Archive for July, 2008
A Lesson On Wavelength and Earth Science
I have been walking you through some basic “start slow and cheap before going fast and costly” steps to getting reliable off air reception. Now let’s get a little geeky to see if we can make more sense of this. As I wrote in the earlier posts, there’s no difference in the RF signal, and [...]
The power of television
One misconception about digital transmissions is the old thinking that more transmitter power is better. Fact is, the FCC determines how much power television stations should transmit, and only the FCC can allow stations to change their power. The key for over the air digital TV is using a good antenna at the receiver, and doubling [...]
Antennas: The uglier, the better
So you tried it, and the bow-tie antenna did not work. Before jumping into a bigger outdoor antenna, you can shop around for amplified rabbit ears. This is where most people get derailed by fancy claims of digital antennas and HDTV ready. Before shopping, most people will check http://www.antennaweb.org/ to see what type of antenna is [...]
The Rabbit Test
The digital TV signal is a pretty robust format, but like I said in my last post, multipath is a big problem for it to overcome. I want to stay on the antenna topic for a little longer, because it is going to be the most important part of successfully receiving DTV. Rabbit ears will [...]
Antennas. The Good, Bad, and Downright Ugly
The antenna is the most important part of the off air DTV home system. Getting mislead here will cause you hours of frustration and headaches, and cause you to write emails to the station beginning with “Dear stupid dumb @#&&$”. Actually, that’s pretty clean compared to some of the viewer emails I have responded to, [...]
What’s next?
While you are waiting for your DTV coupons to arrive in the mail, (you did order them from www.DTV2009.org or 1-888-388-2009 didn’t you?), you need to do some homework to learn what DTV is (and isn’t). You will be bombarded with terms, numbers, acronyms, lies, and deceptions that will rival any movie you have ever [...]
Dude! Where’s my TV?
I hope only a very few or even better, none of our viewers will wake up on February 18th 2009 to nothing but static on their TV set. It may happen though, so let me say right now: Get digital! It’s not that hard to do, and really does not have to be a mysterious [...]
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