I predict odd stories in the paper, about people who can’t figure this out.
I’d expect lots of, “But no one told meeeeeeeee!”
I had to buy a new antenna after I got my converter box. I still get weak signals and right now, for some reason my picture on Fox is fine but the sound is pitched a few octaves too low.
Am I the only one whose digital reception has worsened since the “official” switchover? Leading up to it, most of the stations around here were putting their digital signals on UHF and they came in great. Now some of them have switched to VHF and the signal’s gone all wonky and won’t hold a level for more than a couple minutes. The ones still on UHF are fine. Don’t know if this has to do with the stations not being cranked up enough or if i’m just “Get Offa My Lawn”-ing.
I’ve got cable, so I haven’t been in a hurry to get a converter box. Sent in for a coupon but it was already too late.
But I will get one. My power went out early in the morning that Ike blew in & came back on at 6 PM. But I was without cable & internet for almost a week! At least I could watch disaster coverage. (Many folks were without power for weeks. On the Bolivar Peninsula, people returned to wonder where the neighborhood went. The most recent blow on Galveston: they are realizing that the salt water killed most of the trees. Yes, I know I had it easy.)
Then, there’s the kitchen TV & the bedroom TV. I’ve been considering paying Comcast to hook up those rooms; do I really need that much TV? The kitchen TV has the built in VHS; my collection includes all of Blackadder, all of AbFab & some good movies. I just played with the bedroom TV. Our NBC channel is running information on “what happened to my TV?” in English & Spanish. A bunch of UHF stations are going strong, but I understand that most of them will go away. This articleboasts of all the wonderfulness that my converter will reveal:
Signing off to re-watch some more episodes of Dollhouse on Hulu.com…
Mine’s gotten worse. The picture is broken and choppy, and it often fades out and I get that ‘No Signal’ message. Grr.
The local TV critic says the stations around here got about 1,000 calls today, but that they were of the “I can’t get the damn thing to work” category, rather than the “what happened to me shows” type.
And is there anything more annoying than the “human antenna” effect? You think you’ve got it adjusted and you move your hand, and the signal–which was never consistent to begin with-- plummets.
Except for the ones yelling, “¡Mis telenovelas! ¿Qué pasó con mis telenovelas?” like my grandma.
We have cable, so things have been showing up OK so far. Last Saturday night I was changing channels on the digital TV in the living room, which is not hooked up to cable, and found that Channel 18 now has other digital channels that broadcast in different Asian languages. The Japanese channel was showing subtitled anime (nothing cool, just some moe show that seems to be based on a dating sim game) and historical dramas. There’s also a Spanish PBS station, which my mom likes. I need to re-scan my VCR/DVD to see which digital channels it picks up, if any.
No kidding, my signal keeps going in and out depending on where I am in the room.
I really have to get this steel plate in my head replaced with ceramic.
Yeah, that’s annoying. Having to adjust the antenna for every station is annoying and having it not work the same way twice is annoying. And finally having every station letter boxed on the top, bottom and sides with them putting station logos on the sides it the most annoying. My TV screen is now even smaller.
Many converter boxes have a ‘zoom’ or ‘crop’ function that gets rid of at least some of the letterboxing.
I’ve noticed one problem - and I’m not sure if it’s the signal, the converter box or the TV itself. When we watched Conan O’Brien, the sound was “off.” The band is very loud, but we can barely hear Andy Richter. It continued like that through the show and I noticed the same thing with Jimmy Fallon. I looked through all the menus on the converter box and the TV and I couldn’t find any audio settings. Is this just how the HD, surround sound mix sounds on a crappy stereo TV, or is there a trick to fix it?
I don’t have a converter box, I have a digital ready TV but what do you know it does have a zoom so now that problem is solved, now what to do about the antenna?
I don’t know what the solution is, but this is what would happen if you took only the front two/main channels of a surround (5.1 channel) broadcast. You’re missing the center channel, which is where all the dialog happens. Its most likely a problem either in the setup of the converter box, or how you cabled the converter’s output to your television.
I rescanned my TV yesterday, we only have an antenna. What I don’t like about my TV is that you can’t tell it to scan just the digital stations, so it takes twice as long. I also think that some of the local DC stations have cut power a bit. I can’t get ABC at all. The CBS station only gives a 40% power according to my TV, but it used to be 90. Though the Fox and PBS station come in better now.
Or it could be a screw up at the station. Most of the time I get sound just fine, but for a while shows on ABC’s HD feed would occasionally have this exact problem. It wasn’t anything I did, my setup hadn’t changed, and the problem often only showed up for part of a show (usually Lost, :mad:) and would eventually be corrected. Fortunately this hasn’t happened to me in a while, I guess the numbskulls at the station finally got their act together.
Now if only the Fox affiliate would fix their reversed stereo (left channel from right speaker and vice versa). Every other channel is fine, so it’s gotta be their problem.
I’ve been noticing that I have to turn up the volume more than usual for the shows, the commercials are still too loud.
There was a tear in my eye as I watched the analog signals from WLS (Chicago ABC, broadcasting since 1948) and WCPX* (Ion Television) wink out, but I’m a TV history geek and my romantic ramblings can be safely ignored. Since the switch Weigel Broadcasting, owner of analog channels 23, 26, 48, has seen its penetration go from its “measly” four analog stations (you don’t need or want HD when you are broadcasting “Brady Bunch” or “Starsky and Hutch” reruns and that drunken Filipina lady brewing up recipes from Spam and Rice-a-Roni) to one Channel 48 station, SEVEN Channel 26 stations, and EIGHT Channel 23 stations, most advertising the possibility of a That TV station to compliment its This station. As I research, I realize that digital is more directional than analog, so most of those excess stations are probably aimed elsewhere, but I wish my converter box included a “Delete Station” option.
-
- Graduated from college in '76. Had I conned some of my classmates into buying WCFL-TV we’d be multi-millionaires.
I just turned on the television I’ve had in my bedroom since I was six years old. Nothing but snow. If it weren’t for the laptop an inch away from me and the iPod playing on the space-age looking speakers two feet from that, it’d feel like the apocalypse or something.