Traverse City, MI - HDTV - Page 51

Great news! Now only if they can fix WTOM similarly so it broadcasts to more than 2 1/2 counties.

Does anyone know if WWTV is running at reduced power? I live in southern Muskegon county and am able to pick up this station on a very reliable basis during the morning hours. The power increase the FCC granted them made all the difference. However for the past few days, the station hasn't been coming in at all.

Quite a few OTA viewers in Muskegon, Kent, and Ottawa counties have come to rely on this station because our local affliate, WWMT is completely unable to air any syndicated programming in HD and their SD up-conversion is so far out of calibration that it looks like VHS.

WWTV fried their channel 9 exciter last Wednesday during a power outage. They got it fixed within a few hours, but were running on generator power for a while. Supposedly, they got everything back up and are skating at full strength, now. Just checked and they have the same pre-outage signal at my location.

I talked to one of their engineers yesterday. The power surge also did damage to their PSIP and they had to do some reprogramming. They told me to rescan for the station. I did, and now they are there.

Channel 47 (7.1 NBC & 7.2 ABC) is up and running in Kalkaska. Signal is strong here on the west side of Traverse City with just rabbit ears.

Their signal is 100% here in Mesick, some 36 miles from Kalkaska tower and the bonus is the station doesn't break up when the microwave oven is running as it does with 7 (10.5 mi. away).

That's awesome!
29.x is still up and running too.
I can't re-scan till after Private Practice.

Any idea if 50 has moved yet? Or is that still to come?

And is 7 still up?

- Trip

Hopefully they will drop 29.2 now so we can have full HD on 29.1 again. Or at least put it back to SD. It looked much better before they tried to do HD on both channels.

Yeah, I was going to ask....

I get 29.x and 47.x great. 47 might have 5% more signal, but its meaningless.

So what's the benefit to 47? Or to 29? I don't have any HD sets, nor can I get my DTV boxes to tell me what/how it's broadcasting. I'll pick the best signal, but I don't know which it is.

47 and 29 are broadcast from the same location and therefore have similar coverage areas. Since Fox is no longer using 47, NBC is now using it. This will allow them to move NBC from 29.2 (hopefully) to their own separate channel and fill in the coverage gap between 7 and 4. This would allow 29 to restore full HD on 29.1 and broadcast something else on 29.2 if they so choose. In my opinion it would be stupid to continue broadcasting NBC on both 47 and 29.2 since they are coming from the same location with very similar coverage ranges.

To answer your question the benefit to using 47 means NBC has their own full bandwidth channel with almost the same coverage they now have with 29.2. This frees up the bandwidth on 29 as well. It probably won't matter much to those without HD sets but this move should allow 29.1 to go back to their full bandwidth and allow 47 to also broadcast full HD. Both ABC and NBC should have better HD picture quality without sacrificing coverage area.

IF that's what they end up doing (I'd agree that they almost surely will).
For right now, flip a coin and be happy?

Didn't WGTU run the CW network before on 29.2? They could put that on 29.2, and if they have been running both ABC and NBC in "HD", they could try CW in HD on 29.2.

7, 47 and 50 are all up. Nothing has moved, yet. I was getting all three last night.

Yes, WGTU had CW and WPBN had The Tube until it went belly up and then RTN. Barrington dropped those sub channels when they started managing both stations.

The CW+ service that WGTU used is not yet available in HD.

- Trip

Some alternative stations would be great. It would make this whole transition thing worth it. =)

I would welcome new subchannels but having two HD subchannels crammed onto one channel as 29 is now doing reduces the image quality quite a bit. If they kept the subchannel to SD then it might be worth it.

The CW network in this market is cable only. In markets 100 or smaller, it's cable only. The local station can only add advertising to it. They can't broadcast it on a digital sub channel because the CW only bought the cable rights for the other programs on that cable channel.

Actually, the CW+ (the small-market feed) is carried on subchannels in most markets. It was the WB+ which was cable-only.

Lansing is a smaller than 100 market and the local ABC station has the CW network on it's subchannel.

Have any of you guys noticed that WWTV is starting to move some of there graphics (Ticker/Storm Warnings) into HD?

Does anyone know if WWTV is going to start to move there news into HD...

Just think if they did, they would have a hudge advantage over all the other stations!!!

Keep in mind that Fox stations cannot crawl over Fox network HD without use of the new splicer which I'm told is still not fully operating properly at this time.

- Trip

It would be nice to see WPBN put CW+ on 7-2 and WTOM (or should I say WTOM-Fisher Price Transmitter) put it on 4-2. WBUP has CW+ on 10-2, FYI.

Has WPBN finished moving everything and boosting power? Can't get them still on the upstairs tv with an antenna.

Not yet. 47 is up in Kalkaska. 50 is no longer broadcasting from TC, but hasn't been moved to Harrietta. 7 is still broadcasting from there.

If you're in the Manton area, check out Bob Helsel's light display that's synchronized to music. Even if you're not, it's worth the trip. It's about a mile east of US-131 at the M-42 exit. It's well worth the time to check it out. Tune your radio to 107.9 FM and enjoy the show. He has a clip on YouTube. Search for "bobhelsel" to see.

An interesting discussion going on over at the Grand Rapids forum about the future of OTA stations. Could change OTA in the Traverse City market if some of these things happen.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...49584&page=233

Looks like channel 50 will fire up in Harrietta in February:

We continue to work to improve our signal to viewers in our southern broadcast area and hope to have those improvements completed by the end of February, 2010.

http://www.upnorthlive.com/about/about.aspx?id=97103