atari2600land's Blog

Go to tvfool.com and see what stations you should be getting, what physical channel they are, and the direction they are in.

 

Digital TV is all about SNR. The best ways to increase SNR are:

1. Height - even a second floor window or balcony may let you get more stations. However, the longer the cable the more signal loss & noise gain, and therefore the lower the signal to noise ratio.

2. Bigger / better antenna. I use a homemade Gray-Hoverman out a second floor window. The only drawback for high-gain antennas is they are highly directional. So if you have transmitters in multiple directions you may want a rotor or multiple antennas and a switch box.

3. Low noise pre-amplifier. A Channel Master 7777 or similar boosts the signal at the antenna to preserve the signal through long cable runs and splitters.

 

The one big quirk of digital TV is channel remapping. The channel frequency used to transmit the signal (physical channel) is probably not the channel used to select the channel at the TV (logical/virtual channel). But it's a chicken & egg problem. You can't tell the TV to tune to a particular virtual channel until it's picked up that data from the physical channel signal. Therefore, you will need to tell your TV to scan for channels. Or you need to determine how to tell you TV to tune to a particular physical channel.