[Gary Day]

Saturday I was unable to get the NCAA in HD. I switched to channel 3 and received their news in HD. Did anyone get the NCAA Final 4 in HD?


Also, Sunday night, their HD continually was breaking up and the audio was in an echo chamber. At the same time channel 5 and Alias was great! Normally, 19 is one of my better channels (around 90 to 100 on strength).


Is anyone else having trouble?


GLD

 

[bassguitarman]

It appears that WOIO was again having trouble with the HD feed from CBS.

There were discussions on this a month ago. Apparently WOIO's HD dish that they receive the feed from CBS is problematic and mounted 300 feet up the tower (for God knows what reason) so they have trouble fixing it.

I noticed last night the broadcast of the "Whole Nine Yards" was very prone to dropouts. Yet the local feed of advertising was trouble free.

 

[Shark73]

We called WOIO on Saturday and the cause of the problem was the storm that came through on Friday night. The wind moved the dish they have on the tower. They tried to fix it during the games but were unable to lock in a good signal. As of last night, the signal was still not locked in. With the weather forecast for today being what it is, I would not expect to have a good signal for the championship game tonight.


Let's hope this problem is corrected by Thursday for the Master's.


Shark

 

[ted_b]

I was out all day today and only in the last few minutes was I able to lob a call in there (left a vm for Jim Sidacase, engineering). The crazy thing about Saturdays' problem was that we almost lost all signal during the last few minutes of the Syracuse game due to their tinkering. We all appreciate the work, however futile, but do it at the half or some other down time. Don't wait until 3 minutes to go to try again! Thank goodness some of us will have DirecTV (or Dish, I guess) to fall back on for the first two rounds of the Masters (i.e DirecTV channel 198 will cover the Thu-Fri USA simulcast w/ CBS in HD). That still means we need to go there as a group and hire some kid who'll shimy up the 300 ft tower and point the damn thing for Sat-Sun. Whatta ya think, a 12 pack of Jaegermeisters do it?

 

[182driver]

The NCAA final where the HD? WOIO isn't fit to be a CBS affiliate

 

[ZManCartFan]

So I finally got around to replacing the old rabbit ears that would only pick up some of the channels some of the time with an honest-to-goodness in-the-attic antenna on Saturday. When I was done, I was happy to see that I could get 3, 5, 8, 19, and 43 with about 75% (minimum) signal strength.


And then I sat down last night to watch the game. Nothing. Or, almost nothing.


Signal strength on 19 was WAY down from what I'm pretty sure I remember seeing on Saturday night. It wouldn't rise above about 10%.


Did something happen that would have effected the signal strength? Is this related to the "dish" you're all talking about? Or is that the dish that WOIO uses to receive the CBS feed?


I'm located in Medina, and considering that I can get all of the other locals just fine, I'm hoping that this is just a temporary WOIO problem that will be resolved.


And is 43's antenna shared with WOIO's? It seemed with the rabbit ears that the signal strength of those two channels were always identical when I moved the antenna around.

 

[Bizily]

FWIW, I received last night's final game fine. Granted, I had the usual burps and farts along the way (from the broadcast, not the chili dinner), but comparatively speaking, it was pretty good.

 

[ted_b]

Bizily,

Me, too. At about 9:17 the game came in. Whew! Why is this so tough? Clearly our collective assumptions on WOIO-DT at any given moment is "there'll be some kind of problem.....chances are the (fill-in-blank) won't be in HD, etc, etc."


ZMan,

Medina should be a decent position for signal strength, I agree. WOIO signal is very problematic. There are times when my strength in Westlake is 70 and I get no pic, and yet some days it's 51 and I'm fine. And yes, the dish we discussed is the incoming CBS signal, not the outgoing signal to us.


I'm going to ask the mgmt if any of us "early adopters" can come down there sometime and see what's going on. Maybe they have more issues than we're aware of. It's always good to go see "where they live". The bottom line though: WOIO-DT is failing to provide a moderately reliable HD service, and we should be persistent in our vigilance.

 

[Bizily]

ted_b,


I'd also love to understand the difficulties involved in transmitting HD. Let me know if you get any word back from WOIO requesting a "field trip".


By the way, I'm surprised to hear that people are having more difficulty with WOIO than the others. My experience has been that they all have their problems at times. Perhaps WOIO seems to have the most problems simply because they have the most HD content.

 

[flip22]

Bizily, Ted_B,

You guys get the "field trip" arranged and I'll buy the 12-pack of jaggermeisters for the poor kid to fix that darn thing! Seriously, if you can get something organzied, count me in. CBS was such a pain in the butt last night that I just gave up and played on the xbox for a 'bit. I'm gonna give 'em a call in a sec and let 'em know there's yet another early adopter out there that is getting pretty aggravated..

 

[Steve B]

Count me in on that tour - post here if you hear anything. For what it's worth, got the finals in HD with no signal drops of more than a split second. Didn't check signal strength.

 

[flip22]

Nothing to update, but FYI- I did leave a message for Jim Sidacase regarding their reception probs and asked if there was "possibly a timeline as to when their broadcast signal would be on-par w/the other networks."


I agree 100% w/ted_B and urge everyone else to call in to WOIO-DT and do the same as we have.