Greensboro, NC - HDTV - Page 276

Woody, does your 8640HDC have the problem discussed in the first post and throughout this thread: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1219141

You picked up any stations from the Central Savannah River Area -- Augusta, Ga.-Aiken, S.C.??

p.s., I take everything seriously (response to your post about lo-VHF)

Actually it was all VHF high. Charleston and the ETV in Conway were the SC stations. No WIS, I was surprised. The tropo ran along the coast.

Last night I picked up WGSA HD and the subs from Savannah. They do two CW's. A regular feed, and the CW + on 35-2 .

All you've got to do is start scanning once the sun sets this time of year, and you just never know what you might pick up.

I don't scan. I usually go to the physical channel of what I am trying to pick up. I just press the Ant Level button on my converter box remote and then go up or down until I see the physical channel that I desire to get. Then, I look at the signal strength and signal quality on that channel. I picked up many, many channels using this method, including all of the UHF stations in Savannah at one point.

WGSA and WGCW are the CW stations in Savannah. The two stations have a much different daytime schedule. For example, Wendy Williams comes on at 4 p.m. on WGSA (35.1), while Tyra comes on at 4 p.m. on WGCW (35.2).

My 8640HDC works perect with no lags. If you use componant cables you have absolutely no problem with picture reverting to 480i . I am recording hd like crazy and have only got the HD to 20% full. Unless you archive a bunch of shows on the HD you will never need a eternal hard drive. My 8640 performs great is fast and responsive and has a couple of new features.

FYI - We are getting information that FOX will be demonstrating the long awaited new splicer features at NAB in a couple of weeks. I hear by the end of summer, stations should be able to do moving video (animated logos) along with weather crawls, EAS information and other crawl info while staying in HD during network.

We shall see.

Yes, we all *love* animated screen bugs... just search the forum for opinions.

That will be a nice improvement. It was always a painful experience switching back and forth in a storm, especially since the SD and HD were never exactly in sync.
Yes... progress is exciting.

Joe L.

I'm guessing one of the passing storms took WXII off the air earlier? DirecTV has a message up, and there's nothing showing OTA.

Looks like WXII had a bad day all around. They were 7 minutes late starting their 5pm news. Not sure what happened there, and then the transmitter went down at the height of the storm and when I stopped checking at 7:30, it was still down. Not sure when it came back up. I checked it after 8:30 and it was back up.

When the weather looks bad and it is heading towards our transmitter and we are either in storm coverage or a news cast, I will remotely switch the generator on line and run it for the duration of the broadcast. With VHF, if the transmitter went down, it was only down for the duration of the outage and the switch to the generator. With UHF transmitters, if they are bumped around too much, they may not want to come back so I would rather run the generator and not need it then have the transmitter not come back after a power dump in the middle of something huge like storm coverage. You not there and people will stop looking to see if you are there. We had a saying when FOX owned us, "We Never Close. PERIOD" and FOX agreed with that. The new owners are starting to come around to that thinking as well.

Hey bigcementpond! You need to stop by sometime. You won't recognize the place now!

For those of you on TWC who want a newer DVR with a 320 GB HDD, the Spring Garden St. store has the Samsung SMT-H3270 in stock. I picked one up today. It has a 320 GB harddrive (twice what the older SA boxes have) and is faster/more responsive than the SA box I was using. They were out of the Cisco 8640HDC's.

Edit: The Samsung box apparently does NOT support pic-in-pic!

I know. The 8640 does support PIP. The 8640 fast forward is also superior to the Samsung.

Unfortunately they were out of the 8640's and the CSR didn't know when more would arrive.

I think I'm going to get an antenna while I'm deciding whether to ditch cable, get satellite, etc. I must be about dead center - antennaweb shows the Triad stations (not counting ION) between 23.5 (WXII) & 25.4 (WGHP) miles from me.

A while back, foxeng mentioned the Channel Master 4228HD and Winegard HD7694. I looked at Winegard's site today to get some info and used their 'recommender' for my situation. Their site recommended the SS-3000. Does anyone have any experience with it? Amazon has some great reviews and the ease of an indoor setup might sway me to go this way. Just thought I'd check and see if anyone had any experience with it locally.

P.S. foxeng, FWIW, the antennaweb site shows WGHP as channel 8 and the only vhf channel listed locally. Didn't know if that was worth looking into...

First off, DO NOT GO WITH AN INDOOR ANTENNA. It will cause you more problems than they are worth. Having gone through a change TWICE in 9 months, I speak with some knowledge of the situation. The 4228 or the 7694 will work very nicely for you. I have the 4228 and my boss has the 7694. Of course the only reason now to have the 7694 would be to watch WTVD in Durham on 11, if are in the eastern part of the market.

Second, as far as AntennaWeb. They get their data from the FCC. I can try and contact them, but I have no idea if it will do any good.

I remember watching something on FX a few years ago. They had some ad that would pop up frequently advertising some SCIFI or dragon movie. The popup would take up at least a quarter of the screen and the sound effects would make it impossible to hear the dialogue. So, no, I am not looking forward to more animated stuff unrelated to what I am watching.

Just some suggestions for antennas. I have a Winegard HD8800 UHF 8 bay whisker antenna, and it is really excellent. I ordered from SolidSignal, and it was slightly cheaper than others. I watch UHF stations 60 miles away with no kind of problems ever. Also another similar antenna is the Antennacraft U8000. I have seen good feedback on that as well. It should be at Radioshack. I have seen mixed results with the new CM 4228. The balun is sometimes faulty. If you can get an old USA made 4228, they can't be beat. The winegard HD 76** series are great, but if you don't have any VHF channels you want to watch, then you are losing a bit of gain possibly in the UHF area since combo style antennas often are tuned more for VHF.

I saw the same things. I think foxeng mentioned that he had an older one, so I was leery of the latest, greatest model.

I'm not really interested in pulling in far away stations. I'm looking for a backup option for local OTA viewing with a view to possibly either eliminating pay TV entirely or maybe going to satellite and using OTA for local viewing.

FWIW -- I got the 'new' CM4228 -- didn't realize about the issue new/vs old until it was mounted. I'm up in Summerfield, with the antenna in the attic, pointed directly north. (Yes, north.)

The reason for this, after hours of testing and playing, I realized that I could pull all the Roanoke channels, plus close enough the GSO that I get all the GSO channels regardless of orientation. For whatever reason, pointing towards Raleigh or Charlotte didn't yield much (not sure if anyone else is able to get them here).

Not saying you couldn't do better with another antenna, just my experience has been pretty solid.

Ok, SVTarHeel. First things first. WGHP is NO LONGER on VHF, so disregard the AntennaWeb listing. I know this because I actually pulled in their current digital channel 35 earlier this year (it deleted Savannah's WGSA off my converter box for about three weeks).

And if you are not interested in pulling in stations outside of Greensboro, then I would go straight to the UHF-only channels, since there are no more VHF channels in Greensboro.

The new CM4228 has been taking somewhat of a beating by reviewers on Amazon as being 'Chinese-made junk'. I would stay away from it if consistent reception of locals is what you are after.

The Terrestial Digital DB4 is a good option. Also, any of Winegard's UHF-only antennas would be a great choice as well.

Exactly. When I saw the error, I thought I'd make sure foxeng knew about it in case it could be changed to prevent future problems with people looking there to find out what antenna they needed to get. If they're like me, and just looking for Triad stations, they could ignore the VHF range and base their decision on the best UHF option.

15 April 2010

SVTarHeel,

I just spotted your private message. Sorry I did not notice it two weeks ago.

I also noticed foxeng's reply to you concerning commercial indoor antennas. He said, "First off, DO NOT GO WITH AN INDOOR ANTENNA. It will cause you more problems than they are worth." LOL... Yes... I suspect he is right when it comes to most of the commercially available indoor antennas.

His suggestion concerning the Channel Master 4228 outdoor antenna is certainly a very good solution to your problem. In fact a few years back, I had planned on purchasing the very same antenna, an antenna rotor, a CM-7777 mast pre-amp, a new mast, a new roof top tripod, gable mounting brackets and about 100 feet of best RG6 coax cable I could find to replace my 25 year old VHF/UHF outdoor antenna.

Somewhere along the way, I stumbled across some information on building a "Do It Yourself Four Bay Bowtie Antenna" out of coat hangers. LOL... Really!!! So, I gave it a try and much to my surprise it sort of worked, even at ground level on my driveway. It was pretty big and very ugly. It might have been okay for the attic, but for the outside world, no way. It would have rusted and rotted away in the weather in short order. Like foxeng said, "It will cause you more problems than they are worth."

But by this time, the hobby bug had bitten me pretty hard. I kept on reading and experimenting. I came across a Canadian website that had a following of avid experimenters. They used a sophisticated freeware antenna modeling program, 4NEC2, written by Arie Voors to extend the Hoverman UHF antenna. Arie’s package is a Window’s front end to the Numerical Electromagnetics Code program originally developed in the 1970s for the US Navy at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. The Hoverman UHF antenna was first patented in 1959 (Patent # 2918672). These enthusiastic experimenters were searching for design improvements, finding them and then building their designs to verify the theory. Wow!!!

I tried to learn a little bit from these guys. I finally figured out how to use the 4NEC2 software at a fairly low level. I continued to independently experiment with simple and relatively small UHF antenna designs that might have some promise as an amplified indoor antenna. Fortunately for me, WGHP (FOX8) gave up on their original plans to switch their digital transmissions from UHF channel 35 back to VHF channel 8. This meant that all of the local Triad DTV stations would be transmitting in the UHF band and that greatly simplified the antenna design requirements.

Two more things I learned along the way were: 1) a low noise pre-amp like the CM-7777 goes a long ways to improve the performance of any “Do It Yourself” indoor UHF antenna, and 2) keep the RG6 coax cable as short as possible if you are not using a high quality pre-amp. An amplified indoor UHF antenna located close to each of your DTV sets can work or at least it does for me here in the Winston-Salem area.

I have several other working designs similar to the double diamond design in the picture I posted a month or so back. The best performer is a little taller than the double diamond design but has about the same size foot print. I am not exactly interested in starting a cottage industry, but on the other hand, I would love to see more folks go back to Free Over-The-Air HDTV. I am willing to demonstrate my humble efforts.

Good Luck,
DTV Student

When I moved back to the Triad from Texas in '07, I used my 25" generic TV to replace a broken one at my dad's office. With the pending shift to digital TV, I didn't want to invest too much in ignorance so we got one of the government coupons and ordered a Dish DTVPal converter and picked up a cheap rabbit ears style antenna from Radio Shack. It worked OK for him but needed frequent adjustments to view much of anything. In fact, everything but WXII and THIS were pretty pixellated most of the time.

My post above (about getting an antenna) finally trickled down into my brain far enough for me to realize that I already had an antenna, albeit a budget unit. I had dad bring it home yesterday and today I plugged it into the antenna input of our Samsung LN-T4053H.

All I can say is WOW. The picture was stunning. I was able to pick up everything I expected to with one channel pixellating slightly for a second or two and another one probably 25% pixellated. Everything else was crystal clear.

This experiment really gives me some food for thought in my research into the possibility of moving away from pay TV...

I'm wondering the same thing. My TV has a built-in QAM tuner but I don't know where to look to see what should be available to me...

Local channels are in the channel 74 plus range. The QAM channels in Winston are not the same channels as in Greensboro and High Point. Best thing to do is run a QAM channel scan and then go to each channel in the list and see what it is. Remember, you will see an SD and HD version of the locals. TWC also likes to change the order every so often so the list changes a lot.

You can try this site... http://www.silicondust.com/hdhomerun/channels

Choose United States and enter your zip code, and then go to the drop down box in the top left and select cable.

That must be a current list since the thumbnails supplied for WGHP are all within the last 72 hours.

TWC QAM LOCAL CHANNELS
April 19, 2010

	GSO	WS	CALL SIGN	FORMAT
	116-4	78-1	WFMY (hd)	1920x1080
	116-3	85-315	WFMY(sd)	528x480
	87-4	78-2	WFMY2 (wx)	704x480
	115-2	78-3	WGHP (HD)	1280X720
	115-1	85-316	WGHP (sd)	528x480
	115-3	90-1	WXII(hd)	1920x1080
	87-3	90-2	WXII2 (this tv)	704X480
	115-4	85-314	WXII2 (this tv)	528X480
	116-6	85-508	WGPX	704x480
	91-1	83-3	WCWG (hd)	1920x1080
	117-20	85-502	WCWG2	528x480
	116-1	118-45	WXLV (hd)	1280x720
	116-2	85-505	WXLV (sd)	640x480
	87-1	117-48	WMYV (hd)	1280x720
	87-2	85-48	WMYV (sd)	528x480
	91-4	90-4	UNC-HD (wunc)	1920x1080
	91-3	91-4	UNC-SD (wunc)	528x480
	87-5	90-5	UNC-KD (wunl)	704x480
	87-9	90-3	WUNC-KD	528x480
	91-5	78-7	UNC-EX (wunl)	704x480
	117-414	85-14	NEWS14	528x480

The Winston-Salem side of the on line chart was incomplete while the Greensboro side was complete.

Hello from winston-salem!! I have the SA 8240hdc and I was wondering when and how I might be able to get the 8640HDC?

hey foxeng. did you guys go HD with your news this morning? I was on my way out the door and was stuck looking at the TV trying to figure out if it was in HD or not. Looked a lot sharper and clearer than it did when I watched a few days ago.