[Les H]

You have a more cooperative PG&E than I do here in the East Bay. I have some noisy power lines a few blocks away and I've reported them but nothing ever seems to be done about them. Fortunately they are not right next to me. But just driving near them blanks out the AM radio in the car.

Switch the tuners and see what happens. Trace down if one of the LED's is bad. Or if they are all radiating, try different bulbs - LEDs do vary a lot as to their noise emissions. But they for sure shouldn't be blanking out 170 mHz reception.

 

[Calaveras]

My experience with PG&E and fixing power line noise is dismal. I've dealt with them since the late 70's. They pretty much do whatever they can to NOT fix it and hope you just give up and go away. I had one good experience in Mountain Ranch where they sent out an experienced lineman and I worked with him to fix a half dozen noises in one afternoon. That's not how they normally work but it's how they should work.

LED lights certainly do vary a lot in noise output. I know of horrible cases. But my new house is 100% LED lights and there's zero noise. My sense is that decorative LED lights are the worst but that's just what I've run into.

I've been working with the local power company here about noise that's worst on high VHF. At times the noise reduces the station SNR with sporadic dropouts on my one VHF channel. The weird thing is that the TV still can decode the channel almost all the time. I got to wondering how this might be so considering the noise is nearly as strong as the TV signal. My theory is that power line noise occurs mostly at the peaks of the 60 Hz cycle and the ATSC error correction can mostly take care of it. I tried to illustrate what I think is going on in the attached image. The first cycle has minimal lost data and is correctible. The second cycle shows arcing over more of the cycle and the error correction is not able to correct it. Most of the time the TV is not seeing any noise.

Chuck

 

[Les H]

Hi Chuck, PG&E hasn't gotten any better responding to noise problems since they've gone into bankruptcy after the fires resulting from their lines.

Yes, I have some new LEDs that seem relatively free from noise generation except for a bit on the low AM radio band.

As for ATSC 1.0, my experience is that it's pretty good at dealing with repetitive and predictable noise pulses. Where it has trouble is with rapidly changing and less predictable interference - as in my case with hill-induced multipath. My latest approach is to point the beam up 5 degrees where it's most likely to pick up tropospheric scatter instead of signals coming off the ridge of the hills - the tropo seems more predictable than the constantly fluctuating ridge signals so ATSC 1.0 deals with that better. So far it seems to help. Can't wait for ATSC 3.0 which in theory should have robust measures for dealing with noise and multipath.

Les

 

[avs2099]

Why the picture quality on 60.2 KPJKDT is so poor? I get better quality watching 240p stream from France 24 on YouTube

 

[KyL416]

Because most of the bandwidth is going to the HD feeds for 60.1 and NHK World on 60.3.

 

[Les H]

Why the picture quality on 60.2 KPJKDT is so poor? I get better quality watching 240p stream from France 24 on YouTube

HI Avs2099,

I see a bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps average allocated to France 24 - that's pitifully low, so that's why it looks extremely soft. Good quality channels have at least 10 Mbps. It's KPJK doing this deres-ing, so that's why you get a better looking, higher badwidth feed off the Internet.

 

[Les H]

The primary channel .1 is getting 6 Mbps average, and so is NHK. The remaining 4 Mbps average is divided among the other channels - interestingly, KCSM FM audio only is getting the same bandwidth as France 24.

 

[KyL416]

It's KPJK doing this deres-ing

KJPK isn't doing the downresing, France 24's North American satellite feed is SD only.

 

[Les H]

My bad then - blame the French.

 

[pault1]

Hi guys, new (well, a repeat) topic. The KQED channels in the Bay Area repeat in the Monterey Area on KQET, which locally is OTA on 25.1-.4. The rig here receives them well, through an antenna in the attic, that is pre-amped then sent back around the house through coax to the downstairs. Normally.

For the second time this year all of the KQED package has gone off the air completely. The previous time, their channels were off for several days, and someone else here on the forum mentioned that they had contacted the station who seemed unaware that they were not broadcasting, as I recall. All other channels through that general antenna site, going through the antenna here and the house cabling, are working nominally.

This includes some channels that come from that same antenna site, which is at

RabbitEars.Info

RabbitEars, where you can learn all about local, over-the-air TV channels.

www.rabbitears.info

The KQED package channels worked fine last week. Anybody else in this situation? Who should I contact at the broadcaster to update them?

 

[Les H]

From the KQED website:

"Television Transmitter Status
Equipment issue -
KQED in the Santa Cruz/Monterey area is currently experiencing issues. We are working on resolving the issue as soon as possible. Please return to this page for updates.
25.1
25.2
25.3
25.4"

So they know about it and are working on it. There's also a "contact us" submission form on the website.

Television Transmitter Status | KQED

Check this page for the latest status of KQED's television transmission, including scheduled downtime, known issues, and more.

www.kqed.org

In the meantime, you can probably stream most of the PBS shows from the pbs.org website.

Reminds me of when I visited Hawaii and I was driving around the Big Island on the solitary two-lane road. It rained and when we got to a low spot the road was flooded and traffic was stopped for hours until the water subsided. A local in the next car told me that the road flooded every month. Here, we'd build a bridge over it so traffic would never get stopped. There, they just wait for the water. KQET must take the same approach.

 

[pault1]

Thank you! I searched the KQED website for KQET and got no hits at all, assuming that they would post it that way. Apparently they want customers in Monterey to consider them KQED without the "confusion" of a different callsign? So the help form will be useful. As of Friday 11:30 am or so, the channels have returned to broadcast in Pacific Grove; they were MIA as recently as a half hour before that.

 

[wlau]

My bad then - blame the French.

I worked on video encoders. I can tell you it's more than bandwidth limitation as being discussed here. The station's encoder setting is not optimal, some type of interlacing issue or misconfiguration to the source. If you look at 60.2's online streams, the quality is better but the rate is low as well, so the encoder used on the ATSC broadcast has a worse setting MPEG-2 is not as efficient as AVC but 1mbps can still get you a decent SD stream.

 

[Les H]

Now I owe the French an apology.

I've seen SD that looked amazing, where it was difficult to believe it wasn't HD. Clearly the France 24 video isn't one of those; it has all kinds of problems that are not inherent in an SD feed. Maybe KJPK has some work to do.

I worked on video encoders. I can tell you it's more than bandwidth limitation as being discussed here. The station's encoder setting is no optimal, some type of interlacing issue or misconfiguration to the source. If you look at 60.2's online streams, the quality is better but the rate is low as well, so the encoder used on the ATSC broadcast has a worse setting MPEG-2 is not as efficient as AVC but 1mbps can still get you a decent SD stream.

 

[Les H]

I emailed KJPK's director of engineering asking them to check the encoder settings to optimize them. If more people do so, it might help get their attention. His contact info:

Mike Roberts
[email protected]

 

[Les H]

Mike Roberts of KJPK replied to my inquiry and said he'll look into the issue, as he's rebuilding the signal path in any event. That's good news and maybe we can look forward to improved quality.

Les

I emailed KJPK's director of engineering asking them to check the encoder settings to optimize them. If more people do so, it might help get their attention. His contact info:

Mike Roberts
[email protected]

 

[PaulamI]

The CRTV channels are programmed by Cannella Response Television, one of the original producers and distributors of infomercials. They program a bunch of the 24/7 infomercial channels carried by cable, satellite and OTA stations. One of the things they do is randomly insert public domain programming like The Lucy Show, Bonanza, The Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction to trick viewers into watching the long form ad that's the presenting sponsor.

 

[PaulamI]

Stumbled across Bonanza this morning on CRTV 38.6. Someone posted about CRTV 4 months ago here, any more channel info? Not on the Titan listings.

 

[KyL416]

There's nothing more to it than what I posted earlier. Classic Retro TV is just the branding for a glorified infomercial channel that both HC2 and RNN (KCNS's new owner) carry where they trick viewers into watching their infomercials by wrapping them around random public domain episodes of shows like Bonanza and Beverly Hillbillies. You won't get full seasons or series runs on this channel, just the same few episodes in a loop.

You can find the schedule for it on zap2it.com. TitanTV won't have a schedule for it, instead they just list "Paid Programming", "Infomercials", or "Programming Unavailable" for these infomercial channels.

 

[PaulamI]

There's nothing more to it than what I posted earlier

Thank you. Yeah I popped on it a few times yesterday and got the infomercial junk. Already get enough retro series stuff (which I do like) on other channels. My dream list of OTA would be some Discovery, History, BBC type channels but I don't suppose that will every happen.