Raleigh, NC - HDTV - Page 486

nitdawg,

That sure looks nice !!!! I had to feed up from crawl space for my four upper speakers. It was not pretty. Each one had its own unique issues. Two outside walls had insulation to deal with. Inside wall were "Where are the studs?? Oh and all the darn water lines in the wall for the upstairs- was that ever scary.

Yikes. I was fortunate to have wiring pre-installed when we had the house built. Now, I did not know much about surround sound setups when I got it all done (a few years ago) or I might have changed up speaker locations. The extra side channels for a 7.1 prewire were 3x the price of the 5.1 (no clue why), but it did make the speaker setup upstairs and a smaller setup downstairs pretty easy. Plus, with having the front L and R so high on my walls it was an easy choice to give the Dolby IIz setup a try.

ABC is now at 117Mhz (which is channel 99) PID 1E1

I have to admit I have no idea what this means lol. I'm pretty new to the world of non-cable. All I know is that with my HDHomerun and TWC's QAM in Cary, WTVD-HD was 99.1, Live Well was 99.2. Now the 99's are not there and I'm not quite sure how to tune something else. I've rescanned, but nothing new shows up.

Unlikely, in my experience pretty much all of the HD channels are SDV. At one point the news channels were in Clear-QAM+SDV, so they would appear at random locations depending on what the neighbors were watching if you did a channel scan.

Maybe this is why WTVD isn't showing up...
http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/154563/

^

"Posted: April 30, 2000"

Dope...

Got a response from the WTVD Transmitter Supervisor which confirms what was posted earlier...their new frequency is trapped at the street

I'm not trapped, and I was getting it just fine at 99.1 until last week when I posted.

I dunno!

I am having signal issues with MY RDC. On my Directv AM21, the OTA signal meter reads in the 65-95% range for all UHF Raleigh channels, usually WRDC is in the low end of that range. It's reading the usual 99-100% for WUNC, and the usual 40s% for WTVD but WRDC has been in the 25-35% range for the past few days and is all blocky.

Anyone else seeing lower signal quality on MY RDC? It is actually a little worse on the other TV which just has a converter box.

I'm 65 miles out and still have 75% signal strength on 28.

Well, I guess if you're not subscribing to cable TV at all, you really don't have a legitimate complaint about not being able to get QAM channels. What I want to know, though, is how TWC can keep digital cable subscribers when it does not even guarantee picture quality that is as good as what you can get by antenna.

I am over 90 miles out, and see WRDC before I see any of the others on the tower. It's coming in loud and clear right now.

Why do you believe that TWC's locals are not as good quality as OTA? Filesizes are nearly identical between OTA and Cable indicating that TWC is not doing additional compression.

Maybe I'm not an objective judge since my experience with TWC digital has only been with the digital QAM channels not with the digital cable package, and I have found and heard from others that the QAM channels are not as reliable as one would think and sometimes don't look as good as the OTA broadcasts.

Perhaps when people fork over money for digital cable, the digital cable box does a better job than most QAM tuners on TV sets. Either that or TWC doesn't want basic cable subscribers to have good QAM channels.

I really dislike the idea of anybody having to have a special box to receive signals. The government should have forced all of the cable companies to promote cable cards a long time ago rather than letting them be so greedy for profits.

If you live around these parts you will always need a special box to receive TWC signals outside of OTA transmissions.

I don't know about Carrboro or wherever you are, but I believe the TWC Raleigh-Durham-Cary service area still offers unencrypted analog cable, so there are dozens of non-OTA channels that come over TWC (the Basic Cable package) that do not need a special box.

Their web site makes it rather difficult to find that, but it is still there (not that it is very interesting at $70/month). It might go away at the first opportunity, e.g. a month from now when broadcast locals no longer need to be provided in analog (or with free convertor boxes) and they might kill all of the analog service at the same time.

When we first got Directv, we still had TWC for 2 days at the same time. My gf cares the least about PQ of anyone I have ever met and barely notices the difference. The FIRST thing she said when we turned on Directv was "WOW, look at that picture!" We switched back and forth between different HD channels (locals, cable, HBO) and it was night-and-day, especially with sports action. Even now, with only QAM, it is noticeable with the HD locals that TWC pic is worse.

WRDC is stable again for me, but still very low on the signal meter. Perhaps there is something that is interfering with it. I often get interference on NBC17 from Fox21 out of Roanoke (both RF17) but I don't know what could be messing with WRDC.

Also, we still have WTVD on QAM, ch 87.7.

That sounds somewhat surprising. Are you sure it wasn't just a consequence of different picture settings on different inputs?

In the whole time I lived in Cary, I never noticed any PQ difference between QAM and ATSC. The only difference I noticed was when TWC would re-shuffle the QAM channels, and all my QAM recordings would fail. That's why I put up an antenna.

Hmmm... Does DirectTV give you WTVD, or does it give you a different ABC affiliate? WTVD overly compresses the ABC HD signal to make room for its secondary HD subchannel. Nearly any other ABC affiliate will look better. When I lived in Cary, I had an antenna pointing to Greensboro to get the triad ABC (WXLV).

Drew

Dish (at least) does not offer the subchannels from the Dish. But otherwise - you should be able to view them.

The settings are identical on all three of my HDMI inputs. From what I have seen, cable PQ varies SIGNIFICANTLY from town to town, even street to street. I might just be on a bad section. My friend in Graham has worse PQ on TWC then I ever had, but people in Chapel Hill have pretty nice PQ from what I have seen.

Directv does give us WTVD in Alamance County but only in SD, although I do not receive it anymore because we "moved" to Lexington to be within the 75 miles of Charlotte that Directv provides Bobcats games. I have WTVD and all Raleigh channels (with subchannels and Greensboro subs) OTA via the AM21 tuner. For those who don't know, an AM21 is an add-on box that connects to Directv DVRs that puts OTA signals into your guide and allows you to DVR and tune to them as if they were part of your subscription. Because of the "move" we also have WSOC Charlotte (sadly, only in SD). We have WFMY, WGHP, WSOC (via the "move"), (should have) WTVD, WXII, WGPX, WCWG, WUNL, WUNL-EX, WMYV, and WXLV provided as locals on Directv here. But I add WUNC, WRAL, WTVD, WNCN, WLFL, WUVC, WTNC, WLXI, WGSR, and WRAZ and mostly all subs with the AM21.

I'll agree about the over-compressed WTVD pic. WHY DO THEY HAD AN HD SUBCHANNEL AND THE SAME THING REPEATED IN SD!!???!?! I have never seen WTVD on Directv in HD so I can't comment on that. The thing about WXLV that makes me upset is that they are only HD during network stuff, syndicated is still up-coverted SD. They told me in an email that they were going all-HD this year.

Analog cable? I wouldn't watch an analog channel any more than I would watch a stretched pan and scan movie edited for time and content.

Analog has no value in this decade and it only serves to be a blight on bandwidth in this area.

Has anyone used combiner to combine two antennas where one antenna is more or less just used for UNC PBS? I tried using one before all the frequencies changed but PBS and 5.1 did not get along. Just wondering if anyone has tried since.

Don, when you say 'combiner', do you mean splitter in reverse? If that did not work, you can get what is called a join-a-tenna, where you buy a type of splitter that for one port is all band, and for the other port it would be tuned for channel 25 which is PBS I believe out of Chapel Hill now.

I agree that digital signals provide better pictures (both in SD and in HD) than analog signals. That's why I like having the ability to get digital signals OTA. However, I am not at all convinced that TWC provides good value for the money that it charges for digital cable, and I find it especially annoying that its business model is based on giving new customers better deals than existing customers.

TWC doesn't provide good value, but if you want those deals they are easy to get. Phone and ask for a customer retention specialist and say you are cancelling unless you get one of those deals.

Alternatively if you use Facebook post your comments on there and I guarantee within a day or two someone will be calling offering you the deal you want.

It's sad that you have to know these tricks, but TWC never value their customers unless they leave. Far easier to just suck their customer base dry.

The only time that I have heard of people using a combiner is when one antenna is suited mainly for UHF signals and they want to add a second antenna that is more suited to VHF. Otherwise, why not use a rotor?

About WUNC, does anyone know how strong the WUNC fill-in translator in Garner is? I think it operates on RF 30 while the Chapel Hill transmitter is RF 25.

It's a good suggestion, but doing that would make feel as though I'm just going along with a business model that I abhor and also just leading TWC to raise its rates sooner or stick it to some other person who has never even thought of playing the haggling game.

It's just TV, for crying out loud. It's not a car. The way I figure it, I'll just stick with analog cable until TWC discontinues it or finally realizes that its product is not a necessity and offers some cheaper digital programming packages than it now offers.

I have combined two indoor antennas... One is a directional Terk antenna, the other is a small omni-directional UHF that I need to pick up PBS.

As to "why not use a rotor"...

First... rotors have to be turned, and it may not be convenient to use with say a Dish or DirecTV DVR if you want to set a timer to record an OTA channel that you need to also turn the rotor to receive.

Second... rotors are notorious for getting out of alignment due to wind... so you can find your indoor indicator not in sync with where the outdoor antenna is actually pointed. I find it much more attractive to combine a couple of antennas and lock them down when optimized.