The call volume was brisk today after the article posted our number, and we are definitely trying to help each person that calls as soon as possible, and take the time to answer all their questions. Call us at 919-836-1717 and press 8. We can’t pick up the phone 24 hours a day, but we will get back to you as soon as possible, so leave a message and a good time to call back, and we will do our best to help you out.

I practically have all the converter box menus memorized at this point! I mentioned in one of my posts here, we don’t expect everyone to be a RF system engineer with a degree in computer science, but it sure is helpful! Fortunately, I have a PHD from the school of hard knocks and experience, and I am giving away my secrets to the public for free!

If you’re missing a channel or two, or have no idea what channels you should be getting, you can check antennaweb for information on antennas and what signals are in your area.

You have to aim your antenna towards the tower. Analog was a bit sloppy, and as long as you had the antenna oriented in the general direction of the towers, you could get a watchable picture. Digital is a lot more precise and the antenna needs to be aimed toward the towers. Look at a map, and locate where US 70 East crosses the Wake and Johnston County line. That’s where you point to.

If your antenna has a round loop or bow tie style element, pretend you a re looking through the center of the circle and aim it toward the towers. UHF antennas work differently than the long VHF rabbit ears, and you aim them differently. The long ears will only work for WTVD on channel 11, so aim them separately from the loop antenna.

Use the signal meter in the menu to aim your antenna. You no longer have an analog signal to “see” when the picture gets better or worse as you aim your antenna. While watching the signal meter, turn the antenna left, then right trying to get the highest indication on the meter. It is true you can get too much signal into the box, but let’s not worry about that right now. Try to maximize the signal for now.

If you are using a Terk or Silver Sensor antenna, both great choices, point the pointed end toward the towers.

Once you peak the antenna, perform another channel scan. This will take a couple of minutes, but let it finish the scan, then check to see if it found any missing channels.

Don’t throw away your old antenna just yet. Many folks have bought super duper HDTV antennas especially for digital. There is really no such thing as a digital antenna, and one from 1950 may work just fine. There’s only one way to know, and that’s to try it out and see what it does. I have advised against those 50 dB amplified antennas all along. 50 times nothing is still nothing. And in most cases so much noise is amplified they hardly pick up anything. A 10 dB amp is all most of us will need and usually run in the $30-$40 range. I have not tried every type of antenna out there, but I highly recommend asking at your locat Radio Shack or Best Buy, or local TV Repair shop what they recommend for your area.

What works in Raleigh, may not be right for Fayetteville. To confuse matters even more, what works for your neighbor may not work for you. A little experimenting may be needed, but it’s worth checking in with the neighbors to see what works and does not work. (Remember Help a Digital Newbie Month last August?)

Use your signal meter on a found channel to peak the signal to the highest reading by adjusting your antenna. Then re-scan. The box must scan anytime the antenna is moved in a different direction.

Try the double rescan method in my last post if you still have problems.

Don’t over think this. It should be simple. Drink a glass of wine and try again. After several tries, you’ll either have all the channels back, or be tipsy.

Win, Win!

As I lay down for bed last night, I got alerts that we had a power glitch at the transmitter site on my cell phone. After talking with Central Broadcasting Operations, we determined everything came back online just fine. Well, almost everything.

I had the new digital 17 transmitters cooking offline into the dummy load ready for the big switch today, and when I checked this morning, one of them was dead. I headed out and got it back running after a few minutes, and it seemed stable. I setup my cameras, and tested the wireless network card for signal inside the transmitter room. The building is very well shielded from the outside, and cellphones do not work inside, but my EVDO card had a strong signal.

I had a little time, so I decided to run down the street and get lunch and talk to the Geek Squad at the Best Buy in Garner. They did one better, and I got to talk to Danny, the store Manager. We went over to the stacks of converter boxes and antenna selection they had. This store is ready for all your needs. I’m sure other Best Buy stores have a similar display, but they actually have a converter box you can see first hand how it’s connected on an indoor antenna. (And it was tuned to my digital signal!) I highly recommend anyone having trouble with their converter box hook ups, to go by and ask for a hands on demonstration. Danny said everyone in the store has been trained, and is ready to help answer your questions.

I headed back to the transmitter with one of their cards in hand. They also offer in-home service for a fee by calling 1-800-GEEK SQUAD, but advice in the store is absolutely free.

After testing the Skype connection with the station, I setup for the switch. I was lugging my laptop, webcam, and a cordless phone around. We had a little audio issue, but the switch got pulled, and 17 digital came to life. I walked abound the cabinets and shut off the temporary channel 55 transmitter, and turned off the power to it. If you need a good slightly used transmitter, the number to call is….

After shutting off the numerous alarms, I headed back to the studio to answer emails and take calls from viewers. The volume of calls was slowing down a little, but the anger factor of the callers was off the charts in some cases. Most problems were easily resolved walking through the menus, so we certainly helped more folks than not. The number of reception issues was very low, except for those who needed new antennas and wasn’t getting anything. Most just forgot we have been telling them to re-scan for channels.

It’s been a long day, and I have tons of video to wade through this weekend, as well as phone calls to catch. I hope everyone has survived the switch to digital, and I urge you to help your neighbors.

Ready or not, I’m throwing the switch at 12:30 PM tomorrow afternoon. Tonight’s phone bank callers were getting a little desperate and feeling overwhelmed with hooking up converter boxes.

I invited my buddy Fred Pace, Director of Engineering for the Clear Channel radio stations in Raleigh. Fred was a great help on the phones tonight, even though he’s a radio guy by trade. We had a good time and talked about HD radio, and how FM stations are now broadcasting sub-channels in digital. The system they use keeps the analog signal while adding the new digital channels that can received with new digital radios. We can’t quite figure out why it’s called HD radio, but it’s some really cool technology. I hope to post video from our conversations if I remembered to hit record on the camcorder. (Us TV folks get a little flustered easily)

I sort of envy the radio guys, because if they want to go live, all they need is a phone. In TV, we have to setup bi-directional communication links, color balance the cameras, light the scene, test the audio and usually feed in footage to use while we’re talking. My hat has always been tipped to our Photographers that do this everyday. It’s a demanding job, and they do it in all kinds of conditions.

I let Fred see our HD bitstream data rate, and he drooled over the bandwidth it takes to send Dolby AC-3 digital audio. HD radio uses 96 thousand bits per second, while Dolby 5.1 audio uses 384 thousand bits per second. That’s a lot of data and just a drop in the bucket compared to what we transmit, and your box has to receive and decode.

The whole world is going digital crazy these days, and as long as your antenna is up to the challenge, you’ll love the results. This is an exciting time we live in, and someday we’ll look back at all this and wonder how we put up with fuzzy pictures and bad audio for so long.

Watch me throw the analog switch on NBC 17 live, and on our website at www.mync.com at 12:30!

Thunderstorms in the Spring are inevitable, and we are sitting right in the middle of pop-up alley. Storms seem to develop right on top of us and move east. Once in a while, these things lighting up the sky in beautiful displays of art will pick something random, like a TV station full of sensitive electronic equipment, and wipe out things in an unpredictable way.

Welcome to my world, on Wednesday June 10, 2009.

We got hit in a big way, in a bad way, and in the worst possible way. It knocked us off the air, off cable, and off satellite. It did not seem to have any rhyme or reason to what it took out, and just did its damage in a few milliseconds.

We worked each problem all day getting systems back online. Our main HD encoder is fried, and a replacement will be here Thursday. Servers lost sync with each other and our main program switcher is having issues. I hope we get things back to normal in the morning. Like one viewer told me on the phone bank, “The Government couldn’t pick a worst time to make this transition”. True for the transition, and certainly bad timing with the switch on Friday to be hit by a massive power zap!

But, the show must go on!

We have an annoying glitch in the video we are tracking down right now, and like I said can’t send out any HD programming this evening. We lost AP Wire service and odds and ends around the building. It’s just a pain, and a huge mess, but we will get all the issues resolved, so please be patient and stand by!

Monday evening I invited Chip Johnson from Garner TV and Appliances to help answer phones. Chip is the “High-Tech Redneck” and is really up on his home theatre knowledge. I’ve been telling you that you can build your home theater one pice at a time, and Chip would be a great resource to guide you toward your finished theatre, or man-cave as I prefer to call mine. They have all the pieces you need for a great experience right in your living room.

We got a lot of calls from the Rocky Mount area and an unbelievable number of calls about coupons. The NTIA reported they are getting coupons out in 9 days, but here with only a few days, or hours to the switch, there’s no way to get a coupon in time. Most have one digital TV in the house, but forgot the other sets in the bedroom and kitchen, or simply put it off until it’s too late. Did you know not everyone has Internet access? I lost track of how many calls I took, but it was one after the other, and again, my kind of people. Sweetest and nicest folks you can ever talk to. I wish I could spend more time talking to some of them. Surprisingly to me, very few calls with reception issues. I assumed that would be the bulk of the calls, but most of them just needed reassuring they were ready.

Tuesday I brought in Casey Tart, Manager of the Time-Warner Customer Care call center. Cindy Keene, Director of Public and Government Affairs for Time-Warner also came by and answered the phones. Why would I invite the biggest competitor to a broadcast TV station to answer our phones? Simply, they are the largest supplier of our signal to homes in the market. Not everyone can climb on their roof to deal with an antenna, and apartments do not allow gangly looking antennas to hang on their balconies. Cable offers a lot of solutions and packages to suit everyone’s needs. They are offering a Broadcast package for $7.95 per month for the first year. If you are having issues with your antenna, that’s a great alternative and gives you 12 months to resolve your problems, or upgrade to a different package. If you haven’t gotten your coupon, a new TV, or have antenna issues, right now you need to be going with “plan B” and try to get by. They have a low cost viable solution on their website.

The reception calls came in tonight. I got a couple of calls from near the Virginia border, which is one of those areas in-between all the markets, and may be difficult if not impossible, to get over the air TV. These callers have a satellite service, but wanted to know if their second set might be able to get the digital signal especially when analog is spotty now. My advice is to call your satellite provider to see if they have a special package to add those additional TV’s. Most of them do offer some assistance in such cases with special packages for multi-room systems.

I do want to stress again, everyone using an antenna will have to re-scan for channels Friday afternoon. In several cases, I talked some folks how to set-up the converter box on the phone. Lot’s of folks forget the TV will be parked on channel 3 or 4 when the box is on. You can’t take these things right out of the box and punch in channel 17 and see anything. It has to scan to find the channels first!

Wednesday, after chasing different problems caused by lightning in the station, Wayne and I manned the phone bank, and later Photographer Dan West came to help us out. Several had some interesting antenna issues, especially one man that has a great signal, until the wind blows. It sounds like he has some trees in the area rocking back and forth causing problems. He reported it on all his digital channels, which is also uncommon as trees usually affect one or two channels at a time. Some of these problems will improve after Friday.

As always, we have the nicest and sweetest callers watching our station, and it’s a pleasure to help any way we can. We have actually helped several folks set up their converter boxes, but with the phones ringing constantly, it’s hard to devote as much time to everyone that needs it. We’ll keep trying though. We do have a number you can call during the day and we’ll try yo help you as soon as possible. You can always get help by calling the FCC at 1-888-CALL FCC.

Thursday night Fred Pace from Clear-Channel radio here in Raleigh will join us to talk HD radio, and their digital transition.

Friday Daniel Miron from Dish Network will be back. He helped us out in December when we held the phone bank and I’ve been test driving the TR-40 DTVPal converter box.

The uncensored behind the scenes action is being streamed on my back-channel on the video tab of this blog, MYNC.com keyword DTV, and on Livestream.com/mvnn! Check us out live between 6 and 8 PM!