OTA HDTV WOW! And it's Free!

[RAV2]

Just a quick correction - there is no different (or additional) equipment required to receive OTA HD. You will get everything you can with your "original analog antenna".

[rjwaldren]

I'm pulling in FOX-HD from 57 miles (according to antenna web) with a UHF loop. I'm in a new house an haven't had a chance to put my attic antenna up yet, so I'm not getting all of my local channels right now, but FOX is the furthest tower away. Apparently with some pretty good sigal strength.

With digital the only distortion you should see is some artifacting from dropouts on weak signals.

Also, someone mentioned only seeing 8 channels on antennaweb.org. Don't give up hope, Antennaweb doesn't show all of the local channels I recieve. In addition to missing channels it doesn't mention any of the alternate feeds from any of the stations. IE - PBS (18.1 is Digital-SD, 18.2 is Digital-HD, 18.3 is Digital-HD with different programming, 18.4 is Digital-SD spanish). ABC has additional feeds as well as a 24hr localweather feed.

In my area we have much more content available over Digital than we ever had over analog.

[Thalermade]

Living mid-way between Dayton and Cincinnati, Ohio I am able to get all four broadcast networks. I have had a Radio Shack $60 antenna for a couple of years - in the attic. Talk about a pain in the butt for tuning. As people have mentioned you either have a picture or you don't. Antenna in the attic - TV in the basement.
If I wasn't able to get all the networks with one position, I definitely would have bought a rotor.

The bummer is trying to find a new plasma or LCD for our bedroom that has two RF inputs. Fewer TV's have two RF inputs now, which make running basic cable and an antenna a bit more work.

Have fun tuning and be safe
Russ

[ironhat]

We're commenting on reception and antennas but doesn't this all require a receiver or decoder of some sort? There's a guy around here selling a package and comes to your house and takes a signal read as well. I think that his set up is something a little over $1000. What's up with equipment - and what do you need to know or where to find the info) about antenna types, etc?

[rjwaldren]

There are holes in my understanding of the FCC side of this but my understanding is that they are also using the digital conversion to reclaim some of the UHF/VHF bandwidth. That said the digital signals are still within the UHF/VHF band, so there is no difference in the antennas required for Digital or analog. The HD or Digital antennas seen at Best Buy, etc are now different from any other antennas on the shelf. Just a gimmick.

Rabbit ears are for VHF, and loops are for UHF. The same idea applies to larger roof top antennas. The large wings are the VHF portions and the smaller arrow shaped portion is for UHF. When buying an antenna shop for the band that your channels are in or one that adequately rated for both. Everything in my area is UHF and I see a lot people messing with rabbit ears complaining that it's a lousy signal, it's the wrong antenna.

The other thing that I feel is intentionally muddy about the digital transistion is that HD and digital are sometimes treated as synonym's. The Digital is the broadcast format. HiDef is the resolution. The only requirement from the FCC is to broadcast digitally. There is no requirement to that that signal be HD. Most of my local channels are offering both SD feeds in 4:3 format and 480-1080i feeds in 16:9. Your TV will not necessarily be obsolete next year , just the analog tuner in it will. You can strap an aftermarket digital (ATSC in the USA) tuner to it just like you do with your DISH, DTV, VCR, DVD player. Digital Tuner pricing is all over the place. Just make sure to connect it the highest quality input that your TV provides. RF, Composite and even S-video are a real disappointment compared to Component and HDMI.

Long story short, if you have good local reception on you current antenna and are happy with your current analog tv all you need is a Digital tuner box to take advantage of your local channels. But Best Buy would much rather sell you a new TV.

[RAV2]

Great summary!

Remember to go to the Fed's web site to get a coupon for $40 off of the converter box:

https://www.dtv2009.gov/

Check out the FAQ section for unbiased information.

[LCHIEN]

RJwaldens description is correct, I couldn't find anything to nitpick.
Ironhat, if you can receive just one station with analog OTA broadcasting, then you won't get much better with digital OTA broadcasting - the signal frequencies and transmission characteristics are basically the same.
Most of the DTV allocations seem to be in the UHF band so that might help a little if your VHF reception is poor but you get OK UHF reception.

This particular indoor UHF antenna ZHDTV1 from Zenith and or Philips seems to be getting good reviews for UHF reception; I'm using one instead of a loop and I get all the stations which are clustered together (location-wise) at about 25 miles distance.

[rjwaldren]

I looked for a photo, but I guess Radioshack finally discontinued it. The best indoor UHF antenna bar none used to be a gold plated grid antenna with 2 gold bowties. It was horrible to look at but did the job, I told my mother to get one years ago and she chose bad reception.

I guess they had enough people refuse to buy it and dropped it from the line up.

[ironhat]

Thanks for making a definitive statement on the viability of this technology for my app. I also wondered about doing this at out cabin but I'm afraid that the proximity of tall trees to the house and the caveat that the antenna should be close to the house seals that deal as well. Yea, we don't go there to watch TV but on a rainy weekend there's only so much reading that can be done before your eyes cross and you doze off. The old Johnny Carson tapes are some of the few tapes or DVDs that don't seem to get old. This has been an enlightening thread for me. Thanks to all.

[LCHIEN]

...
I'm afraid that the proximity of tall trees to the house and the caveat that the antenna should be close to the house seals that deal as well. ...

where is it written that the antenna has to be close to the house?
Cable TV uses an antenna to capture local broadcast stations and its not close to your house. You can run antenna wires a long way if need be, to get the antenna up high or in a more favorbale area.

[ironhat]

where is it written that the antenna has to be close to the house?
Cable TV uses an antenna to capture local broadcast stations and its not close to your house. You can run antenna wires a long way if need be, to get the antenna up high or in a more favorbale area.

From antenna web's FAQ

"3. Closer is better. If a position above the roofline is not possible, the antenna should at least be on the side of your building facing the TV signal broadcast tower."

I thought that there was something different about reception of this signal that warranted close proxcimity. Heck, my old antenna was 40'up (wish I hadn't taken the tower down!), the line ran another 15' through the basement and another 4' up to the cabinet. Then there was the bedroom run of another 45'. So, I thought that I understood that signals can be carried a long distance.

On another front I was looking into the receivers and was disappointed to read nearly universal reviews (only 3, actually) that they were very slow to switch channels as well as some other delays, the functions of which I don't understand as yet. OK, my ignorance is showing pretty completely so I'm hanging this one up - LOL!

[rjwaldren]

Signal loss over coax is effected by the rating of the cable used (RG6, RG8, RG58), length of the run, and the frequency of the incoming signal. Higher frequencies suffer more, for example 2.4G wifi antennas require high quality cable and the shortest runs possible to counter signal loss. It get very technical very quickly, maybe theres a Amateur Radio guy around that can explain better.

The problem isn't nearly as bad in the UHF/VHF ranges. Your pretty much guaranteed a better signal from a external antenna mounted as high as possible as long as the cable run isn't ridiculously long.

I'm only using the built-in Digital tuner in my 60" Sony right now and it switches quickly. I was using a 3 year old AverHDTV tuner in my MythTV box, there were complaints on LinuxDVB and MythTV forums that it was slow to switch. But honestly, it's not noticeably slower than my DISH box.

[mpc]

Digital TV will generally tend to "switch slower" party due to the signal compression. Basically, digital TV (High Def or Standard Def in digital format) sends a full frame every so often, and in between only the changes are sent. So when switching channels, your digital decoder has to wait a split second for the full frame before it can begin to decode. Folks with digital cable TV today experience this. A friend of mine has digital cable and it is really slow to flip through the channels. Higher compression rates (typical of current satellite digital TV) use fewer "full frames" since they are biggest bandwidth hogs; relying on more "incremental frames" to compress the signal enough. The more a picture changes from one TV frame to the next (bigger increments), the more bandwidth is needed... if a broadcaster is bandwidth limited, they can only encode the "most significant" changes, hoping the other stuff is too small for the viewer to notice. This is what causes the blocky appearance during rapid motion scenes and/or cuts to a new scene - lots of "incremental changes" that end up being too much bandwidth so some are tossed. Fine details can also be compressed out like gradual shading: watch a blue sky TV picture... one that is dark blue graduating to a light blue. On analog, that'll generally be a smooth, blended transistion but on digital it often ends up as bands of lighter and lighter blue. Your TV set may be capable of displaying 12million colors or whatever but the compression "chooses" to use only 100,000 of them sometimes. Kinda like using 16 bit color instead of 256 bit color on your computer's video card.

This type of encryption also causes digital TV to react differently to interference or signal loss compared to old fashioned analog signals... with analog, interference or signal loss led to a bit of static on the screen or in the sound. With digital, the decoder basically looses key information so most just leave the last decoded screen displayed - you end up seeing a stop-motion picture for a moment, or half a screen of stop-motion. I find that much more annoying personally.

For those of you with fairly modern computers/laptops (fast processor speeds, XP service Pack 2, and USB 2.0 ports) those USB digital TV tuner accessories are a cheap way to play around with digital & high-def TV. Or internal tuner cards - they're cheaper yet. I have the little Hauppage HVR950 USB stick - it's about the size of a cigarette lighter (the guts of this thing are used by several different vendors actually, like most PC stuff these days) and lets you see what over-the-air stuff is generally available in your area. It'll tune analog too; though it's not a very sensitive tuner for analog. "NTSC" is the United States analog format (PAL is Europe and other parts of the world), "ATSC" is the digital format, and "QAM" is the format generally used by digital cable. The HVR950 will do NTSC and ATSC. Some sticks (not the HVR950 unfortunately) will do QAM as well. If you have a shop PC... this is a cheap way to get TV out there too. Or you can start making your own Tivo clone.

mpc