It’s been two weeks since the digital television switch was universally flipped in what’s effectively a government spectrum fundraiser.
Immediately after the NTSC plug was pulled, I fired up my only remaining analog television device – an ElGato EyeTV Hyrbid (ATSC + NTSC) USB stick. Leading up to June 12th, many over-the-air (OTA) broadcasts contained crawls alerting folks to he transition. But I was expecting to find some sort of message on those vacated frequencies for a week or so, reinforcing what had happened and what to do next. No dice, all I found was static.
As part of their transition, many broadcasters changed/swapped frequencies. According to reports, this generated the most issues and calls into the FCC DTV hotlines. In fact, I heard from my mom who had lost some channels on her kitchen TV using the converter I got her last year. With low expectations (she’s not really geeky at all), I told her she could try poking around the menu looking for some sort of ‘rescan’ option until I found time to walk her through it. Fortunately, it must have been simple/clear enough as she managed to recover her lost channels – and a few new ones, too.
I received a similar complaint from a work buddy and suggested he rescan. Unfortunately, that didn’t resolve the problem. He’s lost both ABC and CBS in HD here in the DC region. Turns out WJLA (ABC) and WUSA (CBS) migrated from UHF to VHF as part of their transition. And thousands of local folks have lost reception. Last weekend, I confirmed the reception/power issue at a Starbucks near work (Sterling, VA) and home (Rockville, MD) using the aforementioned ElGato tuner. It’s sadly ironic as CBS always had the strongest ATSC signal in the region and was the first to go HD with their nightly news. And now they serve nothing but a blank screen, aka the ‘digital cliff‘ strikes. My DTVPal is able to pull in WUSA – probably a combination of a more powerful/better tuner in a wooden structure versus the USB tuner at a nearby SBUX. (Used the same antenna in all three scenarios.)
Lastly, as Brent and others have noted, many of the HTPC guide providers (i.e. Microsoft) were caught unprepared.
So, how’d your transition go?
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Why don't these stations start putting repeaters up on cell phone towers in strategic area's? With virtual channel mapping, it wouldn't matter if they needed to use alternate frequencies, because the VCT tables could still "map" the channel to the branded number. The OTA box would just find whatever the strongest signal is.
Now that it's all digital, I don't see why a distributed transmission model wouldn't work. It's been working for cell phones and pagers for literally YEARS.
Dallas TX - I gained a bunch of OTA channels, and most stations now broadcasting in 16x9. Only issue I had was the converter box I bought in Dec of last year did on me the day before the transistion ( Apex ). The new box dosen't have the tv guide style listins. :(
Also, I am crrently in Austin and the local network stations are really struggling. Only CBS is in 16x9 and Fox keeps runnning ads apologizing their transmission power is too low for the digital broadcast to reach all areas that used to be covered by analog. WTF?
I'm out near Manassas and can get the most of the locals in HD. The problem I'm having is with AFD: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1148095 on my DTVPal (got if for Slingbox). NBC shows look really squished.