It was a magic moment. We were on our weekly Saturday morning shopping trip to Costco, when right inside the door, in the featured product spaces, we saw a 47-inch, HDTV-capable, widescreen projection TV from Panasonic selling for under $1500. The other big projection TVs on display either didn't come in the wide format or cost far more.

I didn't buy the TV on the spot despite an unexpected OK from my wife. But I'd been planning to take another look at HDTV reception and update my earlier HDTV coverage, including some Den experiments that I had conducted a while back using a PC-based HDTV receiver (see "Bleak forecast" and "Finely tuned, or finally tuned?" from May 2000, "Improved forecast," December 2000, and "Partly sunny," May 2001).

We continue to believe that digital TV is one of many exciting applications that can help rescue the tech economy. But is HDTV really ready for primetime? That Saturday I started thinking about finding out.

Over the course of the next week, I spent some time looking into the current state of HD programming. My wife was sold on the amount of sitcoms that would be airing in HD this fall. My son just wanted to play X-Box on the big screen. For my part, I worried that we'd get, at best, only CBS and ABC broadcasts over the air. My house has pretty good line-of-sight to the mountain from which those broadcasts emanate. Fox, NBC, PBS, and a couple of independents also broadcast in HD in the San Diego area. But I knew those signals might not be tunable; I had never successfully tuned them in using the PC-based receiver, and a big hill stands in the way.

Still, I reckoned that over-the-air broadcasts weren't the only option. My cable company, Cox, doesn't yet offer HD content, but DirecTV offers HBO and Mark Cuban's HDnet, an all-HD network, in full 1080i glory. Moreover, CBS had announced that it would be carrying an SEC college football game each week in HD—surely affording me the chance to see my Auburn Tigers in HD sometime this fall. So even though our California-small house couldn't really accommodate the giant new set, I decided to go ahead and test HDTV as a real consumer, rather than relying on the evaluation products that are regularly supplied to trade-press editors.

A week later, I returned to the store—in my truck—hoping the TV wasn't one of the infamous Costco bargains that lasts only a few days. (Try taking a kid who just made the honor roll and won several other academic-achievement awards to Costco to buy the featured X-Box bundle, only to find it sold out. It's not fun.) Such was not the case, and a few hours and sore backs later the corner of our living room was overwhelmed with our purchase.

With the TV in place, I entered the phase where you discover the real price of HDTV. I felt that I had entered the project with good awareness of the other costs I'd incur, but the total bill surprised me nonetheless.

Of course, buying an HDTV-capable receiver is the first step. RCA, Zenith, and others sell HDTVs with integrated ATSC (HDTV) receivers. But I wanted to keep the receiver and display separate for now. One day all HDTV tuners will be integrated, but right now there's still a lot of uncertainty over issues like HDTV content protection. Keeping the tuner and display separate affords better insurance against standards that may change or additional features that may be added.

RCA slashed the cost of HD reception early this year by introducing a $500 HDTV receiver, which can receive both over-the-air ATSC signals and the DirecTV HD broadcasts. Since that announcement, several other makers of DirecTV equipment, including Toshiba, Panasonic, Mitsubishi, and Hughes Network Systems (the owner of the DirecTV network), have announced similar products.

A shopping trip, however, yielded few choices. Fry's in San Diego had demo units of the Toshiba and RCA offerings but had sold its stock and expected no more. The demo units were missing necessities like smart cards and manuals. Fry's had the new Mitsubishi receiver in stock, but not on the shelf. In any case it was priced at more than $800, and I was looking for a $500 product. As I discovered later, however, a salesperson with a clue might have ended my misery right there. I later found out that the Mitsubishi receiver was bundled with a necessary antenna and some other goodies, so the price differential relative to my $500 expectation wasn't as great as it appeared.

I next hit the Best Buy store nearest my house. The Toshiba receiver was available, but it was also priced much higher than I expected, and a touted rebate applied only to new DirecTV customers, not existing ones like myself.

I also knew that I had the option of buying an ATSC-based HDTV tuner without DirecTV support. Samsung, in fact, had just announced such a device. However, that unit was priced higher than the offerings that did include DirecTV. After frustrating stops at Good Guys and Circuit City, I ended up at yet another Best Buy outlet. This store had the Hughes receiver at the magic $500 price, and I had read generally good reviews of the unit on the Internet. So into the shopping basket it went.

Next, I knew that if I wanted to receive DirecTV's HD programming, I'd need to replace the circular dish on my roof with a new oblong DirecTV dish. I was surprised to find the requisite dish priced at $150 when the regular dishes sell for $29 at discount. The RCA unit I ended up buying, however, has dual low-noise amplifiers and what the company terms an integrated multiswitch, which allows the single dish to feed four DirecTV receivers while tuning in the signals from the two existing satellites and even a third bird (by adding a third low-noise amplifier) down the road.

Paying for my purchases, I discovered yet another wrinkle. DirecTV has become extremely concerned about piracy. The last time I bought a DirecTV receiver, I plunked down my credit card and left with the box. This time, however, Best Buy wanted a life history and a copy of my driver's license—attributing these requests to DirecTV anti-piracy measures.

More troubling was the fact that I had to agree to subscribe to a DirecTV package within 30 days as a condition of purchase. This was the only HDTV tuner in the store, and it was on display near an array of HDTV displays. What if I only wanted a tuner for over-the-air broadcasts? I don't see how a buyer can be required to subscribe to a satellite service when the receiver is touted as a terrestrial receiver. I decided not to fight the system because I intended to subscribe to DirecTV's HD programs anyway. But I find the demand unacceptable on principle.

After returning home, I decided to dig into the over-the-air reception problem and leave the DirecTV stuff for later. A friend who lives nearby had successfully tuned all of the area HDTV signals with a standard $40 Radio Shack TV antenna. But my friend lives high on a hill, and I live in a valley. An excellent antenna-selection Web site, www.antennaweb.org, had suggested that I'd need a medium-sized, amplified, directional antenna to receive all of the local broadcasts.

So my first step was to take a standard cheap outdoor TV antenna and lay it on top of an arbor in my back yard. Pointing the UHF antenna elements generally toward the CBS and ABC towers, I was surprised to return to the living room and find I could get both digital stations. Moreover, I reoriented the antenna toward the NBC and PBS towers and was shocked to get those signals as well. Things were going too well.

The only problem was a logistical one. The Hughes receiver would only tune signals it found during an autoscan process. I could point the antenna one way, run autoscan, and tune those signals. When I changed the orientation, I had to run autoscan again. But in the process the receiver would forget that it had earlier received the other signals. I thought I'd be able to get all the broadcasts by placing the antenna somewhere in the middle of the approximately 125-degree arc between the two tower locations, but the receiver wouldn't allow that experiment.

Still, that evening I told my wife and son they could watch the CBS sitcoms in HD. I lied. For some reason the signal levels that night were so low, even with the antenna pointed correctly, that watching the HD broadcast was painful, with constant signal interruptions. It seems HDTV reception varies with the weather and interference from other sources. I hoped mounting the antenna on the roof would solve the problem.

So off I went to Radio Shack. I decided to buy an amplifier that mounts on the antenna mast and is powered by a DC supply in the house. I started out buying RG-6 coaxial cable at Radio Shack as well, but decided early on that as long as I had to enter the attic, I'd go ahead and drop RG-6 into a couple of bedrooms where we might want additional DirecTV receivers. At that point I discovered to my dismay that Home Depot sells 500 feet of RG-6 for the same price that gets you only 100 feet at Radio Shack. I also bought coax crimpers and strippers and all other variety of accessories. I'd guess that in total I spent close to $500 on the assorted cables, poles, amplifiers, splitters, and other supplies to complete the project.

A few days later I got around to mounting the antenna on the roof. With a 10-foot mast bolted to my chimney and the amplifier connected, the Hughes receiver's signal-strength meter reported readings near 100 (on a scale of 100) for most stations—assuming that the antenna was pointed correctly. I had also overcome the autoscan problem, in a sense. I still had to run autoscan to actually tune the stations. But I had found a way, in the antenna setup menu of the Hughes receiver, to access the signal meter at each UHF station—even if the autoscan function hadn't found a signal on that channel.

I had also consulted the antenna-selection guide on the Titan TV Web site, www.titantv.com. (By the way, Titan TV is the best source for finding out what's playing in HD on any given day.) The site's antenna-selection wizard suggested, based on my address, that an amplified antenna aimed at a certain point on the compass would receive everything. Compass in hand, I hit the roof, with the family stationed in the living room to read signal strength and relay the info. But I never found a heading that received broadcasts from both of the major transmission sites.

Radio Shack, of course, suggested an antenna rotor—a motor that would reorient the antenna for each station. I hated that idea. I didn't want some clunky motor on the roof, and more importantly, such a setup would introduce an unacceptable delay whenever I changed channels.

I had another idea lurking—one I'm quite proud of given that I didn't find it during any of my Web searches. I wondered what might happen if I put a second UHF element on the same antenna mast and combined the signals. The premium-priced splitters that Radio Shack sells, for $15 if I remember correctly, can function as splitters or as signal combiners.

I was worried, however, that this dual-antenna scheme might artificially create multipath effects. Multipath interference occurs when a signal reflects off of buildings or hillsides and the reflections arrive at the antenna at different times than the unreflected signal. The 8-VSB modulation scheme, upon which the ATSC standard is based, is known to be susceptible to multipath.

In an analog NTSC environment, multipath causes ghosting in the TV picture. In the ATSC world, a receiver facing multipath sometimes can't discern which signal is the strongest, and early ATSC receivers simply failed to tune in anything. Newer receivers work far better, but I still worried that I would artificially inject multipath effects when a signal hit the second antenna at a different time than the first.

Still, Radio Shack had a UHF-only antenna element for a mere $20. I added this second element to the mast just below the VHF/UHF element on the top—making a guess as to the angle between the two UHF elements. Then I used the splitter/combiner to combine the signals directly out of each antenna. Finally, I ran the combined signal through the amplifier. I finished this job after dark on a Friday, and it worked perfectly. I was getting signal strengths in the 80 range on every station of interest. That Saturday I watched my first live football game in HD, and life was very good—even though CBS chose to show the hated Florida Gators.

Late Sunday afternoon, I finally got around to adding the new receiver to my DirecTV account. I already knew I had the dish aligned properly. So after too long of a wait on hold and some brief negotiations, we were watching HBO in 1080i.

Monday evening rolled around, and my wife and son gathered for their favorite night of CBS sitcoms. I was working in my office when the screaming started. For some reason, the Hughes receiver was delivering what appeared to be a message from DirecTV indicating that the local CBS broadcast was not available. Sure enough, the receiver wasn't working the way it had the day before, and I couldn't tune in any of the over-the-air networks. In fact, the autoscan feature wouldn't even find the local digital signals.

I had to leave on business the next day, but a few days later I returned to attack the problem. Forgetting what I learned in engineering, I didn't approach the problem very methodically. As a result, I immediately set off on a wild goose chase.

Even though the receiver wouldn't tune the local digital broadcasts, I could use the antenna setup screen and get signal-strength measurements. The signals were down in the 50 to 60 range. I knew that a signal that strong should have been easy to tune. But still I worked on the signal-strength problem as if it were the issue. I got nowhere.

Then I talked to my local friend, who has an RCA TV with an integrated HD receiver. He reported that I needed to somehow tell the receiver to use the local tuner rather than the DirectTV tuner. I read and reread the receiver's manual, which is pretty horrible, and went through menu after menu with no success. So I turned my attention to the antenna configuration. I pointed a single antenna element toward the CBS/ABC hill and connected it directly to the receiver. Nothing.

Finally, after a couple of frustrating days, I waded through the Hughes Network Web site. I found a phone number (a toll call, no less) for customers who had purchased the HD-capable DirecTV receiver. After a short wait on hold, my problems were solved. For some reason, a software update—done after the manual was printed—made it so that the receiver would look for the local DTV channel info in the downstream DirecTV link, rather than using the autoscan feature. When I had enabled the DirecTV service to the Hughes receiver, the software update had come down unnoticed and changed the way the receiver worked.

According to DirecTV, everything would have worked fine if I had entered my zip code in some menu buried deep within the array of configuration schemes. As I pointed out to the phone rep, I had entered my zip code in the screen that helps you aim the dish antenna. But it turns out that the software revision required the zip code in a second location. I added the code, waited a couple of minutes for DirecTV to find and transmit the data, and shortly had my local over-the-air HD broadcasts restored.

In the end, my family couldn't be happier. The pristine and detailed HDTV picture is really amazing, especially for sports but even for sitcoms. And PBS and HDnet show panoramic documentaries that are simply awesome.

Going in, I knew that the TV was only a small part of the HD equation. But I was surprised at the cost and problems I encountered. Ultimately, my latest test validates the belief that HDTV is ready to ramp. Early adopters will still have to overcome some obstacles, but even those are disappearing. Just after I finally got my system up and running, Cox Cable announced that in the first half of next year it plans to offer the San Diego network affiliates in HD.

Author information

On the rare occasions when he's not watching sports, Editor-in-Chief Maury Wright (mgwright@reedbusiness.com) is fond of The King of Queens.