(Insert stupid Blog name here)

 

I went home for lunch today and turned on the TV news. It had only been 21 minutes since the signal was turned off and they said their newsroom was already flooded with calls.

 

Same here - boggles the mind on how these people could not know about it.

I just use the tv for gaming as well... I'll never miss it.

 

And seriously, how could people not know about it? It was only scrolling across the bottom of the tv for 2 days.

And seriously, how could people not know about it? It was only scrolling across the bottom of the tv for 2 days.

 

2 days? It seems like the PSAs have been on for the past 2 years. And how difficult would it have been to supply different feeds for the different providers - one for OTA ATSC saying "You are currently watching digital TV - you won't be impacted (unless the station changes frequencies).", one for cable / satellite: "You are watching cable or satellite - you won't be impacted." and one for OTA NTSC: "You are watching analog TV using an antenna - you will be impacted. Go buy a new TV."

I went home for lunch today and turned on the TV news. It had only been 21 minutes since the signal was turned off and they said their newsroom was already flooded with calls.

Same here - boggles the mind on how these people could not know about it.

I wonder how many people lost their TV signal, haven't managed to figure out how to call somebody, and are still sitting there wondering what's going on?

I don't know if it's true of all stations but the one I was watching showed what the analog signal looked like at the time. It was a static image of the station logo with text explaining what to do if you see the image and a phone number to call.

I don't know if it's true of all stations but the one I was watching showed what the analog signal looked like at the time. It was a static image of the station logo with text explaining what to do if you see the image and a phone number to call.

Some stations are transmitting a "night light" signal like the one you described. Others "flash cut", using the same frequency and changing from analog to digital. (In some cases one station turned off their analog transmitter and another powered up their digital transmitter on the same frequency.) And yet others simply powered off their analog transmitter completely.

 

The biggest source of confusion, IMHO, is the use of virtual channel numbering. Although you now may be watching ABC 7-1 instead of ABC 7, the actual signal might be on channel 22 - i.e. on UHF rather than VHF. This is why people have to hit the "channel rescan" button on their converter, so it can sniff the channels and figure out the virtual channel number for each physical channel, instead of just entering 22 on the remote. Plus, as part of the transition, there's been a big move away from VHF to UHF. So people who only have a VHF antenna (since that's where the big 3 typically were) can't pick 'em up anymore because they've moved up to UHF. All so stations can preserve their "channel identity".

 

I'm one of the lucky ones. I get 11 HD stations (plus subchannels) from Buffalo & Toronto via antenna. All of them were live before the February deadline, so the final shutdown made no difference to me (other than some of them bumped up their power). There are still a few in the area I don't get (although a couple of them are because I'd need to rotate the antenna), but I'm hoping to build a better antenna this summer and put it outside.

The biggest source of confusion, IMHO, is the use of virtual channel numbering. Although you now may be watching ABC 7-1 instead of ABC 7, the actual signal might be on channel 22 - i.e. on UHF rather than VHF. This is why people have to hit the "channel rescan" button on their converter, so it can sniff the channels and figure out the virtual channel number for each physical channel, instead of just entering 22 on the remote. Plus, as part of the transition, there's been a big move away from VHF to UHF. So people who only have a VHF antenna (since that's where the big 3 typically were) can't pick 'em up anymore because they've moved up to UHF. All so stations can preserve their "channel identity".

 

Do any television sets provide a means of scanning a specific physical channel to see what it is? It's annoying having to do a long slow re-scan every time something changes. At least some sets allow one to do a "scan and add". Not sure what people with rotary antennas should do with sets that don't.

 

Also, another one thing I've wished for--allocate a tiny portion of the bandwidth to an analog 'test pulse' (say, one scan line every 1/30 second) which nicer sets could capture and display, so as to allow a technically-inclined viewer to judge the trade-offs between signal strength, noise, and ghosting while adjusting his antenna. Otherwise it's had to distinguish between a signal that's barely adequate and one which has lots of 'headroom'.

Do any television sets provide a means of scanning a specific physical channel to see what it is? It's annoying having to do a long slow re-scan every time something changes. At least some sets allow one to do a "scan and add". Not sure what people with rotary antennas should do with sets that don't.

 

Also, another one thing I've wished for--allocate a tiny portion of the bandwidth to an analog 'test pulse' (say, one scan line every 1/30 second) which nicer sets could capture and display, so as to allow a technically-inclined viewer to judge the trade-offs between signal strength, noise, and ghosting while adjusting his antenna. Otherwise it's had to distinguish between a signal that's barely adequate and one which has lots of 'headroom'.

It depends on the TV/converter box. My Toshiba 52XF550U has the ability to add / remove a channel without doing a full channel scan. (Necessary because the scan deletes all of the custom channel names!) It also has a detailed signal meter giving all kinds of details like signal power & SNR.

 

In general, ASTC is like FM radio - you either get a perfect picture or nothing at all. There is a small range of "marginal" where you will get video glitching (macroblocking), loss of audio, and the intermittent or partial frames. But analog distortions like ghosting and noise don't show up.

 

Also, unlike analog, what makes or breaks ATSC is not signal power but signal to noise ratio (SNR). So things like a low-noise preamplifier and high quality antenna cable can make a big difference. ATSC also has some problems with multi-path (ghosting), especially if the second path is a strong signal.