Digital television still sucks, but not as bad

I told you DTV sucked a year ago and nothing has changed. The linked article still purports that digital transmissions are more efficient but we all know they are part of a deal to push the broadcasting industry into the corner so the cell phone companies and Google and Intel can use the old analog TV bands. Consumer editor Brian Dipert had a nice article on the shortcomings of the transition. I was glad to see the mainstream media picked up most of my caveats about how you still need an antenna and that you probably need an outside antenna and rotator. I blogged about the transition in May 2008, December 2008, January 2009, as well as in February 2009. I figured that there would be fewer problems since the information about the crappy DTV reception would prepare people. I was saddened to see that the FCC took 317,450 calls Friday from people that lost reception.

One thing that I forgot to repeatedly warn people about was the fact that the channel numbers you “tune” to and the real actual frequency has nothing to do with each other. See, software people have infected the TV and now we have indirect pointers to linked list arbitrary virtual crap in our most fundamental consumer product. So the broadcast people were smart to warn us to re-scan for the new station assignments. Sure enough, some of the stations that have been given UHF frequencies for their DTV had poor reception problems when the FCC moved them down to upper VHF band. Some stations have broadcast that their coverage is now worse, something Dipert pointed out in his article. Let me point out that this makes the FCC, well it’s not nice to call them liars, but lets just say their promises for DTV were “counterfactual”.

Now the good news. I have rebuilt and installed my ham-grade rotator and raised the antenna up 3 more feet and my reception is acceptable. I used to be amazed when my buddy Alan told me he gets 49 stations but I get 47. Only all the secondary stations count to that total, so 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 9.4, and 9.5 are 5 of the 47. I can only receive three analog channels now. Channel 11 has a screen telling you to buy a converter box, channel 40 is too fuzzy to see what is going on and I get KDTVCA channel 28 from Santa Rosa but it is pretty fuzzy. My DTV is not perfect by any means. I have noticed that when certain cars start in the parking lot across the street, my picture breaks up. I assume the car has hot ignition or a bad plug wire. My ABC station that used to be rock solid is now a bit spotty. All that being said, if you hate cable companies as bad as I do, you can still get a great picture when over-the-air stations broadcast 1080i. This is the best strategy for broadcast stations, to have their primary station in HD and a secondary station in SD for older sets. I have already pointed out that if a station splits its band up to 5 stations like channel 9 does, the picture quality is crap.

Real-life TV transmitter engineer Robert Getsla sent along a couple article for us. One discusses the problems with DTV reception. Another article looks at the impact on local stations. A scary one points out that the DTV transition may have had the effect of killing broadcast TV. Finally he sent one to show the cable companies are trying to tie your entire home network into theirs. I, for one, am not a fan. Just give me DHCP and a SMTP server, thanks.

There is still plenty of ignorance to go around, check out this article about the winners and losers of DTV. Sorry, the people lost and the broadcast industry loses (but they may have had it coming for starting the monster in the first place). Rural folks lose. Winners are the cell phone companies that gobbled up the spectrum, the FCC that made billions on the auctions and Intel and Google that got some whitespace proposals granted. Cable and satellite companies won since people will switch. I guess taxpayers gained on the money collected by the FCC and then lost when the government gave it all to the banker CEO cronies. Call that one a wash.

Now I give the FCC a lot of guff since they are now a political organization and not a technical one. Still, the FCC is full of pretty decent folks so you can expect them to try and fix particular instances of DTV problems. Here in the SF Bay area we are reconfiguring towers and boosting broadcast power. Bob Getsla talked about how his station will add a repeater so their station coming off Mt Bruno can get to their Chinese audience in San Francisco that is blocked by Mt Sutro. So yeah, the tech people will come to the rescue again. If you signed up for that free basic cable be sure to check out over the air TV in a year before you start paying. Folks like Getsla will do everything they can to get you good reception, for free, forever.