I have (had) a massive, just massive UHF/VHF antenna, it was a zillion elements and about a football field long. The UHF section was a huge corner reflector thing hanging way off the front. I know the difference between UHF and VHF, I have a ham radio license, I'm familiar with the basic concepts of antenna construction, I've built a few myself.


I'm not looking at anything anymore. When a free television virtually pulled from the trash works better than the whizzy new tech that's supposed to replace it - well, I'm reticent to invest anything it it.


I miss analog hills.


Ummm....and this is different (in terms of my experience) how?



No, I'm not. I know that the DTV system (ATSC) can carry HD but does not have to. My point is that I can't recall ever being at a party where people were griping about the picture quality on their TV. I, like many other folks, didn't really have a problem with the NTSC system, it was, like AM radio, "good enough" for the job and a technology that was mature, cheap and effective.



My point exactly. Most people don't see the difference. If you can't tall fat-o-vision from HD, that means there's really no point (for most folks) to having HD at all.
To be honest, until recently, I didn't really see a major difference for HD vs. SD, in terms of picture quality. The gamma still is horrid, the compression artifacts are really annoying. I have been checking out uncompressed 1080i via digital downloads, and it's really not all that wonderful (at least to me). Certainly it's not going to be enough for me to go out and buy any new gear, ever.



Yeah, I know all about doppler shifts - I compensated for them when I used to work AO-SAT for field day and such when I was more active in Ham Radio. It's amazing to me that the slight movement of a car, relatively speaking, can kill an ATSC signal, whereas I can stream video with no problem via my Verizon mobile card.

I've hammered on this one long enough. I think this is a poor technology, one that is unnecessarily complex and expensive, and is solving a problem nobody has. It was imposed by fiat by a government that was supposed to re-allocate spectrum to the public good. The "D" block is a fiasco, the balance of the 700 Mhz auction was hardly a huge success, and here we are, a few months away, and the last thing I'll ever watch OTA is going to be the Olympics via an ancient - but working - Analog NTSC tower in Philadelphia.

Hi martinfocazio

Have you tried a HDTV E-PHEMT mast LNA such as the one you can find here at http://www.researchcomms.com/hdtv.html, which can give around 20dB Gain and only 0.4 dB Noise figure. That should help considerably with your UHF signal problems.

Sounds like you know about antennas and radio. You didn't say that before. I was just trying to help, that's all. Most folks these days have never even seen a TV antenna up close, let alone know VHF vs. UHF or how to aim one. Cable and satellite are the norm now (in urban and suburban settings at least).

I do disagree with you about digital vs. analog one being superior to the other. But that's OK. We can agree to disagree. It surely depends on our circumstances. Digital reception just trounces analog reception in my area. Even with low power transmitters for the digital and high power transmitters for the analog. I do agree that good upconverted DVDs are fine. Yes, I can clearly tell the difference between BR (or HDDVD) and upconverted DVD, but it really doesn't change the movie watching experience. It's most impressive for those who like to closely observe the nose hairs in the actors though. But anyone who puts up with stretch-o-vision broadcast or adjusts the aspect ratio to "fill their screen" by distorting things is pretty ignorant IMHO.

SD broadcast TV viewed on my 65" HDTV looks pretty lousy (partly because of the horrible compression that Dish adds). That is typical for HDTVs, but some are better than others at displaying marginal SD programming. However, if I use my OTA antenna, ATSC still beats NTSC by a good margin, and HD really shines. Your areas is just different I guess.

The problem with Digital (and having chatted with Marty more than once I know some of his experiences) - picture you are "deep fringe" - with analog (and in this case AM is even better than FM) you might get a static filled signal - in TV, we'll call it "seeing raster", but the human mind can pull signal from the noise. In digital, you drop ONE bit, you have no reception. It's wonderful when it works, and you can get every bit in each digital packet - but with analog, if you lose the same amount of data, you don't lose signal, you just get a noisy signal

And this is the main flaw in the whole DTV scheme - it's not fault-tolerant like TCP/IP.

This is the main issue with DTV - there's no good way to deal with packet loss in the same way you do with TCP/IP, which can not only re-send lost packets, it can send packets via multiple paths and even network connections and you can put them all in order and store up enough for a decent stream as they pass through the local buffer. I've read up on the ATSC standard (and QAM and all the rest of the jargon associated with DTV) and I am astonished that a specification as poorly engineered as this ever was adopted as a standard. From a data-delivery standpoint, and in looking at real-world situations like multi-path reflections and intermittent signal reduction due to leaf coverage, weather patterns and so forth, it's no wonder I'm at - and off - the edge of the "digital cliff".
This is now the second time I've seen how a digital "upgrade" from analog is in fact a downgrade for end users. Many of the same issues I face as a firefighter with our APCO-25 Digital Radios are similar to the ATSC issues (random, unexplained outages, does not work where the old analog system did). At least in the fire service, we've been given the ability (in fact a MANDATE) to NOT use the digital system for Fireground Communications (it's deemed to unreliable for on-scene life safety). With television broadcasts, I won't have that option.

I wonder what hurricane season 2009 will be like when the cable TV wires go down and people try to get local information on TV and they find that the old TV in the garage that worked last year does not work anymore.

My bet: You'll see a hasty "temporary reactivation" of the NTSC Analog facilities before 2009 is out.

"...In digital, you drop ONE bit, you have no reception..."

Yeah, you get a black screen, with the little words "No Signal" up in the corner. And in our limited experience, it comes and goes with a very irritating frequency. Hopefully when they go all digital it will get better. If not, we will be hitting the $5 DVD bucket at WallyWorld a lot more...

A lot of times the data cards run ona separate "channel" so voice calls don't saturate the data calls and vice versa.

Its not that bad, all your broadcast digital video like this uses a lossy compression so your loosing a few bits there and there anyway. When you do drop some bits is when you see the blocky look on the screen as whole packets get dropped then you start to drop too many and the display get blanked.

Its the same as the little satalite dishes when they get covered with snow, your signal startes to get blocky then goes away.
The real annoying thing is when your aying for cable tv and it gets blocky so you can tell they are just forwarding a signal from a little dish, might as well just get the dish.

I'm undecided as to whether I even need to continue getting TV signals. The effort it takes to uncover anything worthwhile in the midst of the crap is tiring.

I'm not trying to hijack this thread at all, and this question may have already been answered here, but I have lost track with all the high tech acronyms, etc, so here goes. Is there something, maybe like an aircard, that you can stick in a laptop and receive TV signals? Digital signals? That would be perfect for us ramblin' folks who don't want to mess with a sat dish...