Lafayette, LA / Beaumont, TX / Lake Charles, LA - HDTV - Page 42

I live in Orange and have been watching the digital channels out of Beaumont for a few months now (I just moved into the area). This evening, I thought I would swing my attic antenna around to see what channels I could get out of Lake Charles. Specifially, I was hoping to get KVHP / Fox (29.1).

I did manage to pick up KPLC / NBC (7.1), but not Fox. I though this odd since the KVHP tower is supposedly closer to me than the KPLC tower.

Any suggestions?

You'd have to move to Lake Charles to get it.

Here's the exaggerated coverage area of the digital signal:
http://www.fcc.gov/fcc-bin/FMTV-serv...=DS619219.html
Effective Radiated Power (ERP): 0.2 kW ERP
Antenna Height Above Average Terrain: 25.4 meters HAAT

They are not running any HD content either.

I know people with bigger rigs than KVHP running in the 27mhz band! And we all know it takes less power to get a signal out at a lower frequency. Big difference between 566mhz and 27mhz!

The CBS side of KALB is up and running. It is mapped to 5.2, the former weather information site. Someone on the ALEC board reported that he talked to the head engineer and he said they will be at 480i until they receive the rest of the equipment needed. They are hoping to have HD up in time for the Superbowl. I doubt that I will watch the CBS side much but I sure hope it doesn't hurt the NBC side.

Richard: (or anyone else)

I wanted to see if anyone else is seeing this same thing. For the past few days 6-01 has been displaying what looks like a screen door over the image. This is not present on their SAT channel nor have I seen it on any other channels including SAT (HD or SD). This seems to have just started a few days ago. Prior to that, 6-01 has been fine.
Now this effect called SDE is (I thought) something that was only supposed to effect LCD's. BTW, I have a new Samsung DLP HDTV . Again this seems to be present on this station & only for the past few days. The 700 Club this morning is horrible because of it. Now I can switch up the the SAT version & no problem. Anyone have any ideas what might be going on?

Addendum: No SDE; see my revised post below.

Ken

I have also e-mailed Richard at the station to make him aware of the problem in case he doesn't check the forum for awhile..
I have done some further research online and have determined what I am seeing is not the often talked about screen door effect (SDE). This is definately an issue with the station. Also this is not a grid pattern as I recently posted. There are no horizontal lines (only vertical lines, about 1/8" wide and spaced about 1/4" - 1/2" apart) all the way across a 4:3 image. 16:9 (HD) images are fine.

Addendum:

I just checked "The Young & Restless" which is being broadcast in HD & the vertical lines are gone. So this appears to only be on 4:3 images.

Ken

Ok, here's my latest observation. At approx. 11:25 there was a commercial break which was a national feed (4:3) & it was fine with no cross-hatching. Then it went to a Wildcatters commercial and the problem was back, then the KFDM radar image & the problem was still there. Now back to the HD program and all is well.

When the problem is evident, at times depending upon the color of the image, it appears as vertical lines. At other times it appears as cross-hatching. It could quite possibly be cross-hatching, but at times only appears as vertical lines or at least what I am seeing. But regardless, there is a definate problem on certain programs/commercials...

Update: The 12:00 news is bad & the scan lines are definately there. The Bold & The Beautiful is being broadcast in 4:3 and it too is bad. So this appears to be something evident on 4:3 material. And now at 12:45 the image is soo bad, I had to switch up to the SAT feed. Even though the SAT feed is not that great, it doesn't have the scan lines & it's certainly better than the OTA right now. I tried calling someone at KFDM but everyone is out for lunch.

Ken

Still shaking my head... 2 full res 1080i streams on one ATSC mux. We are talking about MPEG2 here not MPEG4. I guess they are trying to pull one better than DirecTV with 3 downrezzed HD streams on one 27-30mbps mux.

Let me know when they get the other 1080i CBS stream going. I can pick up their signal at my other location in Lake Charles. I'll drag my HTPC over there just to capture their stream. This I've got to see!

Wow. Strange problem. I'm at work and can't check my digital 6-1 till this afternoon. Maybe it will be cleared up by then.
I'm still having problems keeping channel 12 locked in which is driving me crazy.

Thanks for the phone call. I haven't been here in quite awhile because Jeff left KFDM to work at KHOU at the end of 2006.

So anyway, in case you care, the "SDE looking video" was being caused by an analog to digital converter which is only used to put our 4x3 analog pictures on digital channel 6.1. The A/D converter was dropping the most important bits, causing the "special effect" you saw.

I rebooted the sucker and all is well now (until it fails again). The good news is that this is the first time this device has ever failed.


Richard

Digiblur: I have heard of another station doing dual HD, but one channel was 1080i and one was 720p. The encoder is very new and also high priced.

Thanks Richard. Actually I do care. Being an Engineer myself, I always like to know these things...And now that I know, if it does happen again, I'll know what to reference if I e-mail you. Thanks for you help.

Ken

The OTA's I've seen can't even get 1-1920x1080i with two very low bitrate 480i's right.

I'm still skeptical...very skeptical. If everyone was able to simply buy a new encoder then we wouldn't see the big move to MPEG4 and 8PSK or DVB-S2 modulation in the consumer satellite industry. I figure it is some sort of high quality statmux encoding scheme instead of the standard CBR encoding you see today via OTA. But then on the other hand, a statmux isn't new, look at DishNetwork, all they use is statmux. Their HD muxes are 8PSK running at 40mbps. After you added in the standard EPG, EMM, and other DVB streams you are about double what an ATSC is per mux. They were running HDNet and HDNetMovies at full 1920x1080i on one 40mbps 8PSK mux...beautiful HD. Then they decided to add a Free Preview HD channel so in order to fit it on this 8PSK mux, they took a page out of DirecTV's engineering handbook and downrezzed HDNet and HDNet Movies to 1440x1080i and downrezzed the free preview to 1280x1080i. After all that, several people complain about the poor quality of HDNet now "macroblocking" all the time now. Do the math....

I'm anxious to see how well the mux performs with two active content 1920X1080i streams. When the get it up and tweaked I'd love to go grab some 30 minute test stream files via OTA.

I'm just glad *I* wasn't the one posting that message saying "the picture looks like crap" because no one seems to listen when it's me.

Everyone be quiet.
I think I heard captnjameskirk post something.
Nah, must just be my imagination.

I am noticing a new problem while watching KALB NBC this afternoon. The picture and sound are fine but there seems to be a weird software issue with my HR10-250 TIVO receiver. If the program is stopped for a while and restarted, the lowest speed fast forward does not function properly. The picture starts to move forward but then stops! You can go fast forward but only if using the higher speed. This doesn't happen on any other channel and I know it didn't happen until they started broadcasting CBS on 5.2.

2-3 months ago, I had spoken to one of the Engineer's at channel 12 (Beaumont) & he indicated they were moving their tower (at that time) & would soon be switching to a higher power transmitter. (Not necessarily HD, but higher power). Does anyone know if they ever really did that?
I ask because my signal strength on their OTA has never really changed. It's always stayed around 73%. I'm also getting a lot of video break-ups as I've previously posted. I know "Arcade" posted not too long ago they were going to be investigating this/these issues after the New Year, but I was just wondering if they are already on the higher power transmitter..

Ken

Ken,
To answer your question, Yes, channel 12 is now at the new tower at full power.
Not sure of the numbers anymore. They still have their fingers crossed on the HD by the end of January.

I finally went to Radio Shack and purchases another 5 ft. section of antenna pole and now I get channel 12 locked in at 85% signal strength. I still get channels 4 and 6 at 100%.
I am using a small radio shack yagi style antenna on the eve of my single story house, mounted with a Radio Shack gable mount system. I have two 5 ft sections of pole so my antenna is about 9 ft over my rooftop. I also have a channel master 7777 pre amp to boost signals. Without it, the nearby trees cause to much trouble keeping the signals locked.
I am now happy with my setup but I don't understand why channel 12 is so much weaker with the signal then channels 4 and 6 are.

Also the past two nights I have been getting channel 20 and 39 out of Houston great. Both are locked in at 75 % at night. MyTv 20 broadcast on digital channel 19-1 and the CW 39 broadcast on digital channel 38-1. I plan on watching Gilmore Girls in HD tonight on 39 since the channel 6 CW substation will probably never be in HD.

On the way home from work I thought of what might be causing the weaker signal from 12-1. Richard or someone who knows more will have to confirm this idea but here it is.
Channel 12 broadcast on UHF digital 50-1. From what I understand, this is a horrible channel number to have, as it take more power to broadcast at higher UHF numbers.
I believe Channel 6 at 21-1 needs less power to push their signal out.
Richard, is this correct?

I have also heard that when the analog shutoff date comes that channel 12 has elected to go back to broadcasting on digital 12-1 which should save them a lot of electric costs.
Some people may have to get a VHF antenna combo to pick them up then but I have heard that a lot of UHF only antennas will pick up channels 9-12 with little to no problem. Since they will only be one channel down from the UHF channel 13 I would guess most people will continue to get them anyway.

Ding ding! And the 35kw or so at RF 50 at that height isn't that great.

A CBS affiliate in BR is at 46kw on RF 46 and we have trouble receiving it around BR. So you can only imagine the lower power and the higher frequency.

On the VHF with UHF topic....In Lake Charles I pick up KPLC-DT on RF8 with excellent results with an outside mounted CM4228 antenna.

Maybe the engineer from channel 6 can speak more on this since he's the expert here.

Did anyone else happen to watch and notice the audio dropping out frequently during the Peoples' Choice Awards on 6-01? This wasn't like before when we had the problem of audio drops and Richard "power cycled" his equipment. Then I was actually able to see the LED on my Yamaha processor blinking on & off.
This issue may strictly be related to my Dish ViP211 receiver since it's been an ongoing & known issue with that receiver when using optical cable. However the problem is that I usually have been experiencing the problem up on one of my SAT HD's, not so much on digital OTA's. It got so annoying I just switched over to the SAT signal & watched the remainder of the awards there.
I can't say if the problem was going on before the awards as we were watching something else...

Update: This is also happening today. My wife called & told me it was happening on all her CBS soaps. She switched up to SAT.

Ken

In the analog world, KBTV (4) and KFDM (6) each put out 100KW in the low VHF band. KBMT (12) has to put out 316KW to get about the same coverage on their high VHF channel. As you go into UHF, you get to 1,000,000 watts to get the same coverage.

Digital should follow the same rules; the higher the Frequency, the more power you need for a given coverage area. However, the digital modulation scheme puts more actual power in the signal than an analog signal will. So the difference may not be as pronounced as one would expect.

Each TV channel is assigned a 6 Mhz frequency range. Channel 13 uses the frequency range of 210-216 Mhz. Channel 14 starts at 470 Mhz (channel 21 starts at 512).

So in theory, a UHF antenna should not pick up channel 12 very well. In actual practice however, it probably will. One of my "guys" just bought an HDTV set and put the UHF only antenna in his attic. He picked up channel 11 out of Houston very poorly, but it was there.

Bottom line is: it can't hurt, and costs nothing to try.

Richard

I have not listened to CBS through the opitcal cable in ahwile.
While this is something Richard probably needs to fix, I do know that you can have both digital and analog audio cables going at the same time. When ever this problem crops up I just switch to my tv speakers with the analog audio and the sound is fine. At least you can still watch an HD picture that way.

On another note, I got my brother a Channel Master 7777 pre amp for Christmas.
We hooked it up last night and he was able to pull in channels 20, 26 and 39 from Houston for the first time. The 7777 is an amazing piece of equipment.
We watched Veronica Mars in Hd on the CW 39 and also watched House in HD on FOX 26.

"Uncle Larry" (UL) tells me that the audio on 6.1 sounds bad. This discussion convinced me to power cycle the same equipment again. Let me know if it fixes your problem. I'm pretty sure that UL will let me know if it fixes his.

Richard

Richard:

I just came in and after watching 15 minutes of Dr. Phil, I have not yet heard any audio drops. I'll keep my fingers crossed & you posted..

Thanks,

Ken

Hey Richard,
Just checking in to see if you've found anything out about the B.C. deadzone yet. I'm not trying to be a pest, but I really want some KFDM HD.

http://www.hdtvprimer.com/ANTENNAS/comparing.html

Scroll down to "Using a UHF antenna for VHF"

I was just curious if there was anyone else out there who shares in my disgust over the PQ coming out of Fox 64 (KUIL)? It was (and is) bad enough via OTA antenna, but even via Dish, it is absolutely horrible. I was attempting to watch the premiere of "24" last night and just couldn't believe the poor quality of video. Now that shows like "24" & "Prison Break" are starting back up, I just can't believe that I have to put up with that crap. At least before I still had Dish Distant out of Chicago, but now that's gone due to court ruling.
Fox 64's so-called Engineer doesn't return phone calls & they intentionally make sure there is no way to e-mail them via their web site (such as it is). I have even contacted Dish on several occasions & after they contact Fox 64, they are just told it's being worked on. I can see now why so many people "move" their Dish service in order to get descent quality PQ from their networks.

Ken

Usually people "move" to get HD locals when they are not available in their area. I'd "move" to Houston in a heartbeat if I were you and do the OTA thing for locals.

You are correct...I'd give anything if I had done this before when someone else here had done so and recommended me doing the same. I kick myself now since I guess I may have waited too long. (I guess I thought if I was patient, all the Beaumont local affiliates would get on the band wagon & begin to provide a descent video signal).
However when I checked into this just a week or so ago, the CSR requested a copy of something to prove the "physical" address (utility bill, lease agreement, etc.). I think this is falling on the heels of the Florida court ruling regarding distants. Dish got their hand slapped for that one & I guess they're covering their a.. now.
Even though I'd love to have all the locals here in HD, I'd gladly just settle on a watchable picture from Fox. I don't know why that's too much to ask..
I may try the "move" again to see if I get the same response from a different CSR, but I'm not holding my breath.

Ken

Looks like you'll learn the term several people have already learned.... CSR Roulette