On Jan 15, 11:28*am, N8N wrote:
On Jan 15, 9:44*am, "Smarty" wrote:





Many if not most homeowners who are trying to now get over the air HDTV
reception are finding that indoor antennas are not adequate and often need
to use expensive outdoor antennas.

Ironically, the entire problem could have been avoided if the FCC had proper
engineering people who had chosen / demanded higher transmitter power and
transmitting antenna type and site choices.

By increasing the effective radiated power by another 6 to 9 dB, they would
have put a much smaller burden on the homeowner antenna, and lowered the
deployment cost and risk for the homeowner tremendously.

I gotta' believe that the choices they made were driven by sparing the
broadcasters the extra operating costs of consuming all the extra kilowatt
hours.

The FCC would, if challenged, probably claim that they kept the ERP to a
small number to prevent co-channel interference between neighboring cites.

But in the UHF spectrum, they have so vastly more spectrum to allocate that
they could have very, very easily chosen clear channels for every neighbor,
and allowed homeowners to use simple rabbit ears and bow ties rather than
need outdoor directional antennas even in urban and suburban areas to get
all the local programming.

Colin Powell's son, an attorney, headed the FCC during the HDTV planning and
transition. Talk about technical qualifications for the job..............

Smarty

Oddly enough I find that I get the best reception with rabbit ears and
bow ties. *I've tried several fancier antennas and they've all been
worthless junk. *I think the only thing that would likely give an
improvement, from what I've read, is either a) a homemade bow tie
array (I may try this) b) either a "silver sensor" or Winegard SS-3000
type antenna or c) a proper roof or attic mounted antenna.

It seems that there is a LOT of junk on the market at the moment, and
if someone buys a new "amplified antenna" and then finds that they
only get one channel, they may bitch and moan about how crappy DTV is
but they may find that if they just try an old bowtie they get 20+
channels. *I know that that's been my experience, I've returned
several medium-priced antennas because they didn't work any better
than a piece of wire jammed in the F-connector on the back of the box.

nate

Discovered something annoying last night... was watching the playoff
game (go stillers) and decided to watch it OTA rather than off cable
so I could see it in widescreen (well, letterboxed, but whatever) I am
using a Channel Master CM7000 tuner box with aforementioned wabbit
ears and bowtie. Every couple minutes the audio would drop out for a
second or so then come back in, sometimes with some pixellation
sometimes not. I thought it might be a problem with the station's sat
feed because I have not noticed this on any other channels that I
watch. But the same thing happened with the news this AM as I left it
on Channel 9 (WUSA) rather than one of the other channels. Now I
never watch Channel 9, so I have not noticed this before, but it
doesn't appear to be a problem with my setup as I can leave the "info"
menu on the screen and see that the signal strength remains pegged at
100% while it drops out. Also ran a long piece of coax up the stairs
just to see if it was antenna position but with the antenna upstairs
it still does this. Have not seen this with any other channels... if
this is going to be permanent this kinda puts a damper on my TV
watching experience, and I may just keep my cable and not install a
roof mounted antenna like I'd originally planned. Based on the
coverage maps I'm just outside the "red" zone for WUSA so this should
not be a problem at all.

nate