Some stupid moron on television was explaining the digital was better than analog because there is no interference. He said digital was either working or completely off. That is a bunch of crap. What is those square boxes going across the screen all the time. I'll agree the sound is either on or off and it goes off many times making you loose dialog, piss poor for science shows. That pixalating shit occurs every day on some channel. I think analog with a little static and snow is better than loosing the entire program. Digital is a over hyped load of crap.
Please proofread your posts for spelling/grammar errors. It sure would be more readable. While you're at it, try boosting your digital signal away from its current reception threshold. *My* digital signals suffer from none of the problems you describe above. And I sure don't miss the video noise that *all* analog video has.
My ex is in an area (in the UK) where the digital uses the same band as the analogue so her current loft aerial covers it. The digital signal has a much lower transmission power than the analogue though so she was getting the squares and sometimes it was completely unusable. She bought a cheap mains powered aerial amplifier and that's done the job for her and she now has no problems at all with sound or vision.
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From reading the FCC documents, I gather that this is true. Many of the "transitional" DTV channel assignments have been power-limited, in order to avoid interference with existing analog (or other digital) transmissions on the same or adjacent channels.
With quite a bit of complexity. There seem to be at least three approaches to what will happen on The Day:
- Station drops its current analog assignment entirely, and its "transitional" DTV channel becomes its permanent assignment. DTV transmitter power may or may not increase. DTV transmitter may or may not move from its "transitional" location to a different location.
- Station drops its current analog assignment completely, and its DTV transmitter moves from the "transitional" channel to a different frequency (almost always UHF, sometimes VHF I think). Some stations will be moving their DTV transmissions to a different physical site, in order to be able to operate at an interference-free power level which will let them retain most of their viewership.
- Station drops its "transitional" UHF channel assignment, and switches its current analog equipment over to digital on the same frequency. I suspect that the stations doing this will be keeping their existing VHF transmitter sites, and just changing out the gear.
A few will be doing so. This seems to be happening mostly in the urban areas, where the UHF spectrum is quite full.
There are a fair number of stations which will be operating ATSC in the VHF high-band (channels 7 through 37).
There are only a very few which will be remaining in the VHF low-band (channels 2 through 6). I understand that remaining on channel 6 and switching to ATSC is being very much discouraged by the FCC... there only seem to be one or two stations doing it.
One can hope!
There were some reports posted a few weeks ago of one city's "early switchover" to ATSC-only. The number of complaints received by the FCC about loss of signal reception was significant - more than they had expected, I believe.
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UHF is largely line-of-site, with reflections thrown in to complicate matters.
My guess would be that you're seeing the effect of nearby trees blowing around in the wind. This will cause rapid variations in multipath cancellation (in effect, moving "echoes" from the moving leaves) and could be overwhelming the multipath-echo cancellation logic in the receiver.
If you watch an analog UHF station under these conditions, do you tend to see "ghost" echoes on the screen which come and go, or move around, as the wind blows?
Using a highly-directional UHF antenna might reduce the problem - it'll have a stronger direct signal from the transmitter, and will be less sensitive to multipath reflections arriving from other angles.
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Are you suggesting that the 'everything else' which has gone wireless works perfectly at all times?
Surely as regards good reception the same parameters apply to digital as analogue TV - if you're in a strong signal area you might get away with a set top aerial, if not you won't?
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That's great if you want to fiddle with an antenna for each channel or set up a complicated antanna that can be optimized for each channel.
But a lot of us were very happy with analog TV and all its shortcomings.
To me it is 1000 percent less annoying to see some snow or ghosts when it's windy or raining or I'm watching a distant channel then to have the picture freeze or pixelate and the sound to drop out entirely.
And, adjusting an antenna for analog is totally real time. Move the antanna and its effect is instantaneous. With DTV - at least what I've seen to far - the only way to really do this is with the signal strength monitor which might be downa couple of menu levels, and that's not real time. There is a very significant lag and even then it doesn't always show what the true situation is.
This is not progress!
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No, but one accepts drop outs as being a great improvement over dragging a 100 mile long wire along instead of a cell phone. :)
But the effects of poor reception are dramatically and annoying different.
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unwatchable, or silent. My analogue was snowy though, to the point of being irritating.
I agree with the OP that digital is a step down from analog.
Maybe it's the closet type A in me, but the pause between channels with digital makes me crazy.
I'm putting off buying a digital TV as long as I can in hopes of makers recognizing and addressing it in the same way that digital camera makers recognized and addresses shutter lag.
Maybe, on a high-end set, there could be a half-dozen tuners - each dedicated to one of the user's favorite stations. Then, once all the tuners got a lock on their respective signal, changing between those stations could be as quick as with analog.
Also, if most of one's shows are talking heads, a little snow doesn't diminish the content; OTOH, the same marginal signal on digital means you don't get the show at all.
Ah. That's something that doesn't happen in the UK - all the channels are effectively national. Apart from some short local news. And if you really must have an out of area one for that they are available everywhere on satellite. At one time this wasn't the case - I used to have an extra high gain aerial pointing in an opposite direction to pick up a different ITV region
- they used to show different films late at night. All one now.
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I imagine UK doesn't have apartment complexes with dozens of separate buildings on a single property,with 300-500 units.
My complex USED to own their own community antenna system,and then their own cable system,then sold it to an out-of-town company.Service was horrible,quality was poor. Then BrightHouse(Time-Warner Cable)bought it,laid fiber between the buildings,new outside junction boxes. I guess service is OK now. IIRC,"basic" cable is around $30-40/month.(too rich for me)
Remnants of the CATV system still exist;the tower and antennas. All the sat dishes are gone. Some folks have DirectTV or DishTV,if they have the south view.
Reminds me of a paragraph in the manual of an Italian car. It recommended to switch (!) between two different spark plug types. One for autostrada (freeway) driving, the other for city traffic. Seriously. I could not believe it.
Amen!
Yep. Same here.
If there even is a field strength display. In the end consumers will need a spectrum analyzer to do this job properly, or a nearly infinite amount of patience.
My guess is that a whole slew of people will become rather p....d off come Feb-2009. I would not want to be an operator at the phone bank of a political representative next spring.
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Sometimes progress isn't really progress. DTV is one example, GSM another. I have an "old technology" CDMA phone. Works everywhere. A neighbor had CDMA as well and then his provider switched to GSM. Brand new phones, and I guess another new 2y contract. After that he needed an antenna on a pole in order to get a signal. Progress. Yeah, right.
Nope. In heavy multipath analog works fine while digital falls off the cliff all the time. Same antenna, same stations, same tower locations. It's happening out here, almost every night.
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unwatchable, or silent. My analogue was snowy though, to the point of being irritating.
It depends on the channel. Certainly with Sky digital, some channels have a higher bandwidth than others.
I prefer to look in the TV guide and watch what I'm interested in, not flick through endless crap.
But is extremely annoying. I like the picture to be crystal clear, which is why I'm getting HD.
My Sky box shows the signal strength at only 25%, yet I never get anything more than a couple of pixelated bits for a second or two. Sound remains clear.
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Very odd, as on the SAME aerial, with no adjustment, I get a perfect digital picture on freeview terrestrial. On analogue terrestrial I got irritating snow on quite a few of the channels.
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What about two aerials? One for each set of channels?
I'll stick to my dish.
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I've got about $300 in mine: purchase price plus paying somebody to install it - thus maintaining our probable distinction of being the only people in town without cable or dish.
If I had known how much better even analog would be (it's a digital-optimized antenna) I would have done it 20 years ago.
Then you are indeed one very lucky Hucker ... Far from it being the case that the powers who be would have you believe, in that the changeover is as smooth and simple as just gluing your STB or digital telly on the end of your existing antenna, in many parts of the UK, including where I live, the joy of your new purchase has been short-lived, after getting it out of the box and finding that it receives almost nothing. The fading joy then turns to dismay when you further discover that your fifteen quid Tesco-Sonic box, is going to need a 150 quid cake cooling rack with 49 rung step ladder in front of it, jammed up on your roof in place of the neat little 10 ele Yagi that you had there for your analogue reception ...
All so that you can get the Shopping Channel in glorious pixellated plastic-view, complete with motion lag and digital artifacts, compounded by the digital processing in your brand new LCD TV to make it work non-native to display standard definition transmissions, rather than the nice Blu-Ray demo piccies you saw in the shop, and which convinced you to part with your hard-earned ...
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