100% of authorized power output.
Anyone Home? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm in North Carolina, but not in Wilmington. Maybe those annoyed folks down there haven't been actually watching TV, because it's been almost impossible to avoid the multiple daily commercials about the switch, the incessant crawls across the screen, and the incessant news stories. Maybe these are the same people who walk out of a flooded house and complain that no one warned them about the hurricane.
Per local press, the largest proportion of complaints were directed against a single station whose digital coverage area is smaller than it's analog umbrella was. If true, then with or without a converter, those folks won't be able to watch that channel.