If this is the wrong newgroup, I apologize and hope you can recommend a better one.
Is it likely a different digital converter box will provide more TV channels?
Or is it more likely my friend, who has a plain antenna in the attic, needs an amplified antenna in the attic? She doesn't want an antenna on the roof.
Any recomendations for a powerful converter box? Maybe with a good Guide. She has a coupon good for 3 more days. :)
She's in north suburban Baltimore (Reistertown) and can't even get channel 45, a Baltimore channel, (it says "No signal") that came in perfectly for her and me too in analog, and perfect for me in digital. OTOH, she does get channel 7 in Washington DC. The city is about 50 miles from her, not sure where the transmitter is, but it's farther than channel 45's.
I'm from Indiana, where 95% of the streets and roads run due north and south or due east and west. I get confused here.
Well, the coupon is expiring and she's trying to decide whether to buy another box.
Plus she has a cramped hot dirty attic which she won't go up in. I can't go there, not because I'm fat, which I am, but because my ribcage is too big for the hole in the closet ceiling, right in the middle of my chest. (I have a little fat at my ribcage, but only maybe an extra quarter of an inch.) I don't know why the hole is so small. I'm 5'8", medium build. I have no trouble getting though the hole into my attic.
Right. And some of the good ones seem available only on the web. There are two models which will tune the converter box to a station at a particular time, so if your vcr is set the same way, you can still do timer recorders with a vcr, wihtout setting the channel each and every time.
One is DTVPal Plus, which one "rater" said has 5 timer slots, although the ad I saw for it doesn't say how many.
The other is Zinwell ZAT-970A`, which has 8 timer slots, although one "rater"** said it had the lowest quality remote he had ever seen, and one button was starting to break after only a few days. Other rated it highly and said nothing about the remote.
**This guy said he had two converters and the DTVPal gave terrible reception and that was improved in the DTVPal Plus. So I was wondering how common that was.
Not only doesn't she get 45, but she had to add 7 several times before it stayed, even though she watched 7 each time she added it. It would still disappear later from the list of stations the up and down buttons stopped at.
the most important thing here is the antenna, far more critical than with analogue. Indoor aerials like this will perform extremely poorly compared to a roof mounted affair due to the weaker reception and obstacles. if you're not getting many channels, the cause here is most unlikely to be the box. they vary in sensitivity, but not that much.
Get someone qualified to set up an external aerial properly, it's money well spent and it's not as if you have to shell out cash for this sort of thing very often, is it?
In addition to different front-end sensitivity and multipath- rejection capability, there's an additional tweak that some converters provide which might be worth considering: "smart antenna" support.
The CEA has created a standard for "smart" (steerable) TV antennas... ones which can switch their directional sensitivity pattern around, under control of the TV or converter, in order to get the best signal on each individual channel. In theory, any converter or TV which has compliant smart-antenna support, can control any compliant steerable antenna.
According to
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"Preliminary tests by the CEA R-5 Antenna Standards committee have shown impressive results, finding that a smart antenna can be most effective in ghosty areas and can increase DTV system performance by as much as 12dB. In addition, both the MSTV and the NAB have endorsed the technology, and the NTIA is allowing the interface on converter boxes certified in its DTV coupon program." Taking advantage of this would require buying an installing a "smart" antenna in the attic, and perhaps buying a new converter box.
It's also important to take into account the question of whether all of the DTV stations in the viewer's area are on UHF (in which case a compact antenna may work) or whether some are on VHF high-band or even on VHF low-band (in which case, a physically-larger antenna is likely to be required for good reception).
A roof antenna will almost certainly beat out an attic-mount.
--
Dave Platt AE6EO
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