FCC wants the Peoples air waves Back!

Well if you've been watching TV lately you must have seen the new NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) public service announcements declaring the FCC is going to take away your free TV.

The public should be up in arms. People have a choice to get free over the air TV and not pay the outrageous cable prices. Admittedly the programming on local stations could be better, but the fact is this is the only free TV for many low income people out there and that the FCC wants to take it away for broadband Internet access.

Why take it away? There is plenty of spectrum to go around. Why squash an already reeling industry into dust. The affiliate model moves ever closer to obsolescence. Let it live out its life with out killing it so prematurely.

How to Receive the Best HDTV signals Over the Air

Since the conversion to digital broadcasting in June of 2009 people all over the country have been trying to figure out exactly how to get the best HDTV signal over the air to their TV.

Click below to read the article.

http://www.ehow.com/how_5721865_receive-hdtv-signals-over-air.html

Real and Virtual channels confuse boxes and People

When you watch TV on your converter box or HDTV you always see the "virtual channel" number on the programming guide. What you don't see is the real channel number.

Confused yet?

Lets take NBC4, New York City as an example. In the analog days you would tune to channel 4 on your TV and there was NBC 4. In today's digital TV era NBC4 is really broadcasting on channel 28 from their digital transmitter. Inside your TV or converter box the signal is recognized as channel 28, but the program information tells your TV to show it as channel 4. Before stations built their new digital transmitters they either elected to stay with there old number or be assigned a new number by the FCC. They show their old analog number so viewers don't get confused.

Here is where the difference between the two numbers creates a problem. In some TV markets stations were given real channel numbers that were the same as an existing analog stations virtual number.

In the market I work in one station started on digital 53 and once the transition was complete they ended up on digital channel 22. The problem is that a competing station has channel 22 as their virtual channel.

During certain times of the year I can only get the virtual channel 22. When I type in 22.1 to check for a signal the box goes right to virtual 22.1. If I want to try and get the other channel I need to manually add 22.1 to the channel line up. On my converter box I now have two 22.1 channels. The virtual one and the real one. Once my reception comes back in the fall the real 22.1 will disappear and the virtual number (3) will appear.

Just after the transition many people lost channel 3 and got it back only after scanning their converter boxes with no antenna connected. This deleted all the channels and cleared up the converter boxes confusion once they rescanned with their antenna connected.

DTV Reception: Don't forget the bounce.

The DTV transition is over. However hundreds if not thousands of people continue to have problems getting their favorite channel.


One thing you could try is the bounce shot. If you have rabbit ears and don't want to go up on your roof a smaller antenna outside near ground level pointed the exact opposite way of the transmitters might be an option.
The topography of this land pictured below was situated correctly for me to receive two of the four possible stations that I can receive with my roof top antenna. If you have a tall building next to you that may work as well. Putting the antenna low to the ground seemed to work for me.

This was done with no amplification and I was always able to receive the stations when they were analog with the roof top antenna. The antenna pictured ubove is UHF ONLY (channels 14-69) and if you are looking for VHF stations (channel 2-13) this "yaggi antenna" is not for you.

TBS Engineering Department's worst nightmare

TBS announced at 8pm Saturday that they were experiencing "technical difficulties" bringing Game 6 of the Red Sox's vs Rays. I would bet such a big game they would have a back up uplink truck at least. It will be interesting to see what the problem is. Maybe they lost their bird?

I can only imagine the lost revenue TBS is experiencing, along with all the watering holes. . .no game. . . no reason to drink and spend money.

Above: TBS's crawl explaining their "technical difficulties"

8:28 they are back.

All they said was they were sorry for the problems in Atlanta.

WEEI 850am radio is reporting TBS Atlanta had "router failure". Anyone in TV knows the router is a major component of any TV station. It allows stations to route video and audio to any device that is needed. Without it some poor engineer was probably behind the racks pulling out cables and re-routing them. If they were lucky they had a patch panel.