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OT: TV converter box

A

Anonymous-0

Well-known Member
Got tired of the Better Half telling me to hook up the digital converter box on the tv, so tonight I did it. We now have over double the number of stations we could pick up before and even better a large number of the 'new' stations are Public Access. One problem we're having, and I'm wondering if other people are having, is the whole tv 'freezing' - it's like someone turned off the sound and put a picture of whatever was last seen on the screen. The only way I've found to correct it is to turn everything off and back on.

Anybody else having this problem? I talked to a friend that has Dish Network and she said hers will do that but correct itself.
 
Haven't had that problem,but have you noticed that a lot of those channels are the digital version of the analog channels? We're getting 61 channels on it,but all but one of the analog channels has a digital equivilent.
 
Do you need a digital antenna? Our TV is already digital, but sometimes the signal goes away or the picture looks like it's scrambled.Most of the time we just watch the anilog channels because of this.I see walmart and a few other stores sell digital antenna's.We just use a regular antenna about 25 ft in the air.Our house is in a pine tree woods and the trees are probably 20ft higher than the antenna.
 
Now you are seeing part of the problem that digital TV dumps on us. If the digital signal misses even one tiny bit of information for one split second, it does not "know" what to do and freezes. Signals too week or (surprisingly) too strong will do that. We have had a POS shoved down out throat. The converter box probably is not to blame. Analog TV just showed on the screen what was being received, incomplete or not.
 
There is no such thing as an HDTV antenna. It is a marketing gimmick to add that logo. It's a UHF antenna. With an amplifier if you're lucky.

There is also no such thing as a 'digital' antenna. Digital vs. Analog happens at the tuner, or more specifically after it. An analog tuner passes the signal for a single channel directly to the chassis for processing, a digital one dumps it all to an Analog-to-Digital-Converter (ADC). One thing I learned about ADCs a long time ago is that if you over-drive it, everything looks like 1s, and if you don't give it enough, it's all 0s. The atmosphere is constantly changing due to weather, so often you'll under-drive it in most cases. The circuitry after the ADC does nothing but render an MPEG2 video stream and remodulate it for analog channel 3/4 on the TV (or dump it out the 3RCA jacks.)
 
Day job working for a two-way radio and antenna place. I have a 100' tower and without revamping my antennas I am going to lose half of the channels that I get now. There are going to be some people that will not be able to get any over the air TV in our area. Stations are not running as much power on digital. Used to they tried to get the signal to you, now you have to try and get it from them. They don't care as much about the minority over the air viewers because they can put their signal on satellite and cable. I was always glad to get a signal not worried about a perfect picture. Government knows better!!!
 
those coupons are a damn joke around here noone has the boxes sold out by the time we got the coupons. now that they have some boxes they say we're sorry but your coupons are no good they have expired! what a freaking joke
 
also the UHF signal amplifiers work with the digital signal as well. Helps with the freezing on the weaker channels.
 
Digital is very sensitive to signal strength. I have a Magnavox converter box that has a signal strength meter that helps. I also have a rotator on my antenna. I have noticed that I can't receive some channels until after dark.







old bc
 
MmmHmm Got the same problem myself with several stations

Basically, that's the digitial equivalent of static. Where your old analog signal could come through with snow, the digital signal goes to a chunky freeze frame.

This is much worse on low strength signals. Stations your box can detect, but can't hold. I've got several.

I went the other way on station count. Had about 20+ with analog, now have 5.
 
I hooked up the wal-mart one. I have about the same amount of channels some new ones , but some of the old ones I can't get. Comes in nice and clear what I do get.
It is really bad that our Gov. shoved this down our throats. People are allready straped for cash. Could forget the whole TV thing but my old stuff didn't cost me anything. Now I've had to spend more money on this box or spend even more yet and go to a dish. No cable around me and I'm not far from town either. And the worst part of it all is the "Made in China" on these boxes. I wonder how much money our gov. has just helped China make with this latest fiasco ?
 
We have dish TV for most entertainment viewing, an outdoor antenna for local news / weather.

We have a perfect picture on the 3 DTV PBS channels we get right now. Our old VHF antenna which has the front half broken off years ago was still able to get the "local" channels which are all in the 100 mile range ;-) Fuzzy but viewable on analog. Those first digital PBS channels are from a town 110 miles away,with our broken antenna which is set for another town / stations which has it set "sideways" turned 90 degrees to the digital PBS stations. In spite of the broken old antenna aimed totally wrong for the digital stations 100 miles away, we still get a perfect picture. The only thing that probibly makes it work is the Radio Shack signal booster installed at the TV. This is an old unit (15 years ? ) the better chrome case model they did / do sell.
Digital TV is going to be a great thing for rural america, it will give us a channel selection and picture quality never possible with the old analog system.
 
If you want a cheap digital receiver, buy an old Directv HD receiver on Ebay. Most of them will receive the local DTV channels and you do not need to subscribe to DirecTv to get them. Best of all, they will receive the widescreen high-definition sigal as well, which I think the coupon boxes will not.
The Sony SAT-HD100, 200 and 300 are an example of these. Also the RCA DTC100 HD.
In many cases, you can get one of these for less than you would pay for the converter boxes, even with a coupon!
 
I hooked one of those boxes up today.The picture is good and it gets several more channels,BUT there is a buzzing noise that comes from the tv,and you have to turn the volume all the way up to hear it.I'm just buying a new tV.
 
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