[frinky]

I guess I should start by explaining my setup. I have the Samsung SIR-151 set-top box and a Radio Shack single bowtie antenna ($3.00!!!) that works just fine for all of the DTV channels except for WBBM. When I want to watch CBS, I unplug the antenna from the back of the set-top box and plug in the coax cable from the digital cable, which gets me the WBBM signal. Either way, the signal strength for each channel is around 66%. I have zero problems with the OTA channels, but right now the CBS signal has frequent audio dropouts lasting fractions of seconds. There is very infrequent pixelation. Again, this happens only with the WBBM signal. This was not the case during the first round of the NCAA tournament, but has now made it such that I would rather watch the standard definintion feed.


I need this working perfectly tonight! I have guests coming over to watch the championship game in HD.


Can anyone offer some suggestions for me to try before calling up Comcast, which I suspect will be a worthless option?

 

[greywolf]

I'm thinking that Comcast gets its signal from a satellite hookup. Right now the Chicago area is getting freezing rain. My dish and LNBs are ice covered and signal strengths are between 0 and 42. Maybe Comcast is having trouble getting the feed.

 

[frinky]

Thanks for the response, however these issues first started appearing about 2 weeks ago. The weather probably has something to do with it. I can't remember if I've watched CBS when the weather was perfect; I know that we haven't had much nice weather in the last 2 weeks.

 

[frinky]

Just a quick update. The problems continued through the game yesterday. It was very annoying, and we tried muting the game and turning on the radio, but we found that the radio was almost 2 seconds ahead of the video, which was even more annoying.


Today there was a Comcast van in the neighborhood and I set out and found the woman working on a line in front of someone elses house. I told her about the problems and she said that this was the first she had ever heard of Comcast broadcasting HD signals outside of their HD package (which she said wasn't available yet), but she promised that she would mention this to a line tech, so hopefully a resolution is in sight.

 

[FSugino]

I have similar problems about once a month or so - I'll turn on the set, tune into a HD over cable signal, and after longer than normal wait for the channel to tune in, the picture and audio will pop up out of sync. Changing to another channel and then going back has always fixed this for me.


Also, WBBM-DT over cable has been coming in fine, even during the bad weather of the past few days. No breaks at all, and the NCAA championship was beautiful.