Calling All Stations
I’ve spent the last couple days trying to get my new antennae working. I was hoping that, while my brother was in town, I’d be able to get some NFL games for him. Try as I might, though, I could only get three UHF stations (including NBC, PBS, and Ion/Pax). I moved the antenna here, I moved it there. Nothing. Nothing close to anything. I come to find out that those are the only stations that actually exist out here, absent cable or satellite. There’s, like no CBS or Fox or anything. Rural America is so weird.
When I was growing up on the farm, the closest TV stations were an NBC 50 miles to the west and a CBS about 65 miles SSE. But we generally kept the antenna pointed NE where we could pick up CBS, ABC, and PBS fairly well and NBC barely. We didn’t watch NBC much and I missed out on a few iconic shows from the 60’s because of that.Report
Well, you were able to get Red Zone, right? RIGHT?!?!Report
This is all in the (relatively) new digital broadcast format? Them old-fashioned aerials and rabbit ears don’t work no more.Report
The broadcast is still an analog signal riding on a VHF or UHF carrier. The aerials and rabbit ears don’t care whether the modulation is the old analog formats (NTSC video plus FM audio) or the new (8VSB digital stream). The biggest difference in effective range is that analog picture quality fell off gradually with distance. Because of error correction included in the 8VSB stream, digital quality tends to be almost perfect out to a situation-specific (terrain, humidity, etc) distance, then the signal becomes unusable.Report
Oh, that makes sense. Thanks.Report
Height is your friend Will, get those ears up high. If that fails trade your cellphone in for a mobile hotspot if a tower is close..Report
The irony of the switch to digital television was that it has decreased access for rural people. If you were out of range, you used to get a middling-to-poor signal. Now, you get no signal at all.Report
That’s what digital means. Zero or one. Analog is the world between zero and one, where no reception is perfect and you can’t always get what you want, but sometimes you might find you get the signal you need.Report
I know what it means, but something was better than nothing. The signals should have been boosted to keep the same coverage area.
After all, we must burn the village in order to save it.Report