Thin-Air ATSC (and NTSC): Reception Irregularities And Hardware Retreats

The latest in a series…

When I wrote last Thursday afternoon that I’d finally succeeded in tuning in the ATSC streams coming from KOLO and a few other Reno, NV area stations, I suspected that my reception ups-and-downs weren’t over…and I was right. In the two followups at the end of part two of that particular post series, I mentioned that I was noticing occasional distortion in the recordings made using the Pinnacle Systems PCTV HD mini Stick. As a result, suspecting signal overload, I’d decided to disable the unit’s ‘Signal Booster’ setting.

Friday and Saturday, I went on another whirlwind roadtrip to the San Francisco Bay Area, and after I got back I reviewed the additional TV shows captured by my Windows Vista Media Center system while I was gone. Once again I saw evidence of random dropouts, across multiple channels’ recordings…dropouts that I’d never experienced with the HP ExpressCard TV Tuner I was previously using (and therefore decided to start using again). Too-weak or too-strong reception, it seems, is not the root cause of the Pinnacle woes.

Perhaps I just have a flaky unit, or perhaps something more systemic is to blame. Possibilities include Pinnacle’s Media Center drivers or the Dell XPS M1330’s USB implementation, even though I had no other peripherals connected to the laptop’s other external USB ports. I thought back to the summer of 2005, when a previous system’s USB 1.1 design caused random dropouts in incoming isochronous audio; perhaps this system’s higher-bandwidth USB2 configuration is similarly struggling with higher-bandwidth incoming isochronous audio-plus-video. It’s too bad…without the Pinnacle unit’s ‘Signal Booster’ capabilities, I’m no longer able to receive KNBP or KREN, and as you’ll see in a moment, KOLO is also more hit-and-miss than it was before.

Getting the HP ExpressCard TV Tuner working again was a bit frustrating. When I plugged it back into the laptop (after first disconnecting the Pinnacle USB device), Windows Vista’s Device Manager correctly reported its presence. But after subsequently launching Media Center, I was prompted to ’set up a new tuner’ (even though I’d previously configured it, prior to migrating to the Pinnacle alternative), and Media Center subsequently (and consistently) locked up. What I ended up needing to do was to completely de-install the Pinnacle software suite, then re-install the Hauppauge drivers for the HP unit (which is a re-label of Hauppauge’s WinTV-HVR-1500), then re-configure TV reception in Media Center from the very beginning using the HP unit. I’m pointing the probable blame finger here at Pinnacle; any software that requires you to do a full system reboot after an install, upgrade, or un-install is far too obtrusive for my tastes.

Sunday and Monday were filled with abundant precipitation (although today it’s drop-dead gorgeous). Here at 7,000 feet it mostly took the form of extremely large and wet flakes of snow (which locals aptly refer to as ‘Sierra Cement’). Depending on the ambient temperature at the time, it either transformed into water or slush, or accumulated as ‘white stuff’ once it hit the ground. And, as it turned out, its presence seemingly adversely affected two channels’ worth of reception. As a reminder, here’s what I’m currently tuning in, and where it’s coming from:

I am unable to tune in KAME, whose primary tower is located on Red Peak

Note that only two of the six stations are in the upper VHF band, therefore serviced by my AntennaCraft Y5-7-13 antenna. The other four, being UHF, are handled by the Antennas Direct ClearStream 2. Fortunately, the UHF stations both broadcast from east of me, while the VHF transmissions all come from the northeast, so I’ve been able to appropriately position the antennas without needing to resort to a rotor.

Note, too, that KRXI is the only Peavine Mountain-located broadcaster with a high-power omni-directional primary tower. All the others’ Peavine beacons come from secondary translators serving the town of Verdi. Translator towers are comparatively low power and are also highly directional, thereby enabling them to focus what broadcast power exists on the target local area.

Fortunately, Peavine Mountain is northeast of both Verdi, NV and further-away Truckee, CA, so I’m able to snag a fairly weak but still usually serviceable transmission from the KOLO translator. Conversely, I can only get KREN’s translator signal when I run the signal through a booster, and other Peavine transmissions remain indecipherable in spite of my amplification attempts. In part, this is because Peavine’s towers’ beacons primarily point towards Verdi, a few thousand feet below and only a few miles from them (as the crow flies, that is). And in part, it’s because nearby-to-me ~7,100′ Prosser Hill lies almost directly between Peavine Mountain and me, causing me to somewhat be in Prosser’s RF ’shadow’. More on that last point in a bit…

Early Sunday afternoon, after successfully getting the HP ExpressCard TV Tuner re-installed, I confirmed that KRNV, KTVN, KOLO and KRXI were all coming in clear. I was surprised later that night, however, to find Media Center reporting ‘no signal’ from KTVN when it tried to record 60 Minutes. KTVN’s broadcast has historically been slightly weaker than that of its KRNV Slide Mountain neighbor, but ever since I figured out that I needed a dedicated VHF antenna, I’d been able to tune it in fine…until now, that is.

I confirmed the no-reception situation by plugging the Pinnacle tuner into my netbook, thereby liberating both the Dell laptop and the HP tuner card from blame, then I gave up and went to bed. The next morning, KTVN was still dead to me, so I dropped an email to chief engineer Jack Antonio, who reported back no detected problems on his end. Since I was still able to receive KRNV’s VHF signal (along with the various UHF channels) just fine, I also assumed my antenna and coax wiring were blameless.

Continue reading with Part Two of this series, ‘Thin-Air ATSC (and NTSC): Snowfall Windows And Mountain Shadows‘…