Thick-Air ATSC: A Dearth Of Reception Leaves Me Feeling Uneasy
A sea level follow-up to my long-running high altitude ‘Thin-Air ATSC’ blog series, which culminated in a recent cover story…
I’ve reviewed a lot of products and usage scenarios over the years, with a diversity of results logged to date. But I don’t know if I’ve ever been more disappointed than I am this evening as I write these words. Although, to be abundantly clear, I’m not near as annoyed as this guy apparently was.
My friend whose been acting as my tech guinea pig of late doesn’t have any sort of subscription television service, and she owns a 25" CRT with a 4:3 aspect ratio and integrated NTSC tuner. She is, in a few words, a prime candidate for a DTV converter box. So earlier today, I finally fired up the four systems that I’d told you I was going to purchase last October, obtained one month later, and analyzed in case-study form earlier this year.
The high-level details of her nearby broadcasters (with specifics kept secret for privacy reasons), courtesy of HDTV Antenna Labs (with thanks to Engadget for the website heads-up) are as follows:
|
Network |
Channel |
Power |
Distance |
Azimuth |
|
CBS |
8 (VHF) |
19.8 |
14 miles |
184° |
|
PBS |
26 (UHF) |
475. |
64 miles |
357° |
|
FOX |
19 (UHF) |
322.8 |
29 miles |
144° |
|
NBC |
40 (UHF) |
370. |
29 miles |
144° |
|
ABC |
10 (VHF) |
20.7 |
14 miles |
184° |
As you can see, the likelihood of getting PBS is remote in the absence of an antenna rotor, but VHF broadcasters CBS and ABC are clustered together to the southeast of her location, with the UHF transmitters from Fox and NBC similarly linked due south of and roughly twice as far away from her as are their VHF peers.
She, like most folks, doesn’t have a functional antenna on her roof. So instead I fired up two top-of-television antennas: a Radio Shack ATV 1000 VHF/UHF/FM combo:
And a simple UHF-only unit, which came bundled with the Sansonic FT-300A that I also tested today:
The other two STBs I fired up were the AccessHD DTA-1080D:
And Dish Networks’ TR-40 CRA:
Unfortunately, my earlier reported over-enthusiasm with thermal paste/grease, as I’d feared, rendered the Apex Digital DT502 unusable:
It’d power on and off (as determined by the green-vs-red front panel LED color transitions) both via the front panel power button and from a remote control button press, but it obdurately refused to output any sort of display.
My friend lives in a one-story home. Her next-door-neighbor’s single-story home is directly to the south of her (i.e. only a few feet away), a close proximity that admittedly might attenuate the signal coming from ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC’s towers. And admittedly, too, I have no idea what television reception was like at her location back in the NTSC days. But judging from my own extensive experience with the topic, I expected to be able to at least sporadically tune in the four incoming signals.
My optimistic expectations were speedily dashed. I tried all three converter boxes, each with both antennas in a variety of orientations and, with the Radio Shack unit, at both low and high gain settings. The consistent result in all cases, after many hours of experimentation: zero signal strength, on all channels. Unbelievable.
Techies will undoubtedly scoff at my minimalist setup, perhaps suggesting that I should instead mount a massive antenna on the roof (complete with a rotor, of course), and string coax cable from there down to the living room. They miss the point. Such a solution isn’t even remotely palatable to the masses. The masses don’t thrill at the adventure of debugging problems and figuring out clumsy but functional solutions. They just want to watch television. And when the cheap top-of-set antenna that used to work fine no longer does so post-NTSC-to-ATSC transition, they throw the antenna away and call up a cable, satellite, or IP television service provider. Or if funds are tights, they do without any service at all. Sigh.
In closing, here are a few positive-feedback shout-outs based on the scant product testing I was able to do in the absence of ATSC reception:
- To Dish Networks, for providing their unit with a dynamically updating antenna orientation feature (which is how I now I got zero signal strength reception on all channels)
- To AccessHD, for including the ability to add specific channels upon completion of the auto-scan algorithm, a nice touch for anyone with a rotor, and
- To Sansonic, for its speedy channel-auto-scan routine
And wrapping up, I’ve (as usual) got a bone to pick with RadioShack (or is that "The Shack?"). The longstanding and pervasive tech ignorance of its employees never fails to amaze me. In speaking with a store manager today, I told him that I was unable to find any instructions online for the ATV 1000 (for which I was in the store to purchase a replacement 12V wall wart), and I asked him if he had any advice for how I might properly orient its oval UHF element. "Don’t worry about UHF", he said. "In fact," he continued, "both UHF and VHF are irrelevant with ATSC. The broadcasters now transmit digital data, even though they still refer to the old VHF and UHF channel numbers with their station names".
This bit of absurdity, mind you, came less than five minutes after the assistant store manager had reassured him that the ATV 1000 would still be relevant in the ATSC era. For about 30 seconds, I attempted to explain to him that VHF and UHF frequencies were very much still in use, with the ‘digital data’ modulated on an analog carrier, although a station’s new ATSC frequency might in fact be different than its old NTSC one was. In fact, I told him, most ATSC broadcasters were specifically using the UHF band he’s explicitly suggested I ‘not worry about’. He just shook his head, smiled broadly, patted me on the shoulder, commented that "it’s all binary now"…and then suggested that I might want to take an electronics class or buy a book if I wanted to learn what was really going on.
Idiot.
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