Charlotte, NC - OTA - Page 152

Channel surfing early this morning, good weather conditions for reception. For some reason, when watching WSOC, the Eyewitness News looks better on 9.5 than it does on 9.1. The video quality appears better on the 9.5 translator channel, as images are a bit sharper than on main 9.1. Not sure about the technical reasons, but that's the way it looks to me.

At least VHF is a bit more forgiving. I find it even tougher to to pickup WUNG in Concord despite that 50% of their funding coming from the NC taxpayers (about ~$13M according to the last report on their website) Their OTA coverage of Charlotte is pretty bad and one of their channels can't be received OTA. You have to subscribe to cable to get it. I'd say that for many people in Charlotte, picking up WUNG with an indoor antenna would be a challenge.

WTVI can be picked up in Hickory due to the 2nd transmitter installed there.

I really don't believe that..certainly much easier to pickup indoors than WTVI !
I get it quite easily...at only 12 miles away, and off the side of my Square Shooter. Indoors is no problem for me either where it is for WBTV &WCNC.

Not much of a signal here at all at 16 miles away. I don't have a Square Shooter, but WUNG is very unreliable for me. Granted, I don't work for a TV station so I will defer antenna pointing experience to you.

Really? Which one? I get 58.1, 58.2 & 58.3. 58.5 has no picture.

UNC-TV has 4(5?) channels. Only 3 are xmitted OTA. So on WUNG...

• UNC - TV - main HD PBS channel 58.1
• UNC-KD - Kids programming - 58.2
• UNC-EX - Explorer Channel - 58.3
• UNC-MX - Various programming - Cable TV only now (Formerly 58.4)
• 58.5 ?

UNC-MX used to be carried on 58.4 until UNC-TV went to HD so they dropped it from OTA due to bandwidth. Only cable systems with a fiber feed to UNC show it. In Charlotte I think that only TWC has it.

About a year or so ago WUNE swapped 17.1 & 17.2 so that UNC-KD, a standard definition channel is their primary, and UNC-TV, a HD channel is on a sub-channel. They did this because of the must carry rules which meant that DirectTV, Dish, & Uverse had to pick up the station for Charlotte.

If you have Directv and an AM21 tuner, you can see the guide data for the MX feed, but it shows as x-5. Was anything ever on x-4 (or, a better question, were there ever 5 UNC-TV channels?) I like the MX feed, which (at least here in Alamance County) is on QAM ch 4-4.

UNC-TV prior to September 25, 2008, with WUNC used as the example:

4-1 UNC-TV
4-2 UNC-HD (8-11p only)
4-3 UNC-KD
4-4 UNC-ED (11p-8p only)
4-5 UNC-NC (11p-8p only)

- Trip

I am thoroughly impressed by this little Roku box that I picked up at Costco. By little, it's ~3.25"x3.25"x0.9". It could be velcro'd to theI back of a TV. Yet despite that, with a Netflix connection it's providing HD quality that far exceeds anything I've seen on Dish DirectTV or TWC. (I've only seen a demo Uverse) It connects to the TV at 1080p and the stuff I've streamed from Netflix is very close to this resolution including recent TV shows.

At $8.99/month for Netflix, I am kicking myself for not having made this change months ago. Dish is costing me over $100/month and it really doesn't compare. They are history. I will qualify this by saying that the Roku is running over wired ethernet and going out over a TWC wideband connection 30M/5M which itself seems pretty solid.

I notice that WSOC is listed as doing some streaming via NoWhere TV but I haven't tried to look at it yet.

My Dish subscription runs out at the end of the month and then I'm done with them. For OTA, for now, I'm gonna to connect the 3 TVs directly to the antenna and use their local tuner. Still trying to figure out what I might want to do with a DVR/HTPC.

I would like to see WBTV and WSOC stream their local newscasts live on the internet. WRAL in Raleigh does this very well, and their full HD pic quality is very good.

I'd be interested if TWC put their News14 on-line even if it was limited to their internet customers. I notice they are doing the actual newscast for some broadcaster in the Triad (I think).

Sinclair (the broadcaster) and Time-Warner in their last retrans agreement worked out a deal where in markets that Sinclair owned Big Four network stations and didn't do local news, if the market had a TW news channel, TW would do news for them.

Here in the Triad, ABC is on Sinclair's WXLV. ABC had been threatening to pull the affiliation if WXLV didn't get local news on. "News 14 on ABC 45" started in January. TW does 6:30-7 AM, 6-6:30 PM and 11-11:35 PM Monday through Friday. It appears TW sells the time, not the station. It doesn't really have any ratings but I don't think Sinclair cares if it keeps the affiliation. When Sinclair tried locally produced news twice before, 1995-2001 and again from 2006-2007, it failed miserably. It got no ratings trying to compete with the perennial news stations in the market that had been doing news since the early days of TV in the market. This arrangement keeps the affiliation and they don't have the cost of a news room. It works for them.

^Thanks for the clarification. I wish we had a Sinclair station here in CLT so ROH wrestling could be seen.

Well, if you have a good outside antenna and rotor, you may be able to get 45 from the Triad, or possibly WLOS-13 from Asheville. But not sure if they actually carry the wrestling show you are referring to. And Sinclair does produce a good newscast for Asheville and Western NC on channel 13, although most Upstate SC viewers in this split market don't watch it, as WYFF-4 and WSPA-7 cover SC news. But Sinclair did build a very nice HD news set at WLOS that actually looks very good.

^My sister in law was once a reporter and backup anchor for WLOS back in the day. She reported news from GSP. I remember her once saying they could only report on anything newsworthy until about 1pm. Later than that and they couldn't get the film/tape up the mountain fast enough to be developed and processed for the evening news. This would have been in the early 80s.

The WLOS transmitter is 105 miles from here. I don't have the equipment to try and pick it up. WMYV is 65 miles from here. It's doable I guess, but I think I'd need about a 40 ft tower so it's probably not going to happen. Would be nice though as both stations have ROH. It used to be on HDNET but they ended their relationship a couple of years ago and Sinclair bought ROH.

Although WLOS has a very high altitude tower on top of Mt. Pisgah, their signal is limited to the south and east to protect WBTW in Florence, which is also on RF13. Some folks here in the Upstate even have problems receiving their signal. If they could increase power and change to an omnidirectional antenna, then their signal would stand a better shot of reaching parts of the Charlotte area. That might eventually become a possibility, as WBTW has requested to move to UHF. But supposedly the FCC has such things on hold right now.

WXLV is on channel 29. The other Sinclair station is WMYV and is on 33. News 14 is only on WXLV.

It wouldn't surprise me that's due to the the present administration wanting to take airwaves away from the TV stations and hand it over to the likes of Verizon & AT&T. IMO, they ought to be encouraging the establishment of more TV stations.

Interesting that WLOS & WBTW (used to watch this Ch 13 as a kid living in Conway) might interfere with each other. Florence & Asheville seem like they are far enough apart but I suppose it would be an issue in the Western SC Midlands. I still remember WBTW showing the time, including seconds, during station ident with a flipcard clock. I remember it well as they switched to a digital clock at the same time as a geeky kid I was building a Heathkit clock.

Back in the analog days I could pickup WSPA and sometimes 8 or 12 from the Triad. Nothing now with digital. I'm probably at the limit of what I'm going to receive with the efforts to pick up the elusive WHKY and all the CLT stations with an antenna hidden in the attic while surrounded by willow oaks. If I had my way, I would strap a strong mast to the chimney with a couple of GHs mounted above, but the spouse isn't having it.

It really is a great value - and the private channels make the box. I even run a virtual movie channel, streaming my favorite movies from my computer - and use it with my mythtv dvr so we record shows and they show up on the roku... neat!

Using mythbuntu, you just install that OS/software package and everything is tuned to get you up and running in no time... I have three tuners (six if you count their respective multiplexes) that can record, commercial detect and remove, transcode, web interface for programming and watching, and better PQ than I could imagine.

The roku + mythtv was the reason we cancelled satellite and we are saving $100 a month now.

Sound as if the county has worked out some sort of a deal to merge WTVI with CPCC.

I can see WUNG on a 24/7 basis with a long range antenna. I am 52 miles away from the transmitter as the crow flies. But I am in a good area too with no hills or other obstructions.

FoxEng is right in that Sinclair's agreement with TW seems to work for them. But just like their own news that they tried a couple of times, I don't suspect the News on ABC 45 (produced by TWC) gets many viewers. It merely allows them to keep the ABC affiliation.

IMO, WSOC (as an ABC affiliate) is serving their community far better than our WXLV (ABC) affiliate. But I honestly don't know if the Triad could support a 4th major network producing local news while going up against the much longer established WXII, WGHP and WFMY.

WCNC seems to be the underdog in the Charlotte market (in terms of local news). But I would expect Charlotte is in a better position to support a 4th news station given the fact that it has a larger population base than the Triad.

What was the approx hardware cost of your setup? What kind of hw requirements does your setup need to successful?

Not counting the antenna and coax, dirt cheap.

The TV tuner cards were $20/shipped/used on ebay. I bought three of them.
I bought a used computer for the TV frontend so we could watch live tv with it, and use as a tradition DVR so we could watch shows live or as live, etc. $70/shipped/used on ebay

I bought a video card with HW acceleration for HD (GeForce/Nvidia Gt430) - has svideo output since we are still in SD, but it will also output to DVI (and there are some of the exact same card that output to HDMI) - $30/shipped/used

For the TV backend I have a separate computer, but you don't have to - I already had one and was convenient.

I bought a 2TB HD before the market fell apart to store all my goodies - $65 back then.

I bought an infrared keyboard to use with the frontend computer from the couch - also makes watching videos on websites much easier - $30/used/ebay.

Bought a learning remote and learned the infrared keys to control the tv instead of whipping out the keyboard - YMMV on price on that.

That was the whole magilla. Within three months I had paid for all that computer equipment plus my TV antenna setup with coax, amp/splitter, lightening arrestor, etc.

Charlotte has 4 stations that produce it's own news programming. WSOC, WBTV, WCNC, and WCCB though WCCB's evening news is at 10pm. All of them compete against each other in the mornings. There is more news TV in Charlotte than actual news to fill it all up.

I agree with WCNC. They seem to be on the verge of making some headway, but then they somehow slide backwards again. I think they were hurt by the departure of Chris Justice as lead anchor. I also get the opinion they did a pretty good amount of cost cutting beginning in 2010 and it really shows in what they produce. On the other hand, they do produce a daily local program that isn't news or sports.

That could be said for most markets.

"Now, an exclusive breaking update on our lead story..."

I guess that I should have added there is a 5th local news broadcast for the area on WHKY at 5:30pm with a later repeat. In terms of what it cost, it has to be the most efficient news program in the area.

WAXN also does a 10pm via WSOC..and their Am cut-ins are slightly different from WSOC's. As to more tv than news here.. it has been that way since the 80's.

If you were just looking to build a DVR for live TV without archival of large amounts of movies and TV, could you use your front end computer for both the front and back ends?

I'm trying to judge purchasing a Tivo or CM 7400 vs building a system. Tivo has some decent deals on hardware, as in free, but they burn you up over that monthly charge and the CM 7400 is expensive.

BTW, I appreciate all the info.

No kidding..the $50 (or even $100) for the box is fine..but $20 a month for
guide data that WinMC gets for free is a joke. BTW, I am still using my first Tivo that I won FREE in the Tivo Launch Essay Contest. It still works fine.

Edited: I am sure now that I bragged on it death will soon follow.