Washington, DC / Baltimore, MD - HDTV - Page 442

I get a blank screen, but when I summon "info" on my Dunex, its time function indicator displaysthe current time, says it is in 704x480i, and says that the current show runs from 2:00AM to 3:00 AM.

It identifies the immediate programming to be Music Videos,FTA TV-PG, and describes the content as, "Artists perform".

54.1 is carrying America's Court with judge Ross, in 1280x720p
Edited by AntAltMike - 8/31/12 at 11:28pm

By my rough mental tally of the stations listed on Wikipedia's TheCoolTV affiliates page, there had recently been 50 affiliates, and at least 26 of them are or were sinclair stations, so the number of stations presently carrying TheCoolTV has been cut in half.
Edited by AntAltMike - 9/1/12 at 11:18am

I think that much of the criticism of the work that the FCC did is undeserved. The FCC had to cram 67 channels worth of spectrum usage into 49 channels of spectrum in such a way as to make sure that everyone within a certain "contour" was as likely to receive acceptable signal quality as they had been previously. One difficulty in doing that is that they are forced to make an apples and oranges comparison of signal quality sufficiency, in that, analog reception is deemed qualitatively adequate if it enables the reception site to develop "TASO Grade 1" pictures, having a 46 dB C/N ratio, whereas digital pictures are all virtually noise free but the disruptive effect of any noise that interdicts the processing of even one frame is wholly unacceptable.

If a plane flies overhead and, for one frame, an analog signal has a ghost image, it would be humanly impossible to notice that, but such a disruption of that short an interval of digital transmission would result in a one frame/one second video stutter, and the analog disruption would be even longer than that.

In Washington, DC, much of the city was within the Baltimore WMAR channel 2 analog grade A contour, but the pictures looked terrible because of impulse noise and there was absolutely no way to make that visual interference go away. In fact, back in 1994, I was part of the crew that installed cut-to-channel Baltimore antennas on The National Captioning Institute's headquarters in Vienna, Virginia and we were developing more than 10dBmV coming off the channel 2 antenna, meaning we theoretically had S/N rations of over 60dB, but we still had huge speckles. And that was a harbinger of things to come. We couldn't get their decaptioning boxes to work reliably on channel 2 because the captioning data was digitally imbedded in the vertical blanking pulse, but any time an impulse burst coincided with that data, it obliterated it.

WGAL is on channel 8, and there is a lot of impulse noise in VHF highband that has caused lots of problems for channels 7-13 nationally. Making matters worse is that fewer people have the gumption or inclination to install outdoor antennas than they used to, but VHF reception more often needs them.

I don't know what could theoretically have been done with forward error correction, but it seems to me that if there is a way to trade a little video bandwidth for a redundant dose of forward error correction, then it would be a tradeoff worth making, but chances are, "the horse is already out of the barn" as far as creative forward error correction is concerned.
Edited by AntAltMike - 9/3/12 at 2:14pm

It is now 6:48 PM on the evening of the announced launch date, but 11.2 is still an SD version of their 11.1 HD programming.

Now, here is some really bad news. MeTV has already dropped most of what I had considered to be its best programming

Former programming

Comedy series

Bosom Buddies (October 2–December 18, 2011)
Family Affair (December 21, 2010–August 31, 2012)
Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. (December 15, 2010-April 13, 2012)
Green Acres (June 20-September 1, 2012)
Happy Days (December 21, 2010–September 2, 2012)
Laverne & Shirley (December 21, 2010–September 2, 2012)
Love, American Style (September 26, 2011-April 13, 2012; June 19-August 28, 2012)
The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour (June 22-August 31, 2012)
The Mothers-In-Law (June 19-September 2, 2012)
The Odd Couple (December 21, 2010-June 15, 2012)
Taxi (December 20, 2010-December 30, 2011)

Drama/action series

Cannon (December 15, 2010–August 31, 2012)
Honey West (December 20, 2010–September 2, 2012)
The Invisible Man (January 29-April 15, 2012; returns October 6, 2012))
The Rogues (October 1, 2011–September 1, 2012)
The Streets of San Francisco (December 15, 2010-September 23, 2011)
The Untouchables (December 15, 2010-August 31, 2012)

Westerns

Marshal Dillon (early, half-hour episodes of Gunsmoke; December 15, 2010–November 26, 2011)
Rawhide (December 15, 2010–November 28, 2011)
Stagecoach West (December 20, 2010–September 23, 2011)
Edited by AntAltMike - 9/30/12 at 4:04pm

I just caught the closing credits of Make Room for Daddy this morning. MeTV is going to become my most watched weekend channel.

When I'm home during any weekdays, the Rockford Files at 11:00 AM, Book 'em Dano at noon, the Wild Wild West at 4:00 PM are probably better than any shows on cable in those time slots, and The Bob Newhart Show at 10:30 PM looks good for me, too.
Edited by AntAltMike - 10/1/12 at 8:39am

Here's something cheap you can try. Channelmaster is closing out the last of its Jointenna series filters and is presently selling the channel 11 jointennas for just $3.99 each, plus shipping.

https://www.channelmasterstore.com/JOIN_TENNA_CM_0581_p/cm-0581.htm

Your channel 11 field strength is about 50 dB below your Washington DC signals that come to you from the same general direction. If you use the Jointenna as just a bandpass filter, it should reduce every channel except channel 11 by about 20 dB, so the chances are you would lose Baltimore channels 2, 45 and 54, but keep all of your Washington channels even with that filter in line and your tuner may function better without the intermodulation of the stronger channels decimating the quality of your weak channel 11.