Dallas, TX - HDTV - Page 20

thanks MP3trojan,

I'm new to all this HD thing. I guess this has something to do with somebody not allowing sattelite providers to offer local HD channels. That seems kinda screwy to me but stranger things have happened I guess.

I face north and am in Addisoin in a townhouse. There are dishes on the side of other units facing south. I have to assume I could mount something like a Winegard 2000 to the dish and then a Channel master 7777 in the house and be all set?

Do I need to get permission from the local stations to let me recieve the signals and will dish network have any issues with the Winegard being part of the setup? I wonder if I should just do a Silver Sensor and channel master 7777?

I would go with the Winegard and the amp. What you do with your antenna is none of Dishnetworks business. No permission needed. OTA signals are FTA(Free to all).

ok, got it thanks. I have to get Dish first. This might be a stupid question but I have to assume once the Winegard is attached to the dish, then I need to use a splitter or something to connect both antenna's to one line coming into the house and then into the 7777.

I'll be using a IF 4805 PJ and be using a AV switch box on my Onkyo. I assume then the 7777 will connect in the line between the antenna and the 811. Then out via component from the 811 to the switch box on the Onkyo. Does that sound right?

I'm guessing the channel master 7777 also works well on cable SD?

I found it, I need a satelite/ OTA diplexer.

Is any body else having audio dropouts on 11.1 during CSI and CSI Miami?

I have an lg 4200a receiver and indoor amplified rca antenna. The receiver shows that I have a good signal. I'm in South Arlington south of Sublet between Cooper and Matlock.

You can but I would run a seperate line. The receiver sends voltage to the dish which "could" create interference to your OTA reception.

KTVT is having problems. Thank you for your post. The engineers are watching this thread. Please state your "general" location.

I live about 10 miles east of Denton and wish the only problem I was having was audio dropouts. At unpredictable times, but usually at night, 11.0 fades entirely to snow. 11.1 isn't affected as much, but at times I lose the picture there too. The worst time was towards the end of the Patriots-Colts game. Lost the picture on 11.0 completely with about 6 minutes to go in the game. One other thing, I do get a lot of video dropouts on 11.1 when 11.0 goes out and the signal strength varies wildly on 11.1. It will drop from about 80 to 0 and many points in between.
Had the same problem last winter, but it went away with the warmer weather in the spring and summer only to return when the temperatures turned colder this winter. Sure is frustrating!!!
Hope this post may give them a clue as to where to look as we satcha lot of shows on Ch. 11.

Dish doesn't use voltage in its antennas or lines, so you can 'join' the ota antenna with the dish signal without any problems.

Sure it does. 13/18vdc to command the lnb to switch polarization. They all do. Without that voltage you would only get half of your channels. What dish does different than D* is: D* uses a 22khz tone to command the multiswitch to switch to 119/110 on multisat setups. E* uses a digital signal to command the multiswitch. Take a short piece of coax, connect it to "satellite in" and cut the connector off of the other side, seperate the center from the shield. Connect a DC voltmeter and switch transponders in the signal meter screen and you will see it change on the voltmeter.

I am a new HD customer with D* and having an issue with 4-1. I have an ota on the roof and I am getting a strong signals on all channels but 4-1. The thing is, when I update the receiver to find the local channels in my zip (75093), it gets 4-1 to a signal of 69% and working great, but once I change the channel and then go back to 4-1, it has a signal of 30% and no picture. Has anyone ever heard of this issue? D*'s HD receivers now only have D*'s name on them. They do not show the manufacture of the receiver, ie: Hughes, Samsung. Is this a receiver issue? Thanks for any feedback.

Not entirely true, with the Dish 811 you cannot run the OTA cable with the SAT cable (via splitter). You must run a separate coax for the OTA antenna directly to the OTA input of the Dish 811 receiver.

I'm in Watauga (north Fort Worth) a few miles north or 820W off Denton hwy and I get all the locals with no problem. The antenna is mounted on a 15' pole on the south corner of my house with the UHF end pointed at Cedar Hill.

I recently bought a VU-190XR antenna from radio Shack and I get excellent reception thru my sammy STB. Never had any issues with ch 11-1, always a great picture. Switching to Dish this weekend and getting a 811 and a 522 box so I can have some DVR ability without paying the ridiculous price of the 921 or D*'s 1K HD DVR receiver. Should be interesting to see if my reception is the same using the 811's OTA receiver.

This antenna is about the size of a small car, but works great.
http://www.radioshack.com/product.as...t%5Fid=15-2156

as i had posted a few weeks back...i can get all channels except ktvt...i used to get ktvt w/ rabbit ears around december, but now cannot, even w/ a larger antenna in the attic...right now, i get 49% on 19-1...that's it...anyways, thanks to mp3trojan for all his help. any idea how long it will take to fix???

Hopefully soon.

Ok, I talked to my complex and they said no to an outdoor antenna. I'm thinking I might be able to put it out on my balcony but my balcony faces due north. According to antennaweb most of the stations I want are 26-29 miles away at between 193 and 196 degrees.

Now I'm not sure what antenna to buy. What are the best indoor antenna options given these parameters or am I better trying to use something like a flat and small bowtie mounted facing north?

I'm still confused about this VHF vs UHF and not sure which I should go for.

Thanks,
Joe

I have been unable to receive 5-1, KXAS-DT in digital ATSC for one week now on either of my two DirecTV HDTV receivers with ATSC tuners. One is a Hughes and the other a Samsung. I live in University Park, so I am not too distant from the broadcast. Is anyone else reporting these problems or know the cause?

I lost KXAS-DT for about 30 minutes this morning but it's back now. If you are getting 4-1 and not 5-1 then it's not your antenna. 4-1 is on ch 35 and 5-1 is on ch41.

Current signal here is 90% and steady. 77 miles away

Antenna selection help for M-Streets Area?

I live in the m-streets- (Greenville Ave.- North of downtown/ South of Mockingbird). Have had decent luck in pulling in most of the OTA local HD channels using a Zenith Silver Sensor/ standard rabbit ear configuration (combined the two using a diplexor)- on my Sony LCD w/ built-in ATSC tuner.

However, I cannot get any signal at all on UPN 21.1-- and I get some dropouts/ have to reconfigure a bit for 11.1 and 5.1.

Question is-- I have the Silver Sensor basicall behind the tv-- would I get any performance boost by putting it higher- like in the attic? Or, am I seeing about what is to be expected and need to step-up to a larger antenna and either mount rooftop / or place in the attic? (or maybe add a line booster?)

Anyone in the area have a decent solution that works? Thanks a bunch for your help!!!

The attic should work fine. You are within line of sight to the towers. A south facing balcony or porch would do the trick.

We have recently found an issue with the KTVT-DT High Definition transmitter that has caused some viewers to have erratic power level fluctuation while others were not affected. We have one of our vendors working on a solution and anticipate correcting this problem in the next few days.

The signal to noise ratio has decreased which is causing some receivers to not be able to decode the transport stream while others are not affected.

It is interesting to find that some receivers show this as an erratic signal level rather than an issue with the information contained inside the signal itself. The transmitter has been at or near full power the entire period of time, but the modulation of the signal has been drifting.

We are sorry for any inconveniences that this may have created.

Bill

Thanks for the update Bill. That is great news and it sounds like it was not easy to find. Many of us have the D* HD Samsung 360 STB whose signal meter is practically useless so its hard to tell what the signal level was on that box. Luckily I have a couple of Sylvania tuners as well and those showed erratic signal strength.

Thanks bill,

I hope that some of the posts from us AVS'ers helped you troubleshoot this problem. I was aware that you were monitoring this thread. Thanks for your help and keep up the good work.

Also, thank your for making KTVT-DT the VERY best HDTV in Dallas/Ft. Worth. Hopefully the others will follow suit and make D/FW one of the best digital DMA's in the country.

First, I will tell you what I have:

Dish Network 921 Receiver, all wires are RG6. We have an attic that is a bunch of trouble. The attic has a reflective, metal insulation on the back on the whole roof. Its called teck shield which is a heat shield. Then we have an old antenna suspended in the attic facing 198 degrees. The antenna was already installed except we upgraded the several butted RG59 wires to one contious RG6 wire.

Whats going on:

We tried an in-line amp, tried amping at the antenna, tried amping at the antenna and tv rec, tried amping only at the tv rec. The amps we used was 2-24 db with fm trap. The inline amp was a 10 db with dc block. All methods were about the same. One method that worked the best was amping at both locations, tv rec and antenna. We may be over amping it but we don't know how much.

Channels Quality:

8.1 - Strong
21.1 - Strong
11.1 - Slow loading and fading in and out
33.1 - Comes and goes
4.1 - Real Strong
5.1 - Can not pick up at all, (only once or twice at night or mid morning)

Our question:

What can we do? I know the answer is to get an antenna outside away from the attic. We live in a neighboorhood that doesn't allow big antennas. We've seen a dish mounted tv antenna that spreads 4 ft maybe left to right and looks like a wing. It attaches to the back of dish bracket and suspended above the dish. Its not a terk antenna because it looks different and I tried a search online and no luck.

Should we buy a better, newer antenna?

Any advice would be great,

Justin

That teck shield is killing your reception.


A chimney mounted antenna should work fine. Most restricted neighborhoods do not allow antennas over 20' high. NO H.O.A. can refuse you the right to do that. It is against federal law. Go to the www.fcc.gov and search "OTARD".

Others here have been noticing problems with 5-1.

Let me be the first to welcome you to AVS Justin, or is that your location??

Since I'm having the exact same symptoms on KERA-DT (actually started a few weeks earlier), what are the chances they are experiencing the exact same issue? Any chance you could have them check?

They are on the same tower. Could be.

That doesn't mean they use the same transmitter (which is where Bill said the problem was), does it?

I doubt it. I'd like to see that trick. Same antenna, now that's possible.

I have nothing on 5-1 for at least a few days either.

I have also experienced the problem with the varied signal strength on 11.1 using the HD TIVO. I live in Corinth. One additional problem I have noticed on 11.1 and 11.1 only is a slight popping noise on the audio every few seconds during primetime programming. It comes and goes but I have no problem on any of the other local channels.

* Kudos to KTVT-DT for acknowledging this intermittent problem. I'm sure they constantly get complaints with this new technology that are not their fault. And when we first started seeing this issue, it probably looked like the same type of problem. It probably took a reasonable number of complaints before they looked into it, and even then they probably saw no problem on a lot of receivers. But thankfully, they've realized something on their end is fouled up. Hopefully they can figure it out. Oh, and kudos to everyone who complained :-) so they'd know the problem wasn't just a few techno-neophites.

* KXAS started multicasting (again) a week or so ago. You might want to try a re-scan and see if this helps, although I have a friend who can't get either 5-1 or 5-2 even then.

* UPN 21's radar channel is now indicating 352x240p! I haven't had the time yet to check out the stream, but this is not one of the 18 legal ATSC resolutions. My Mitsubishi TV cannot receive this channel. I have e-mailed UPN 21, but I haven't gotten a response. If you are having problems with 21-2, please let them know. Multicasting is bad enough, but when you can't even view the extra channel, it's an even bigger waste!

* FOX is using only about 50% of their bandwidth. Unlike the other networks, the ATSC-encoding for FOX is done a the network. I contacted the network to see if I could encourage them to at least use 75%. I'm sure there are local affiliates that are multicasting, so they have to leave some room, but 50%!? The network told me I had to contact the affiliate. Of course, the affiliate verified that they can't control the bitrate, which is controlled from the studio (actually, he said "in the truck" in reference to sporting events). If you'd like to encourage FOX to crank up the bitrate before the Super Bowl, please let them know.

Xesdeeni