The Digital Television Transition

"Nielsen may have vastly undercounted the number of households disenfranchised in last week’s DTV transition. A senior astronomer at the SETI Institute writes that there may be “zillions of viewers who might not have a converter box or a digital-ready TV--namely, the aliens.” Seth Shostak works for the nonprofit organization focused on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence by way of radio frequency transmissions. The project uses, among other resources, one of the world’s largest supercomputers comprised of more than 5 million individually volunteered PCs, to monitor for RF activity from outerspace.Conversely, the RF emissions generated by TV and radio signals are considered a sort of collective ping directed at the far reaches of the Galaxy. The switch to digital broadcasting could leave our space neighbors watching intergalactic snow on their “wall-size plasmas,” Shostak writes at Space.com."

I am not making up this kind of stuff! However, I do have some Digital Television Transition concerns that fall a little closer to home.

First, to every television engineer out there, please return those phone calls! Every viewer who takes the time to call your station are truly in need of your expertise as a Broadcast Engineer. These are viewers who WANT to watch your station and are asking (maybe pleading!) for your help. By returning their call promptly and being friendly on the phone, you can do something that no amount of promotion, news awards or sales will ever accomplish and that is to build the good-will of a viewer which turns into a loyal viewer. Think of your own experiences when you have called a vendor or manufacturer looking for some assistance. The ones that gave you good information and good customer service probably are the ones still getting your business today. The ones that were gruff or did not call you back, are probably not seeing much of your budget getting sent their way. It's the same with your viewers. You are the vendor and what you are trying to get your viewers to do is spend more time watching your station.

Second, to all the painfully frustrated viewers trying to make the transition to digital: Don't Panic! Here are some ideas to try:
1: If you've been using some big monster antenna on your roof to get analog television, try a "Metro Gain" (about 5' long) or a "Suburban Gain (about 8' long) antenna instead. If your current antenna is more than 15 years old, replace it! After 15 years in the weather, it's corroded, probably has some busted parts and is in generally poor condition. If you live in the Pacific Northwest, it most likely has a fantastic eco-sphere of moss-like organisms growing on it.
1A: A note about antennas: Why go to a smaller antenna instead of a bigger antenna? While a bigger antenna may be more sensitive to signals it is directly pointed at, it also has what are called side-lobes. These side lobes are little points of increased gain in directions other than the front of the antenna. These side lobes can pick up a reflected version of the channel you're trying to watch and that causes multi-path. In the days of analog, we called that ghosting. Today, we call that "Digital Cliff" and it's something that you don't want to fall off of. What's happening is multi-path which is the signal of your favorite TV station getting to your antenna via more than one path. Instead of a straight line from the broadcast tower to your antenna, the signal is bouncing off the rock cliff on the mountains behind your house or off the side of your neighbor's metal building and being picked up by your antenna. With more than one version of the same signal arriving to your antenna at different times (were talking about less than 1/1000 of a second), the decoder chip in your receiver gets all kinds of confused and doesn't know what to do. All those various ones and zeros make no sense at all and so everything shuts down. With Digital Television, it's either all there or it's all gone. There is no ghosting. A smaller gain antenna like the Channel Master CM-3016 is good to 45 miles from the broadcaster's tower. Because this type of antenna has a nice, big, wide gain in almost every direction (it has less gain or a null at the back), multipath problems go way down. If you are within 45 miles of the broadcast towers and have a pretty good shot toward them, at most, all you might need to add is a 10dB amplifier to get the signal to your receiver. If your house is more than 45 miles from the towers and you have a pretty good shot, then stepping up one size to the next bigger antenna might help. With the exception of one instance where a big monster (called deep-fringe) antenna worked was on top of a ridge mounted on a 100' tower picking up a TV signal 125 air miles away, your best bet is a much lower gain antenna to reduce multi-path effects for receiving Digital Television.
2: There is a wonderful thing in Digital Television called PCIP. It gives you all the program information for the channels. It also allows the Broadcaster to identify his channel with what ever number he wants. In the analog days, he was broadcasting on Channel 3. Well, it turns out that Channel 3 is not such a good channel for digital and so now he's actually broadcasting on Channel 47. Thanks to PCIP, you tell your digital receiver that you want to watch channel 3 and it knows to actually tune into channel 47. Here's the problem, for the last 50 years that you've had an antenna on your roof, you've been watching only channels 2 through 13, which are called VHF channels. Chances are you have a VHF antenna and it's not going to work at all well when it comes to receiving UHF channels. Buy a new antenna and make sure it is a VHF/UHF combination antenna.
3. Do NOT pay extra for a HDTV antenna! What makes a HDTV antenna different from a regular TV antenna? With the exception of price, absolutely nothing! Big Hint: Even though your favorite local TV station has literally invested millions of dollars to send you a stream of ones and zeros, at the end of the day, all your antenna sees is an old fashioned analog envelope. That's right, an analog antenna receives Digital Television just as good as some whiz-bang HDTV antenna that cost three times too much for what you get.
4. If it is all too confusing, call the engineering department at one of the local TV stations. They do want to help you receive their station! If that's not working or you have some questions for me, fire off an email to brianw@provideoandtape.com I'll do my best to help out. Remember, you're just trying to scoop up some spare electrons, not provide a ground path for every RF signal on the planet!

Best of luck and good viewing!

Brian