June 12 is the end of an era in analog broadcast TV. It’s great. More free channels. Better video quality. It is going to require a little more equipment and perhaps a different antenna to get the new broadcast. I’ve been using digital TV for more than a year now, and I figured I should write down some observations to make your life a little easier.
There are a couple of issues that you’ll face with the new system. To be convenient, you will need an antenna that is good enough to receive all of the channels in the market that you are in. It’s because you have to scan for the channels. If you don’t have an antenna that will receive all of the channels w/o fiddling with the rabbit ears, your TV will skip channels that you can receive. This isn’t like the “old days” where you will go to the TV and tweak the ears to get a better picture. The antenna must be good enough to at least register the channel to scan it. Minor tweaking of the antenna, once placed, is possible, but it has to work at least well enough to register the channels during your scan.
Antenna placement is important. You should try to get it as far away from computers, the TV itself and anything else that might interfere. HDTV’s will interfere less than traditional picture tube sets, but they will still interfere with your signal to some extent.
My setup is a 50″ plasma 720p TV set, a computer (Athlon 3800 X2 with a 500GB hard disk and 2GB ram) running Snapstream Beyond TV and a Terk HDTVa antenna. I am in Hillsboro, Oregon and the location of all of the stations I would want to see is in the same place in Portland’s West Hills. To aim at the towers you want with a directional antenna, you’ll probably want a compass. You can consult antennaweb.org to get the compass bearing of all of your local broadcast stations. In Portland, that is somewhat easy, because the stations are all in the same place.
For an indoor set top antenna, I can recommend the Terk HDTVa. Be aware. Most of the antennas that are on the market don’t work well! It’s definitely “caveat emptor” (let the buyer be ware). You’ll want to save receipts and wherever you buy your antenna, should have a friendly refund policy in case it doesn’t work. You’ll also want to be careful about unpacking your antenna, so that you can put it neatly back in the box for a refund if you need it.
Having consulted antennaweb.org this is the screen that will tell you where the TV broadcast antennas are in relationship to your location. Antennaweb recommends a small multidirectional antenna for my location, but that wasn’t optimal because I have a small airport a few blocks away, and a helicopter school. I noticed that the directional Terk was better at rejecting reflections of the TV signals off aircraft than a multidirectional antenna. Since all of the Portland broadcast stations are in the same place, aiming wasn’t a problem.
So pulling my old Boy Scout compass out and pointing the antenna to about 80 degrees gave me the coarse aim. Then I set the TV to scan the channels. It was close enough to register all of the channels in the scan, but some of them were a little choppy. Moving the antenna a degree or five to find the sweet spot where all of the channels came in perfect took a few minutes. I also found out that putting the antenna on the right side of the TV worked better than on the left. Don’t ask me why. I only point this out because where you put the antenna can make a difference. Even if the placement is only minorly different.
In the scan results from antennaweb, there were some results that claim that I would be able to recieve stations from outside of the Portland Market. It’s not true. I would take antennawebs recommendation for antennas as overly optimistic. It does serve to tell you where the broadcast stations are. I’d buy an antenna that was an upgrade from what they recommend, unless you are in a completely flat area, with no trees and no helicopters flying over your house.
My neighbor replaced his old outdoor TV antenna with an Antennas Direct DB8 (below) and it has enough gain to drive 4 sets well. I’m too lazy and cheap to wire the whole house for TV though. I’m going to put that on the recommended list for antennas, just because I know it works.
I have a TV in the bedroom that is analog and bought a converter box for it. It also uses the Terk HDTVa antenna. After looking over some converter boxes, I found I liked the Digital Stream unit below, which I bought at Radio Shack. I wish the tuner in my HDTV was as good as this box. Notably it has a signal strength meter that most TV’s don’t have. It takes the guesswork out of aiming your antenna. It also is cheap and comes with a nice remote control.
One component of my TV system that is really nice is the computer. I use Netflix online for streaming movies and it’s nice to play web sites like Retrovision on my big TV. The computer I use is a Athlon X2 3800 with 2 Gigs of Ram and a 500GB hard drive which gives about 100 hours of uncompressed recording time. The video card is an Nvidia 7100GS. The performance of this system for HDTV recording is just about barely adequate. I have a cable splitter on the Terk antenna that feeds an ATSC tuner USB dongle.
The only PVR software that is worth it’s salt is Snapstream Media Beyond TV. It’s great. It downloads program guides. It schedules automatic recordings. It will compress to Windows Media and Divx. It has a media server which will send recorded videos anywhere on your lan. With optional plugins it will even make DVD’s and ipod compatible videos. Better than buttered bread. Nothing else I’ve seen is even close. Did I say awesome?
Now I’ve chronicled everything I know about the Digital transition and how to enjoy crystal clear TV while sipping a cappuccino in my easy chair with a faithful pooch under foot. Hopefully everyone will be “good to go” June 12. Make sure you rescan all of your channels on June 12. Some of them are going to change.
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