Madison, WI - HDTV - Page 59

The original description of the location of the tower is correct. From where he lives, the tower west of West Towne would look as if it were behind Elver Park.

Tom:

Doesn't NBC upconvert the non-HD material for shows that are not in HD, like Dateline?

I ask because it appears that you are using your own upconverter for shows like Dateline, even though NBC provides (at least I think they do) an upconvert for you.

No offense, but the NBC upconverter is a little bit better than the model you have. I noticed that difference during a show I was editing that was the last before news and master control cut over to the house upconvert during the final credits (what goes for closing credits these days) and one could definately see the difference.

The worst upconversion that I've seen was what The WB used to provide. Their upconverter sucked and this was a network upconversion. Don't have to worry about their upconversions anymore

Some, but not all shows. I do agree that NBC's upconvert is a little better than ours. (Our upconverter was state of the art when we bought it in 2001!)

But until we save up our nickels to buy the aforementioned fancy-schmancy HD switcher, it's operationally to our advantage to do the upconvert in house. Speaking of nickels, our talented sales department has landed their first advertiser on TrueView 24/7! When you sign up for one of those Covance studies, tell 'em you saw their ad on channel 15-2.

We'll need a lot more of those.

At least it's on Charter - there's a small chance some people will tune in every now and then. I must say, I much prefer the Weather Plus product over the Accuweather product; as a matter of fact, I preferred the radar over the Accuweather...but if I had my choice, it would be no sub at all.

You and I both know that what is considered state-of-the-art today is tomorrow's old technology

That makes NBC one of the last holdouts for supplying all of Prime in HD, even if it is an upconverted show. Even the old cheap The WB finally started upconverting so that all of prime was available.

The only other holdout is The CW(UPN) and their WWE. Guess they didn't want to pay for transponder time when none of the 5.5 hrs is in HD. All of the other days have upconverts for non-HD material.

And before anyone says that The CW only has two hours of network programming on Friday.... the 5.5 hrs is made up of 30 minutes of bars/tone before prime, 2 hrs of prime east/central/mtn (record), 1 hr between east and west (bars/tone), 2 hrs of west. Some time after west is done, they pull the carrier.

That is a lot of expensive transponder time for zero HD program content.

can someone post a summary of the sound available for the madison, wi hd channels? what's up with wmtv not having 5.1? huh? they're behind pbs?

Two good questions. Tom will have to answer the reason why they aren't doing NBC network programming in DD5.1. My guess is "no budget."

I'm fairly certain that WBUW (The CW) is doing 5.1, as well as WKOW (ABC). I had tuned into WBUW with the computer ATSC OTA card and noticed that it said that it was DD5.1. That surprised me. More so in that at the time I tuned it in, the CW program was only DD2.0. Not all of the CW programs are 5.1 (Smallville for one). WBUW was having lots of HD issues. Don't know if they have fixed it yet.

WMSN (Fox) is, since Fox network does the 5.1 encoding. All other stuff from WMSN is 2.0, which means that whenever they go to/from Fox net, it goes from 2.0 to 5.1 and then back to 2.0.

I think WISC (CBS) also passes through the 5.1 that is sent to them. Unfortunately the way I get the only two CBS shows I'm interested in results in only DD2.0 audio.

With a QAM tuner for Charter Janesville you can get WTMJ-HD NBC in 5.1 surround thank god.

Now if Charter would just map that channel with the CableCARDs I could record it with my TiVo

Perhaps a fair number of you watched ABC's coverage of the Badgers/Penn St. game. I believe this is the very first HD broadcast of any Badger game on ABC from Camp Randall. Perhaps ESPN had a HD broadcast of a Badger game from Camp Randall before, but I don't know as I don't get ESPN HD. This was a nationally featured game, so there was a fair amount of exposure of our stadium and campus to many regions of the nation.

They had some nice HD shots of the campus, including the Memorial Union, as background for some of the intro 'sponsored by' shots. Very nice.

Barry Alverez was featured in the booth at one point.

Another nice bonus was the Badgers won the game...

regarding the penn st/wi game on abc hd, did anyone else's picture breakup constantly through the game? mine was via ota on my hdtivo. with it being a relatively calm day weatherwise, i have no idea why the signal broke up all the way through the entire game. i doubt it played for 2 minutes straight without pixelating. just wondering. luckily it was on wha later.

The game was fine for me on Charter cable. No break-ups or tiling.

I had picture breakup on Charter with the Moxi during the game, I switched to OTA and it looked like it went away. I've seen it recently too pretty heavy on WISC-DT via Moxi.

I have both--a Moxi and a DCT 6200. Neither boxes have had tiling or picture breakup on any channels-- either the HD or the other digital simulcast channels. If you are having picture problems, it sounds like a signal problem. I hear the Moxi can be very sensitive to signal variations.

just lost fox hd

its back all is well and will be better if the packers score on this drive

in addition to losing the hd picture for a short time during the game, the sound kept going in and out of 5.1 too.

I don't watch football, so have no idea what happened, but if the HD went away and WMSN had to switch to their upconverted video, then the audio would go from DD5.1 to DD2.0. That is because WMSN can't produce anything but DD2.0.

I just moved from NY to Madison and well, until i fully setup my equipment, i still have my ny channels because i havent officaly changed my address, but where do the madison locals come from with Dtv. I know NY they came from 101. the dish that is on my house here in madison is a 3lnb that was pre pointed, but iim not picking the 110 lnb up properly.

In recent posts I asked of Tom could tighten up as much as possible the return from local to net, so that NBC programming isn't chopped.

Well, today I edited the capture I did of Monday night's What About Brian and discovered a computer programming error in New York. In case you don't know it, while the local break is occurring, ABC feeds public service pieces. Normally there is enough black between the end of such a piece and return to programming.

No so Monday night. During one break, the computer was set wrong such that the end of a piece had a one frame video fade into the program. How many frames the show had been running is unknown. There was no way in Hell that local stations were ever going to return to net and get it right.

Here is the really dumb part. No one seemed to have noticed, resulting in the exact same computer playout programming sequence being used for the west coast feed.

I'm surprised that you are still able to receive the NY local-into-local channels. Why? Because of the lack of space, D* has been using spot beams so the the same downlink channels can be used in different areas of the country. Madison is far enough away from NY, that I would have thought that reception would not have been possible. I guess those locals aren't on a spot beam.

Unfortunately, since I do not have a pizza-pan setup, I can't answer your question.

Catransplant,
I have a two QAM tuners (one on a Sharp LC32-D50U and one Miglia TVMini HD tuner for Mac) connected to Charter Madison and only get local NBC-15, on two channels. Couldn't tell you about the sound. I could find no other network feeds on the digital cable feed. All broadcast DTV signals easily picked up OTA from Madison ( and I live in Stoughton, 17-18 miles from the antennas). The QAM tuner delivers about 100 channels.

HTSurg

Hello All,

I have been through the 60 pages of the forum. Can't find my answer so I have a question for you all.

I am trying to get Fox 47 with my antenna for digital tv.

With all of the other Madison stations I get 100% signal quality, but not with FOx 47. I know that this station is a VHF station. 11-1 is the station, however I only get anywhere from 0% to 65% signal strength. Most times it is around 25% to 30%. I don't know what I can do to get better signal strength.

I have two antennas, one that is directional with no amplified power and the other with uhf/vhf uni-directional.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Kelly

You live where and your antennas are located - where?

I live over by Badger Bowl off of Rimrock and Moorland. My antennas are located in my basment. My basement is exposed to the south side, with half walls on the east and west sides. I have both antennas pointed towards the west where the tower is. Or at least the direction that antennaweb tells me.

West would be correct, but basement location is not. Best placement is on the roof.

These are indoor antennas. Don't have a roof antenna. If I can get all of the other stations at 100% then I should be able to get 47.

WMSN-DT broadcasts on VHF Channel 11 and runs with less power than the other stations which are on UHF.

It is harder to receive due to these issues..

Antennas plural? Feeding the same set? Describe what you have and how they are connected together.

My suggestion: if you have a rabbit-ear style antenna, adjust the length of each telescoping rod to about 14 inches, spread them out horizontally, and orient them so that they're broadside toward the west (one rod pointing north, the other south). That should favor WMSN-DT's frequency.

An antenna in the basement is not your friend. The higher you can put it, the more reliable the signal will be.

Yours for free television (even if it's the competition),

Ok, I've read back through a few pages and haven't found enough simple, clear information to help me. So I'll just ask the questions.

I am a current DirecTV HD subscriber and when I move to Madison here very, very soon, I am considering switching to Charter. How does one get all the HD channels with this cable company? I called and they said they don't offer the Fox HD out there through cable.

On a D* box one only needs to plug the OTA cable into the back of the D* reciever and it accepts those signals. Is that what I would have to do to get Fox HD? What other little things should I know about, if any?

Thanks for any help.