On Jan 1, 7:26*am, klem kedidelhopper
wrote:

It's nice to hear that finally from someone else, because
personally I
couldn't give a rats ass about HD either. We watched snowy pictures
for years on UHF because that's all we could get. You can watch a
snowy picture but you can't deal with "now you see it and now you
don't". I have 25 year old sets here that produced a damn good
picture
on NTSC and were never a "problem" for us to watch. However now
thanks
to our brilliant government those stations are only a memory and
we're
stuck with this flawed system for eternity now. Sorry for the rant
but
it just ****es me off to no end. Lenny

Happy New Year to you too.

I've been running OTA DTV since Dec 2003. It is possible for it to
work flawlessly but it can be tricky to get running. Signal strength
is secondary. Flat response is FAR more important (no ghost phase
cancellations). Unfortunately a spectrum analyzer is the best tool
ESPECIALLY if you're going to try to use reflections rather than line
of sight.

All ATSC receivers include equalizers to flatten the response. Early
receivers don't work as well as the newer ones and to say PC tuners
are universally bad is ignorant. Like the tuners built in TVs, the
newer ones are better in than they can tweak the equalization faster
meaning they're more tolerant of the trees blowing in front of your
path. Known GOOD PC tuners are made by Hauppauge. I have 2 ATI HDTV
Wonder PC tuners which never break up and 1 Hauppauge 1250 tuner that
also never breaks up BUT I also have a properly installed antenna
system that has known flat response. You can get an idea of how good
your tuner and antenna is by how fast you can change a channel and
achieve lock. The flatter the response, the less action is needed by
the equalizer.

One of the reasons the 8VSB was selected was that it requires less
power than COFDM. If you check complaints in countries with COFDM you
find them similar to yours.

The first spectrum analyzer photo is AWEFUL and is likely beyond the
capabilities of any tuner. The second is what it should be.

http://www.prism.gatech.edu/~wn17/

G²