Home audio & video forum: Digital TV is a bust!

it's funny, i had great reception without digital, and even during a storm when it would fuzz a little the programs were still watchable. but with digital there's no in between, either the signal gets there or or doesn't, and when it doesn't the program skips like a scratched dvd and becomes unwatchable. it's one of those things that makes me wish they'd stop developing new technoligies that force everyone to buy new stuff. the new is almost never better anymore, and everything is made to last less time than the previous thing. do you ever get the feeling we're being manipulated?

digital tuners built in there NEW tv's are having the same trouble with digital tv in our area,, so it doesn't makes sense to toss a perfectly good tv to buy a new digital ready one for the same signal loss checkered screen,, that makes a lot of sense.....Im glad i bought the box first,, rather than find out that a new tv would have been a real waste of money sitting in the corner and i would be watching uhf on my old trusty great picture tv.....

I have an older TV, with a Zenith-LG converter box, and it works great.

I suspect that the problem is getting a strong enough signal to the television set. In that case, I suspect that a new antenna, not a new television, is the likely solution. If not that, then (sigh) sign up for cable television.

The problem has been documented and the gov't is trying to figure out what to do about it. It doesn't help that about 1/5 of Americans plan to do nothing when the switch comes in Feb. That's right -- no converter box or anything else. Guess how many phone calls the Feds will get on Feb 17th -- tens of millions -- when all those TV's stop working. Congress doesn't want the phone calls, either, so they're trying to find a way out of this before then. Easiest fix -- keep analog around for a while longer. No guarantee of that yet, but don't be surprised when it happens, either. The Feds just have to move the high end UHF (ch. 52-69, I think) to capture the spectrum they plan on selling (it's all about the money), so as long as they can do that, they'll be happy and won't really care about how long it takes to finish the rest of the move to digital. They may even figure out a way to keep those UHF stations around at lower analog frequencies -- there aren't that many stations up in those high UHF frequencies. Easier to retrofit a few stations for another 3-5 years than to deal with 20 million ticked-off viewers with no TV and plenty of time to write, call, and complain (and vote).

Hi, Keith here in Amherst, NY

We went for the the top box through the local MalWart, price was acceptable and performance is mixed.

First off, I don't watch enough TV to make a free box worth it but I was out voted (outshouted?? Something like that...)

The local market has all of the major networks plus CW and a couple of religious stations. All of them have a digital equivalent on the air, even the LPTV station and they aren't required to switch . I get multiple programs on the majority of the channels and now have 3 PBS feeds, a full-time weather channel, more sports (if you call Olympic trials 'sports') and frustrating dropouts that I didn't have to put up with before.

I am in the prime 'local' signal area, 6 of the stations are less than 10 miles north of me and the other 5 are 12 miles to the south of me, the southern transmitters are 1500+ feet higher than me and the northern transmitters have towers that I can see from my roof. No signal problems there.

I do know something about UHF propagation as I have been in amateur radio for 40+ years and utilize the same frequency ranges for communications. the problem here is not signal strength but is multipath. On analog TV the multipath will give you ghosts, on digital it causes the dreaded 'No Signal' black screen.

The eye, and the average viewer can tolerate a bit of ghosting, even a lot of ghosting still leaves you with some usable signal and the audio is fine. With digital TV the bit error rate rises very quickly with multipath and the box gives up and dumps the channel on you.

So, digital is great, or it's not there. Analog is good and deteriorates with noise and ghosts, but >>IT'S STILL THERE!!!< I'll take the ghosts myself.

As for the antenna, what's out there is old tech and advertising hype. The "HD-Ready" antennas are UHF log-periodic yagis, the same as the UHF-only fringe antennas sold before, but with a snazzy box and higher price. The set-top "HD_Ready" antennas appear to be UHF loops with some gingerbread added for visual enhancement. Regardless of the model and brand, the theory behind a directional TV antenna is derived from fundamental research and discoveries from the 1920's and 1930's. Even the big parabolic UHF antennas are based on designs from the first radiotelescopes in the 1930's.

Now, one thing I can't dispute is that a new antenna is (probably) a good idea. The corrosion from air pollution quickly degrades most, if not all TV antennae and efforts to clean up paper-thin elements and screw connection exposed to the elements is iffy at best. I homebrew my ham radio antennas and if TV manufactures build their antenna like mine we would have scrappers climbing roofs to steal them. I am going to make an "HD-Ready" antenna, log-periodic cell with additional directors, solid 3/16" elements and Delrin insulators but I need time for that. That's a 'Later' project.

I also need to justify $0.85 per foot for the better coax cable and $5 each for the connectors, RG-6 & F-connectors suck, plain and simple.

The DTV changeover was a political move rather than an engineering move. It's gong to cost everybody a load of money and grief and all it will do is drive yet more people to cable and satellite. The cable guys probably bought the FCC off to force the change anyway.

W. Keith Hibbert,WB2VUO
Tech Coordinator, ARRL WNY Section
Amherst, NY: Grid FN02ox

Hi again, Keith here in Amherst, NY

The last couple of paragraphs got cut off. I must have exceeded the text limit, oh well...

II am looking at building my own HDTV antler. Having built many ham radio UHF and UHF+ antennas it's within my capabilities.

Basically one needs a decent wide-band UHF directional antenna and also one that is matched to the coax line, a poor match will add additional losses. The commercial Radio Shack and BigBox HDTV antennas are flimsy and inherently mot well matched. The RG-6 coax is not the greatest choice and the F-conectors suck big time, they also leak.

NOTE: This will be a project to get the family off my butt, not something I really want to do.

There are many antenna designs out there and the best one for this endeavor would be a log-periodic or a log-yagi. A parabolic dish would be nice, but a very accurate and rugger (read 'Expensive') rotator would be required for that.

I will copy a scale the commercial UHF ham radio antennas whe I get to this. Good antennas have insulated elements on a 3/4" - 1 1/4" aluminum boom and are fed with a short section of small rigid or semi-rigid coax to an N-connector, followed with a larger diameter coax with matching connectors. All of this is waterproof and over engineered for long life and reliability. It won't be cheap, but i will be a challenge.

I'll be following this discussion as I can.

73, Keith, WB2VUO, ARRL Tech Coordinator, WNY Section
Amherst, NY: Grid FN02ox

Digital TV is great - when it all comes together. Our radio ham and antennaguy have got the solutions, but there are many variables to the successful reception of TV. There are also a number of problems.

1. While both analogue and digital signals are transmitted from the same location/area, there are problems with bandwidth and signal interference. Only one analogue TV signal can be transmitted on one frequency(channel), while up to 5 or 6 digital TV channels can be transmitted on one frequency. When the changeover occurs and analogue channels are no longer transmitted, the analogue transmitter frequencies can be used to transmit more digital TV channels and the power used can be increased giving better reception. Until that happens digital signals have to be kept lower in power to prevent interefering with analogue signals. In addition, as already mentioned, the same TV programme transmitted from two sites cannot be mixed in the way analogue ones can. So multipath reception of digital signals does not work.

2. There is a lot of hype perpetrated about 'analog' and 'digital' aerials. An aerial is an aerial and transmits and receives both analog and digital signals equally without knowing what type it is! I had new aerials installed at my home to replace very old 18 element UHF yagis which were about 30+ years old. I was told I would need 'digital aerials' but rather than argue I let the antenna installer put up the new ones. I then wanted to have TV on my PC using a USB stick receiver/decoder so I dug out one of the old aerials, mounted it on a pole about 8 feet above ground, pointed it to the local transmitter, about 5 miles away, and I get over 80 TV and radio stations.

3. I can understand the need for newer designs to our TV aerials as my local transmitter transmits a total of 4 analog channels and the 80+ digital signals, TV and radio, on 5 digital channels, covering channels 22 to 59, almost the whole UHF TV range(21-69 in the UK). So the new digital aerials need to be 'wide band' to be truly effective in my area. The transmitter on channel 59 has the strongest transmitted signal, but one of my old receivers causes the picture to constantly pixellate and the sound crackles. The other two newer receivers have signal strength indicators on the channel info dialogs, show a stronger signal and do not suffer from these problems due to newer hardware designs I am sure. They all come off the same aerial and three channel signal amplifier.

In conclusion, digital TV is good/great when it works. There is no Government plot against the general public and if your home is badly sited and you don't have the right gear, you will not have a good experience with digital TV. That is why cable and satellite transmitters make money for these companies. Internet TV is unlikely to meet the demand for every citizen to use it due to bandwidth limitations, as much as the ISPs might want to encourage it. After all they will impose download limits or charge by the Gbyte downloaded!

Go here if you want to read about how I got the information:

http://www.computing.net/answers/digitalhome/digital-signal-antenna-vs-analog/319.html

If you have an UHF antenna for outside, that is what should connect to your converter box. (Do NOT connect VHF to converter box.)