Boston, MA - OTA - Page 91

I am also only 12 miles away from the towers. So do you think the Zenith is a good investment?

I am not in any rush as I have already spent a small fortune on all this equipment but at some point I will get another receiver I guess I will hold out as long as I can till some new stuff hits the market.

Any suggestions for an Attic antenna in the Hills of Holden? Anyone in the Worcester area using an indoor mounted antenna? Thanks

re-scanned without channel mapping...
still no luck

Steve,

I'm in a strong signal, but multipath prone location in Cambridge, and the Zenith 420 is doing well for me. I face away from the Needham towers on the sixth floor, but get everything but Channel 19 (2) without repositioning my indoor antenna (Silver Sensor). Analog channel 44, for example, looks like garbage, with many, many ghosts. The other analog UHF stations come in better, but there is always some ghosting.

I'm certainly picking up reflections of neighboring buildings, and get relatively few breakups, maybe a few each night. Certainly not enough to be distracting.

I would consider getting one from CC just to try out. They have a generous return policy.

re: recent reception problems. I'll throw my two cents into this, since I see a number of posts regarding changed reception conditions. I've had a Winegard HD9095 antenna in my crawl space since last March. With a DTC-100, I received 20-x,30-x,31-x,39-x,42-x without problem, 41-x never, and 19-x only when it rains. Since the beginning of January, I have been unable to get 20-x at all, and 42-x breaks up quite a bit. Also, I suddenly started to get WMUR (59-x) out of Manchester NH. Normally I would just wait for some spontaneous healing to take place, but what with the Stupor Bowl rapidly approaching, I needed to take some action. I've been really hesitant to do anything with my antenna since it's in, well, a crawl space, but this past weekend I did indeed crawl up there. It's just hanging from the rafters by a cord on each end, so I tied a piece of garden twine to each end of the antenna, and ran them over to the crawl space entry point. Then, I just moved the antenna around by a few inches in the horizontal plane. Bingo. A few inches more easterly and now I get 20-x and 42-x again, 30-x still fine, and now 19-x comes in. 19-x still breaks up occasionally, but at least I can see it. I no longer see 59-x. 39-x has become marginal. So what's up with all that? Snow? Sunspots? Cold weather? Moon phases? El Nino? Who the hell knows. Further testing shows that 20-x is still bad in the morning, but gradually improves over the course of the day such that at 6:00PM or so, its fine...
--

I guess it all depends how satisfied you are with what you have now, and how long you can wait. I am hoping for a big improvement in tuners next year. But for now the Zenith saves me from much antenna tweaking. I would certainly recommend it for anyone with bad multipath on local channels. But it is missing some features, like most PSIP support. The Samsung tuner 165 also has firewire, and an overall sharper picture. I would rate both far superior to my old Panasonic and RCA tuners.

Jhe,

Thanks for the imput I have to admit it isn't always bad only when I really want to watch something it seems to have a problem. I am probably making it sound worse than it is but it is very frustrating to spend thousands of dollars on this stuff and not have it work 100% of the time.

I keep telling myself that this is new technology and be paitient because over all I am pretty satasfied.

I will be looking to get a new receiver at some point but I want to make sure the next one I get does the job for awhile.

Hi noticed that on ATT Broadband audio of WCVB on 805 and audio of WHDH on 807 but no video. Could it be the channels for HDTV for those channels? Called recently to them, claim rollout of HDTV in early spring

just to add to reception problems...

until recently -- the Boston stations were *always* strong and clear and I never had to move the antenna...

recently (two weeks??) -- reception on *every* channel is more picky. I haven't lost any channels but I have to set antenna direction for almost every channel change ( makes it a pain to channel surf, eh ??)

a few of us seem to have experineced these changes at the same time. what could have changed for *all* of us ??

As of sometime Saturday, I've lost WHDH-DT on my Hughes E-86. I'm however receiving a strong 90% signal on the signal meter. I'm still getting 7-1 on my DTC-100 with no problem. I'm assuming others with Hughes-based receivers are having the same problem. I sent Jim Shultis at WHDH an e-mail informing him of this.

I also lost 7-1 yesterday on my Sammy 151...

Haven't scanned channels this AM, but it was gone as of last night...

Anyone else notice no DD5.1 on WCVB-DT during MI last night? I found this very odd since every Sat. nite movie on ABC I've seen has had 5.1 audio. I hope this is not an indicator of what kind of audio we can expect for the Superbowl later today.

I have had my Direct TV dish and CM 4228 installed by New England Antenna. They use a spectrum analyzer to find optimum antenna placement which is far superior to using a field strength meter. I have been pleased with the results.

http://www.newenglandantenna.com/

-Dave

The funny part was the intro to the movie was DD5.1, with the ABC logo, etc... But once the real movie started, my receiver switched back to PRO LOGIC mode...

Also, did you see the test patterns etc that showed up @ 11pm? Looks like someone forgot to flip the switch back to the local feed, so we got what looked like an ABC test feed (tour of GMA studios in 720P, space shuttle, test audio,etc...)

About 11:05pm someone noticed and the local news was switched on...

it was absolutely AWESOME (test patterns, shuttle) Did you notice the Good Morning America being shot with HD camera in the studio. One word -wow ! Way to go ! Please give me more of these !

Same here with Toshiba DST-3000, but OK on MyHD. They must have screwed up the PSIP as it appears MyHD ignores all PSIP information. ER wasn't broadcast in HD, it looked like a letterbox SD (black boarders all around). Note that the signal strength is pegged at 100.

It is amazing to me that there are still so many problems with this technology after a couple of years!

-Dave

Dave...They are doing something with the PSIP. I noticed today they are sending program info again to the DTC100--something they haven't done for a while. At the cost of not getting anything on my Hughes, I'd rather go without the programming on my DTC100.

I've lost 7 (couple of days) on Panny TU-DST51 - green channel found on display but no program.

Dave how much did they charge ? My install by a differenty co. was more then $400 (rotor and pole and h/w included)

Andrey

I think the rate is around $80-110 / hour, depending on whether there is one or two installers. I had one installer and ended up spending about $400, but I had my own equipment. Part of what took the time was originally I only wanted to go up 10 feet, ultimately I decided on 20 feet with guy wires, so the roof walking / signal analysis was done twice. I had run all of the cables for the antenna / rotor as well. I actually got up on the roof to save some time when he was anchoring the guy wires.

The equipment was a CM 4228, CM rotor (with remote) and Wineguard UHF only pre-amp - all purchased from Stark Electronic. It was good I had the rotor, the dock strke that was going on at the time had depleted rotor inventories. NE Antenna supplied the two 10' masts, the guy wires and the mast anchor (as well as the cable / F connectors to get the antenna feed into the attic.

-Dave

I cannot recieve 7-1 at all with my HD200. Yesterday there was no audio. Today nothing. Is it my equipment or what is going on? Thanks,

I just installed a CM 4228 in attic. I not only get great UHF, I also get reasonable VHF as well.

Elbig...I have emailed station engineer Jim Shultis at WHDH about the problem. A number of us are having the same problem.

Thanks. I have just installed my HDTV and I was concerned. Can I assume that ABC will bve in 16x9 for the game. It is weird seeing it as a small 4:3 box.

Elbig...my information is that 5-1 will begin 16x9 HD with Dolby Digital 5.1 at approximately 1 minute before 6PM.

I HAVE NO SIGNAL ON ABC. PLEASE TELL ME THIS IS A JOKE!!!
ARRRGH!

-JR

John...check your antenna. I'm getting my usual super strong signal on 5-1. It's a good thing NBC is not carrying the SB. I haven't gotten 7-1 since Saturday morning.

7.1 Working fine on my TS160 and my HiPix card.

I am getting some audio dropout on 5.1. Anyone else?

Sound OK with me. Al Michaels eyes are freaking me out though. Anybody else notice that? There was a HD shot of the stadium to start, but now everything is 4x3.

I guess I should go to the Superbowl thread.

- Hal